Victoria Coren Quotes

And as we walk back down the street, me gingerly clutching what at this point constitutes my entire collection, my father says, 'One day, when you're all grown up and I'm not here any more, you'll remember the sunny day we went to the market together and bought a boat.' My throat feels tight because, as soon as he says it, I am already there. Standing on another street, without my father, trying to get back. And yet I'm here, with him. So I try to soak up every aspect of the moment, to help me get back when I need to. I feel the weight of the chunky parcel under my arm, and the warmth of the sun, and my father's hand in mine. I smell the flowers with their sharp undertang of cheap hot dog, and taste the slick of toffee on my teeth, and hear the chattering hagglers. I feel the joy of an adventurous Saturday with my father and no school, and I feel the sadness of looking back when it is all gone. When he is gone.

Poker is a shifty game played by shifty characters. Outside the two official card rooms in London, most games take place in illegal spielers with heavy rake money. Debts and revenges are rife, names are changed, multiple passports are not unheard of. The majority of regular players have no interest in advertising their lifestyle, their whereabouts or even their existence to tax inspectors, thieves, neighbours, creditors or old enemies. Television? You'd have to be a complete ice cream.

I start referring to sums of money as a pony, a bottle, a carpet or a monkey, quite unselfconsciously. Probably sounds ridiculous in my posh voice. One time, in the £50 game at the Vic, I try to bet a cockle and (once the word has crashed against the accent barrier and slumped unconscious on the baize) it goes as a call. Stupid really, since I'm the only one who actually pronounces the 'ck' in the middle. But this is the language, it feels normal to use it. I can't sound any funnier than Bambos does when he bets 'sirillo'. Three, or three hundred, or three thousand = a carpet, because people used to get a carpet in their cell if they were jailed for three years or more. And there used to be a carpet manufacturer called Cyril Lord. So when Bambos, in his heavy Cypriot accent, bets 'a sirillo', everyone knows exactly what he means.