The mind gets dirty as you get closer to thirty

The above line is from Blur's End of a Century; who knows whether it's true, but I'll hit the big three-oh in just a year and a day. A bit scary really. Yesterday I got a cheque in the post from my mum for my birthday - after this weekend's finale to the tennis season, I could probably do with spending the money on some lessons. I played four matches all up and didn't win any of them. In two of those matches there was only ever going to be one outcome and I thought I played fine, but the other two were a real disappointment for me. We did enough to win our doubles competition (woohoo!) - I have the honour of being the winning captain, though going by my recent performances I feel we were victorious in spite of my presence on the team.

On Wednesday I went with Julie (who's already been to thirty and back) to see The Reader at the Bridgeway, the first time I'd been to the cinema since Christmas when I saw the latest Bond film (which I thought was total dross by the way) with Mum and Dad in Geraldine. The Reader wouldn't have been my first choice but I'm very glad I went. It was a great film I thought, and there was a slight irony in Julie and I watching a film involving a bloke having an affair with a much older woman, which wasn't lost on us. The various eats and drinks made it a thoroughly enjoyable evening. I don't know why, but I often find people easier to get on with the further their age is (up or down) from my own.

The following day I saw the psychiatrist, a shorter meeting this time, so it wouldn't cost me an arm and a leg but just a leg. I told him there had been a marked improvement (I think I've been extremely lucky) so I won't have to consume any substances beyond what I'm already taking.

Work is still, well, total dross. I spent a good deal of one of my work days (probably Friday) calculating probabilities for this newfangled poker game called badugi. In fact it's not really poker at all, but instead what could be described as four-card "anti-poker". The object of badugi is to make a badugi, which is a four-card hand with no pairs or cards of the same suit. You get three attempts to draw cards in order to achieve this. The probability that you'll be dealt a badugi from the start, known as a "pat badugi", is 6.3%, about the same as the probability that you'll one day meet somebody called Pat Badugi.