Playing with Luke

Like many people, I sometimes find myself saying to a friend “We must catch up properly soon” yet, simultaneously, experience tells me that we won’t get around to it and will be saying something similar again in a few months, or years, whenever we next encounter each other.

Yesterday, I found myself uttering this phrase when I was at a meeting and bumped into an old friend called Luke, a potentially confusing coincidence - all the more so because he is a psychologist; however, he works from a different theoretical framework to The Diceman. It was natural to tell him about my recent crisis, even though I am already feeling bored with the story myself, and he was entertained by the notion of harnessing chance therapeutically. Consequently, after doing the ‘we must catch up’ thing, I commented that mostly people don’t when they say this and suggested that we use the dice to ensure we act on our intention.

I proposed that I would offer six suggestions for things we could meet up to do. He could then counter-propose alternatives until we agreed on a final six, and then the dice would make our decision. Luke and his family are based in London and I live in Kent, so I shall propose activities that have an evens chance of one of us having to visit the other (two each) and two that require both of us to make a journey away from home. Here are my starting suggestions:

1. We have an outdoor table tennis match on one of the concrete tables that can be found in London parks http://etta.co.uk/news/find-an-outdoor-table/ 
2. I devise a walking tour of my old home town Chatham that could either be just for the pair of us, or adjusted for our partners and his children to join us and discover that Chatham can be magnificent in a way that contradicts the impression in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkTiJzJRAG8A
3. A meal at Luke’s home 
4.  A meal at our home. These two are kind of boring for the reader, I know. But the objective is not primarily to entertain the reader, it is to make my life more enjoyable so... 
5.  Attend an event at the De  La Warr Pavilion. Great architecture and an interesting cultural programme http://www.dlwp.com/ 
6. Visit an exhibition at the Turner Contemporary, Margate http://www.turnercontemporary.org/

You can reject and or all of these Luke, but you have to propose alternatives for each one you reject, we have to obey the dice and we have to fulfil the commitment by the end of 2014. You can do so in the comments on this blog, or by email, as you prefer. I would prefer it if it was in the comments though.

If anyone else reads this and wants to offer other suggestions, please do. Equally, if you want to borrow any of these ideas for yourselves, that is also the point, so be my guest.