Walk the Beach, Play the Deal

I was to meet with Kim, the friend I met a few weeks ago in London, at 10:30a and drive to a shire farm and then around the island a bit, but we missed each other thanks to a communication vortex and Wight's flaky cellular system. We never got each other's verification calls and text messages, and we were each in different spots at the same meeting time.

Have therefore spent the past three hours walking and sitting at the beach. Walked the two miles from Sandown to Shanklin and had a bit of a cry at the steps at Hope Beach. Sat on some wooden steps and heard only the wind and waves and the bamboo wind chimes hanging from the hut rental place behind me.

So why the cry? Some lonely. Some scare to lean into the moments of just being OK to be here, to be alive, doing nothing. A great grief and awareness of my bitty particle on the planet whirling through space, held here by gravity alone.

I kept remembering the sense of belonging, being cared for, in group, in friends' arms; I can hear their voices telling me I'm enough, there's enough for me, this is all I need to be doing right now.

Resting into the wooden steps, hearing the chimes, feeling the wind, tears came to wash away the fear of leaning in. There's nowhere I need to go, nothing I need to do, no one I need to be except exactly where and who I am in this moment.


Rather than keep walking miles along the beach or finding a bazillion steps to climb, I took a lift straight up the cliffside to reach the Old Village of Shanklin, whose thatched buildings look straight out of Shakespeare's time. Sat outdoors to lunch at The Pencil Cottage. (I don't recommend this restaurant. Lousy soup, doughy scones, not enough jam provided.)

The umbrella-ed tables had sewing machine treadles as their base. Singer and Jones. Decorative wrought iron painted black with weathered planks as the tabletop. A small robin redbreast went after my bread. Timid, though, and didn't want to stay.

Stopped into the Chapter 1 pub (an old church) on the way back to Sandown and met a worker setting up for a local game of "Deal or No Deal," a game show I'd seen on TV last night. He told me it started at 8:30, and invited me to come along. Don't know about that one yet.

Rode a bus back to the hotel and had my flaky TV replaced, and then napped. Decided to go to the pub for the game; "Say yes" has been my motto on this trip. Better than staying in my room all night. I'm a little anxious about this idea though...evening visits at pubs aren't my thing, and this could be a disaster if I don't meet up with folks.

I am heartily welcomed at the pub by Stuart, the same fellow I'd talked to earlier. He introduces me to a group at a nearby table, and they all take me in as "Audrey The American." Most of them are imports from the London area. All of them are the salt of the earth.

At my table are Joe, Sue, Angie (Joe's wife), Steve (Sue's boyfriend), and Andy, all friends of Stuart (alas, not pictured). We joined the rest of the patrons playing video Bingo, Keys in the Safe, and three rounds of "Deal or No Deal" nearly all night.

The game show is simple: 22 sealed boxes, each containing a card with a dollar value. There are 11 low-dollar values in blue, ranging from 0 to £5; and 11 high-dollar values in red, ranging from £10-£90 plus an unknown jackpot amount--in the past this has been as high as £274. The TV version uses much higher stakes, of course, and they play for up to £100,000.

A player is drawn by raffle, selects a sealed box, and keeps it at his table in the center of play. He then chooses other boxes one at a time and selects people from the audience to open them. Getting blue (low) values is better than getting red (higher) values.

As more boxes are opened, the banker (Stuart, hidden away upstairs) calls in an offer to the emcee on the cell phone. The offer is always less than the highest amount still left to be found, which may, of course, be in the box the player has chosen. The contestant can accept the offer or keep playing--hence the name "Deal or No Deal?"

I bought £3 of raffle tickets for a chance to be a contestant and was just as glad that I didn't get called. But late in the third game, the players selected me to open one of the boxes, and it was blue (low number--very good), and one of them was so jazzed that he jumped off his chair and ran up to hug me in thanks.

Great fun and lots of laughter, and I was glad I stayed until 11:30 to see the last game through. Having outlasted the bus system, I took a taxi back to the hotel--a gift in itself, for the driver was a friend of Sue's, and my friends at the table spontaneously contributed to the tab.