Play Your Cards Right: Reflections on Bruce Forsyth and My Grandfather
Bruce Forsyth has died.
The news casters are doing a ring-round of celebrities and people with whom he had close contact. The stories are all the same, of what a kind, professional, and genuine human being he was.
It is a fine obituary, to be sure. It makes me think of my own kindness; makes me want to improve it, that i might have such a fine send-off one day when my is becomes was.
When someone particularly of note to my upbringing passes, it makes me think of what their life meant to me, and what reflections arise from that. As I reflect on Brucie’s life, I think a lot of my grandfather. My grandfather was a great artist, but he was also a quiet artist. He put the seul in soul, although he preferred German to French.
There was so much I learned about him after his death. From his stamp collecting, to his grade eight piano abilty. I think my affinity for less is rooted in him, though he was Christian rather than Daoist.
One thing that sums up his personality to me is Freecell. At seventy years old he got his first computer capable of running Freecell: Windows 95. It’s. basically a card game like Solitire. Well there was a feature on there that you could enter a game number between 1 and 32,000m and it would load up a pre-generated game.
My grandad used to keep a log of the games he’d completed. Broke the full thing down into chunks of checklists in a notebook, and over the course of several years, completed the lot. I recently learned that they had a name for them: the Microsoft 32,000. There was a whole online community dedicated to playing Freecell games.
There was one infamous game within the community: game 11982. Infamous because, well, it was impossible to beat. But before I ever heard about the community, my grandad showed me it in his log. I remember him getting into the twenty-thousands and telling me about one game that he still hadn’t solved from way back when. He might as well have discovered the impossible game. As far as I’m concerned, he did.
But why take the time? Why go through every game of a free program with your computer? Well that’s just the kind of person he was. He did hobbies the way I aspire to do hobbies: go hard, or go home.
He had a quiet way of challenging himself to do things. He knew how to use the latest photoshop, he taught himself digital photography, and spoke multiple languages. I never heard from him about doing these things, but they would just crop up now and then. He wrote his own prayers that, after he’d passed, my grandmother propped up at various spots around the house.
I think that’s what made him such a great artist. He took the time to learn things, and learn them quietly well.
He used to take photos of famous landmarks on holiday, and combine them into a single painting when he got back home. That’s what his life was. A collection of monuments, all in one picture.
Thinking back to Brucie, I see him that way too. From his time on Play Your Cards Right, to Strictly Come Dancing, and that time he hosted Have I Got News For You, he was an all-rounder who could turn his hand to anything. Though my grandad was never in the public eye like Brucie, I hold them both in great regard, and I hope I can live my life as virtuously as they lived theirs.
