Tuesday's poker match went fairly well: I got to the heads-up at the end with Peter, and managed to throw away a reasonably commanding chip lead with a few unbelievably close hands*. Unfortunately, I managed to drag out this process until 1.45 am.
Second thing dragged out was myself from bed at 8.30 the next day. Jon (another poker player) had organised some whitewater rafting for Wednesday, and Kate and I were getting a lift there with Eliza and Mark. Apparently when he suggested the rafting trip at a poker game, the responses went:
Guys: <non-commital mumbling>
Girls: "Woohoo!"
Way to assert your thrill-seeking manliness, guys. Clearly I would have replied "Woohoo!" had I not been elsewhere, rocking my fucking socks off with TM during that particular game. I did in fact reply "Woohoo!" via the medium of electronic mail sometime later, hence this exciting little story.
Once we were all kitted out in wetsuits and lifejackets and had run through the safety drill, we headed off down the river with two guides in the back of the raft. A fair amount of the trip was on relatively pedestrian stretches, so we were required to do some 'challenges' transparently designed to result in some or all of us falling in the drink.
Don't listen to all that crap about wetsuits being warm once you've been in the water. Complete rubbish. I'd agree with 'just about bearably tepid', but 'warm' is just taking the piss. Coincidentally, Mark urged us all to urinate in our suits to warm us up. Thank God no-one did. A raft full of voluntary incontinents wearing spongy, porous clothing doesn't bear thinking about.
The rapids, once we got to them, were good fun but pretty tame. I had been expecting something a little more exciting, but fair enough; the Tay isn't exactly Amazonian. Still, it was good fun, and the day away from work was a welcome relief.
That night, TM convened for a practise at Lighthouse Studios in Granton. We'd never played there before, and I suspect we won't be going back. While the kit was good (the Marshall bass amp was the best I've played with), the room was tiny, and soundproofing was limited to a square of carpet on the wall beside the door. A twenty-times life-sized poster of a baby's head staring at us with dead, dead eyes didn't lend much of a party atmosphere to the place either.
I think it's been a fairly exhausting couple of weeks for all of us. Couple this with a tiny, dim practise room designed around psychological stress tests and you have the Practise Of Which We Do Not Speak.
We went to the pub and got drunk.
* For the poker-inclined among you, at one point I was dealt A-3 off suit - not great, I'll grant you, but I could have sworn that Peter had something worse and I jumped at the chance to take him out.
"All in," I said.
5 minutes later, my eyes glazed over from watching MTV in the background, he replied: "Okay. I'll call."
We flipped over our cards. He also had A-3 off suit. Un-fucking-believable.
Neither of us came up with anything near a flush on the community cards, so we split the pot, ending up with nigh-on exactly the same as beforehand. Almost every hand that came to the flop after that point was just as close. I think I finally lost on a hand where I had K-Q suited, and he had A-10 off suit. To trot out an old cliché, it really did come down to the luck of the draw.
Next time, I will be the master now. Er. You know what I mean.
