Bristol Art & Pocket Kings

Before watching the mighty Saints crush the once mighty Leeds at the rather excellent Hort’s in Broad Street, I took in the Royal West of England Academy. You can get a closer look at Damien Hirst’s Charity up on the balcony. I didn’t know there were huge coins littered around its base – pre-decimalised coins too. That took me back.

The real reason for forking out a fiver was the Mary Fedden exhibition but Lisa Milroy stole the show. Her geishas are hilarious. Of interest to this blog, the Elisabeth Frink room showed some birdy aquatints. Her goshawk fooled me but the osprey was unmistakable. I got the long-eared owl wrong too. Tut-tut.

Downstairs were the most amazing pencil line creations. I forget the name of the artist but he started from a few straight lines and tried to draw lines right next to them but complete with errors. With subsequent lines he then allowed the errors to accumulate or dissipate as they would. Hard to describe but it looked painstaking, especially when he used the same technique for a self-portrait!

How do pockets kings relate to this? They don’t but today I bust out of a poker tournament when my kings hit a pair of aces. This is not as rare as it sounds: about once every 220 hands you get a pair of kings and something like 1 in 24 of those will lose to aces. It’s also happened to me at the Gala Casino within ten minutes of the tournament starting. That made the trip in to Bristol worthwhile!

What was unusual today was that a third hand also went all-in, not from the usual idiot looking to treble up but from pocket queens. I can’t do the maths to say how unlikely that is. I don’t expect to see it again.

I do expect to see Saints win again. The next televised game is Birmingham a month away and not much later they travel to Cardiff. Might fork out to get over the Bridge to that one.

Related posts:

1. See No Evil
2. Steyning, West Sussex
3. Dear Santa