Category: playing cards

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London Calling

With my love of travel, my love of Gilbert and Sullivan, and my love of “Chariots of Fire”, there is one important location that has not yet been mentioned.  It Is a Glorious Thing – Old Lady Writing Did you guess London?  If so, you guessed correctly.  If not, I cannot fathom what you are thinking. 

London was slightly elusive in my younger days.  During my college summer in Europe, the Chunnel train was not yet in existence.  While the British rail system was covered by the Eurail Pass, the passage from the continent to Albion was not.  There was no way I was going if there was an extra charge.

The Royal Family in the “good old days” (At Madame Tussaud’s in London. I love wax museums, and never miss one!)

Around the time of my last college spring break, my mother gifted me with enough free, rapidly expiring airline miles for two tickets to Europe.  I could bring a companion.  No catch.  In what can only be described as a fit of temporary insanity, I invited Grandma.  No, really, I was twenty one years old, and I went to London with my Grandma.  I am expecting to be rewarded for this in my next life…

And so, I flew to New York, and Grandma and I set out on a cross-continental flight together.  Our troubles started immediately when she set off a metal detector.  The year was 1990, a kinder, gentler time when everyone could walk on to the departure gates, and TSA was only a vague concept—except in a case of an elderly, five feet tall woman who was  bringing not only an apple for her long flight, but an accompanying knife wrapped in a handkerchief.  Bizarrely, the TSA agent who confiscated Grandma’s best paring knife agreed to mail it back to her home address in Brooklyn.  The potential loss of the knife caused Grandma considerable distress during our vacation, until we were informed by triumphant Grandpa, upon being picked up from our return flight, that the knife arrived safe and sound.  No “How was your trip? How is London?  Welcome home!”, but “Those bastards did not steal our knife after all!”

The flight itself was an unmitigated nightmare.  Grandma, immeasurably energized by full access to me for the upcoming week, decided to start early on what we call “educating” me, but really the better term is “nagging”.  I was treated to a seven-hour lecture about the various deficiencies of my character, my appearance, my behavior, my friends both male and female, and my overall prognosis for a productive life.  As a graduating university senior heading to an Ivy League law school and holding down two jobs, I naively thought I might have had a right to feel sort of OK about myself.  However, I was also overweight and single, two of the most cardinal of mortal sins in The World According to Grandma.

Holiday Inn London – Kensington Forum Hotel |Best Price Guaranteed |Kensington London Hotel (hikensingtonforumhotel.co.uk)

We were staying at the Forum Hotel, now Holiday Inn Kensington Forum.  This is important, because this hotel is huge—900+ rooms and 27 stories. Upon arrival, after a sleepless night of “education”, I determined that I lost interest in my travel companion.  We had a brief discussion and decided that, in order for each of us to preserve our own mental, emotional, and physical well-being, we will tour the city separately and only share sleeping quarters.  I lived in a dorm—I could do it!  Grandma was married for 45 years at that point—she could definitely do it!  We each had our own money, room key, basics of the English language (some better than others), and I generously gave her one of my maps of London (this was when giant folding paper maps were all the rage).  She stormed off.  I breathed a sigh of relief.

Here is what I did next: (1) Called my mom as I still do during all important times, or really any time at all. She was supportive, as she generally tends to be.  (2) Unpacked my suitcase and staked out my bed.  (3) Took a shower, washed and blow-dried my hair, and changed clothes, because I needed a pick me up.  (4) Opened the minibar and daringly consumed an adult beverage, because I needed a pick me up.  (5) Ate a bar of chocolate, also from the minibar, because, well, isn’t it obvious? (6) Unfolded my giant paper map and determined that the first stop on my tour that day will be Harrod’s, which was the closest landmark to this hotel, and also made the most sense, given how the trip started.

The reason for these boring details is because I want to convey that I was only ready to depart the hotel quite a fair bit of time after Grandma.  I mean, all of these activities took a while.  I am not sure exactly how much, but long enough that when I heard a tentative knock at the door, I logically assumed that the day’s cleaning crew was arriving.  Since this was my first time staying at a place fancy enough to be cleaned (and with a mini-bar—did I mention the minibar?), I grabbed my coat and rushed to the door, on my way toward my adventure in London, yelling encouragingly to whoever was behind the door that I am leaving and they can get down to business.

Behind the door was Grandma.  All this time, she was trying to find her way out of the huge hotel, rode the elevator, stumbled on the underground garage, gift shop, and every other floor, but regrettably, never the lobby.  She was exhausted, defeated, and ready to make peace.

Thus began my love affair with the West End… [The photo is not mine]

The rest of the week actually went reasonably well, all things considered.  We walked a lot (some of it was because Grandma was always a tireless walker her entire life, never having learned how to drive), saw all the main sites, including a day trip to Windsor Castle (where Grandma concluded that the tiny medieval royal beds are far inferior to her Italianate suite back in Brooklyn), and experienced our first (but far from my last) West End musical (“Me and My Girl” at the Adelphi theater).  In those days, London was still boasting its terrible cuisine, though to be fair, the two of us, a college student and a Soviet retiree, were decidedly not “foodies”.  We ate at McDonald’s and were excited.  Once we had pastries at a cafe and felt rather sophisticated.  I bought six decks of cards for my collection. I took only twice as many photos.  Every night, after Grandma fell asleep, I watched British TV and treated myself to a beverage and chocolate from the mini bar. 

It was not my best trip to London, but it was a decent first encounter with an exciting city which I came to know well in subsequent decades.  Later, there came many laughs, many discoveries, and many unforgettable theater experiences.  This was the slightly inauspicious start.

