OK, trying this again.

My mum was a solitaire player, right up to (literally) her quiet passing, found sitting on her sofa with a hand played out on the coffee table in front of her. As her only child, I grew up loving the worn and shiny feel of the cards, and how she always had a pack with her. We also played board games, and I wanted to win but then learned that that was what ended the game. Gently she taught me that the narrative of the game was the thing. Fresh clean start, complex play, messy game space, someone wins, end. Like you, I’m sure she was cheating in various ways to encourage me to keep going.

So it was natural to me to bring cards into the life of my daughters, and then to watch how they each take a different angle on the possibility of winning, avoiding winning, cheering the winner, minding about things. And like you I can see that what they’re doing is buying time with each other, laying out something that takes a certain amount of time to do. Small rituals — making hot drinks, clearing the table, what about a snack? Then in-game talk, and easygoing ways of being together when sometimes just being together without a game is too hard.

What we in education call groupwork seems to emerge oddly and spontaneously when a game is stuck, especially a game involving memory.

When I was very little I learned to play memory games with cards with my dad, who was sick in bed and moving towards the end of his life at 48. I can still clearly remember the feeling of balancing the cards on the blankets over his legs. Much later I realised what he was doing playing cards with me.