En ymmärrä! or have you played Scrabble in Finnish?

I’m no stranger to the Finnish Scrabble board so I should be better at it by now. It’s a game that I don’t intentionally join because its complexity is such that the Glass Bead Game would be as simple as Snakes and Ladders without the snakes, just an endless and joyful climb to victory undeterred by even the cruellest throws of the dice.  It appears that I have been dealt a fantastic hand each time that I sit down to play at the Finnish Scrabble table, at least that is the opinion voiced by the confident supporters looking over my shoulder at the jumbled row of consonants, or jmbld rw f cnsnnts (which would be a very good hand indeed), that are neatly laid out on their slim horizontal wooden support and which should enable me to get a lot of whatever it is that Scrabble players want a lot of. Points is the word we’re looking for – they want a lot of points because pnts mean przs and prizes mean success and progress. I chose the Finnish metaphor because it is a rich and emotive language with the single drawback of being incomprehensible to all but a few. Thus it is that there are those who see great possibilities in chaos and others, such as myself who just see chaos. I tend to slip into the Finnish mode at the end of a successful and fulfilling time, such as has been our recent course at Camerahols. The sudden change of pace can be enervating and the plans and ideas, so confidently discussed at the convivial dinner tables of the preceding days, seem to now appear as the previously described jumble of consonants and umlauts. For Finnish read finish. It appears that we humans need a hiatus between bouts of pleasure so that we can fully appreciate the deliciousness of that dish in comparison to the gruel of limbo. Today it is raining but tomorrow it will be sunny, that much I’ve deciphered already, so I’m optimistic. We ate very well last night starting with a plate of pink radishes served with Guérande butter and sea salt which trio are delicious when eaten with toasted baguette and a glass of chilled, white Quincy. To follow we had a  caramelised confit of duck with slow braised, aromatic red cabbage and a thin, crisp potato cake, known in Lyons as “criques”, washed down with a bottle of St.Joseph which is a wonderful red wine from the Côtes de Rhône. Dessert was a Mary Cadogan special which consists of ripe pears cooked with lemon and muscovado sugar, with a good dose of Poire William, topped with a crisp chocolate macaroon.