I played a couple of weeks ago, rusty and jetlagged, surrounded by a particular brand of American, missing my loveable rogues from Birmingham, a lump in my throat. In choosing to break with it, I’ll have changed it. I’ll have the odd trip to Florida or New Jersey, and back home, back to the Gala. I rather feel, in respect of poker, nostalgia is all I have left. And you can feel nostalgic for something even while it is happening.” One of our first impulses was to feel nostalgic for times we had never seen. Where are those who went before us? The wistful motif echoes through the Anglo-Saxon fragments that kicked off our English course… Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? That’s what I learned at university, in exchange for a stand-up comedy career. It still knows that it has lost something. You can see it on the face of a zoo monkey that once lived in the wild. But nostalgia is simply, basic, instinctive and it was always there. So you might mistake it for one of those fiddly, sophisticated feelings like scahdenfreude or low self-esteem. It just seems otherwise, because it has a long name and is tricky to define out loud. “ … nostalgia is a primal emotion, like fear and anger and (maybe) love. The rhythmic shuffle of the deck, the symphony of riffling chips. The same faces and the same personalities. Back in Blighty, I played live poker several times a week at the same casino. I have recently moved to a country with no casinos and certainly no card rooms. In real life, in addition to The Laws and The Romance and The Fanfic and Veep, I am All About Poker.

For richer for poorer victoria coren