Voy Por Ustedes

At no time is it more apparent that time waits for no man than on the first of January. Another year has whooshed by and I barely noticed it. I have quite happily accepted that time is officially moving too fast for me to catch up. I’m stuck in my ways, an old dog incapable of learning new tricks, a leopard with unchangeable spots.

This is no great inconvenience though. My life has been carefully constructed so that for the most part, time is irrelevant. It’s like dropping out of a marathon, I may be denying myself a sense of achievement but achievement comes at cost, and I’m quite happy sat on the side-lines in my woolly cardigan with a cup of tea and a nice biscuit while everyone else busts their chops trying to win the race.

There is a downside of course, it does for example mean that I shall probably never make my millions at the poker table. The intraweb generation have reduced what was a beautifully nuanced, fascinatingly complex and personal game to a series of mathematical equations – consequently it has evolved into a synthetic impersonal virtual experience with a completely baffling language I have no hope or desire to learn.

Whatever that is, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not poker. Poker for me has more character than that. It’s a game originally played by guys named after American cities who wear cowboy hats and have been bitten by a snake at least once in the last week, in the kind of places where you'd probably get shot for using the language in the above paragraph.

Games evolve of course and today’s card rooms are lacking the colourful nicknames and maybe the players don’t have quite so much venom in their blood streams, but the fundamentals of the live game are the same and hold the same appeal.

I’m more concerned with quality and substance these days is what I’m saying, rather than style and image. But of course the good things in life aren’t subject to fashion and trends…a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh, the fundamental things apply as time goes by...ah Casablanca, marvelous, they don’t make ‘em like that any more.

But though, but, the poker experience may evolve, cardigans may never be fashionable, gadgets may become more and more complex, but no matter how unrecognisable and bewildering the kids make the world … the rest of us will always have Paris, figuratively speaking obv.