One of the twelve photos I took. Seriously? What is it even?
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Wanting All the Cards

I got to play “Two truths and a lie” on a Zoom call at work.  Of course I loved it.  In fact, I think everyone did, because we are lawyers.  And of course I obsessed about it for a couple of weeks leading up to the big day, because I like to think that many interesting and unlikely things happened to me over the years.  I was just a trifle annoyed that most of my colleagues had similarly outrageous and improbable experiences, though somewhat mollified when, after I announced my three “facts”, someone muttered that “they are all lies”[1]. 

This got me thinking about what, among the many weird, yet non-traumatic, particulars of my life remain obscure, yet interesting?  And I keep coming back to my playing card collection.

Just a small and random sample

For a large part of my life, I have loved playing cards and wanted to possess them.  By this I mean, I do not necessarily love playing card games, but love the cards themselves. It has been a deep and abiding love, a bearer of much joy, a literary and artistic inspiration, and #42 on my list of Favorite Things [A Few of [Whose] Favorite Things – Old Lady Writing][2].

Sadly, this is not my photo, but this is exactly how it was.

I trace the beginnings of this beautiful friendship to the early summers of my life leisurely spent on the Crimean beaches, playing a rousing game of Fool with whatever friends I made hanging out on the wooden sunbeds[3] between dips in the sea.  We also played Witch (Old Maid) and Drunkard (War), but Fool, the most popular Russian card game, was the only one that required some skill[4].

Clockwise from top left, Stella, Ophelia, Violette, Sylvia, and Sylvester. This is the deck she drew from memory.

When I was six, my grandmother, with whom I spent all my summers at the beach, and I were joined by acquaintances from our hometown, a couple of sisters around her age, one of whom had a 10 year old daughter, Irina.  For reasons that are lost to time, there was a joint refusal by the aged relatives to purchase a deck of cards for us, and so Irina simply drew one.  Although no record remains of that deck, I remember it as the crowning achievement of Pre-Raphaelite art.  We even gave the queens the fanciest names we knew, and attempted to name the jacks, but could only come up with one (look, we were just little girls in the USSR).  We so much wanted a real deck of cards! At some point, Irina’s mother relented and bought her one [5].  Searching for a facsimile of that deck became a goal in my adult life. 

Of course I found it!

Arriving in the US, I was absolutely stunned and disappointed to discover that playing cards here are not beautiful, and the face cards in all the decks are the same.  Of all the easy wins, playing cards were such a letdown!  And then, for American Christmas ’84, my mother presented me with a deck surprisingly purchased at Jacobson’s.  Baroque by Piatnik, which started my collection, is still the most beautiful deck I own.

The rules of the collection are simple:  face cards have to be distinct, human, and beautiful.  That means no animals, no cartoons, and no decks that have a weird theme like politicians, posters, quotes, or whatever.  They have to have traditional suits (French is preferred, because that is what I am used to) and traditional court cards.  I include stripped decks, because again, that is what was popular in Russia in my day. The backs are irrelevant.

According to Wikipedia, the largest card collection is over 11,000 decks.  Mine is about 100 times smaller, not counting double decks, but I love [almost] each and every one.  About a third of them are by Piatnik [Piatnik – Company], the greatest and largest card manufacturer in the world.  As a teenager, I vaguely dreamed of working for Piatnik, but literally could not imagine what skills I possess and into what job they would translate. 

My collection was enlarged by stopping in all stores that might carry these “artistic”, for lack of a better word, European-style cards.  In the US, that primarily included fancy stores that might carry gambling paraphernalia (and surprisingly, the store inside Cinderella Castle in Disneyworld, as well as my beloved and dearly missed quirky Peaceable Kingdom in Ann Arbor).  In Europe, it was pretty much any stationery or souvenir store, as well as big department stores like Harrod’s.  My mother has been a very enthusiastic contributor since the beginning, always traveling with the hard copy list of my decks. I stopped collecting almost a decade ago, because Piatnik seems to have run out of ideas, and ordering on the internet is no fun.  I have a very slight and vague regret of not buying a new deck in Dublin last year, but this gives me a reason to return[6].

A word about artistic inspiration.  As a refugee child in Rome with no toys but an extravagant set of markers which my family somehow managed to afford for Christmas, I drew a paper doll and, over the years, a mass of elaborate period dresses, inspired by my own imagination combined with dolls in Italian toy store windows and later, playing cards.  Since queens on playing cards are only portrayed from the waist up, all the skirts are mine.

(Just a few of the dresses; the last one was left unfinished around 30 years ago.)

[1] My big lie was the monkey story from The First Spanish Trip.  The truths were crashing a circus rehearsal (stay tuned!) and being chased by someone wielding a can opener (a singularly unpleasant event not worth retelling).

[2] I specifically did not mention it then, because I knew it will someday deserve its own full entry.

[3] English language fails me here.  The word that we actually use translates as “trestle bed”, but that seems to mean nothing to anyone.  I literally have spent no time on the beach in my English-speaking life, after an entire childhood of sun-drenched salt-water summers.

[4] In later years, during summers at the Baltic Sea, Nines replaced Fool as the rousing card game of choice. My grandfather subsequently demonstrated himself as the most charming cheat in the game of Nines.

[5] Eventually, the seven of clubs was lost, and we drew a card on nothing better than a piece of green blotter paper.  Needless to say, the seven of clubs was extremely conspicuous.

[6] And I never found Piatnik’s King Arthur deck.  I probably could now, but I prefer to leave this slight gap in the collection.  “Nothing in life has any business being perfect”.