I’m sleeping in and then I would go up to Windermere [Berry Farm] for brunch and have the berry pancakes – because what else are you going to do? And while I’m out that way I’ll go out to Kai Iwi and just walk along the beach or frolic in the sea, depending what time of year it is.
While I’m at Windermere, I would also admire the alpacas and probably pick some fresh strawberries to take home or snack on at the beach. Then I would come back into town and go to my friend’s house in the evening to play a game of Scrabble.
What got you into competitive Scrabble?
When I was a teenager, I used to play with my mum most Sundays – that’s probably why I think the ideal Sunday needs some Scrabble in it – and I learned a lot from mum. She used to play these words and act all incredulous that I didn’t know them, like “em” and “en” which are printer’s measures. I got sick of her knowing words that I didn’t know so I thought how am I going to learn words she doesn’t know?
That was where I decided I was going to have to introduce some other people into my playing pool to get an edge over mum. From there, it was probably another 10 years before I joined a club and that was when my husband went off to Police College, so I thought I was going to have to find something to do and that was when I finally got the guts to walk through the doors of a Scrabble club. Now I can beat my mum quite well.
What’s your favourite scent?
I’m fond of jonquils. I also love when someone is frying garlic and ginger together, like the smell you get when you walk through a market in Bangkok, that sort of stir-fry smell. I feel like I’m going to wake up in the middle of the night and think, that’s what I should’ve said my favourite scent was.
Where is your favourite place you have travelled to for a competition?
That would have to be my first world championship which was in Nairobi, Kenya. I never thought I’d have a shot at a world championship but a lot of people were nervous about going to Africa and turned down the opportunity, so they kept going down the list and I was able to go. It’s not anywhere I would have ever considered going.
They were amazing hosts, we were treated so well, and the lunch they provided every day was top-notch. I didn’t have a lot of spare time but they had a safari park in the middle of the city so we did that one day.
It was a great place to go and one I never would have gone to without Scrabble.
As a librarian, what are your three favourite books?
Heidi would have to be in there and The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, it has a great fantasy tone. If you asked me on a different day I’d give you different answers. There’s so many but we’ve got to throw a New Zealander in there so I’ll say Rants in the Dark by Emily Writes. It’s basically about when her kid was a baby and wasn’t sleeping so she’d just rant in the dark.
What is your self-care ritual?
I would run a hot bath with bubbles and either have a book to read or an audiobook playing. Audiobooks are great for the bath because you don’t have to worry about the pages getting wet.
What are your go-to words or strategies when you’re playing Scrabble?
Knowing words is a good place to start. I’m always saying when I’m playing Scrabble “I wish I had more words”. I have tried to learn all the eight-letter words that contain five or more vowels. There are 472 words in that set and, in theory, I know them all, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you see them when you have seven tiles in front of you.
There’s something called tile-tracking. During the course of the game, as soon as a letter is played, I will cross off the letters from a sheet that’s specially designed for this. The main purpose of this being by the end of the game you can tell what your opponent has so you can thwart them.
You like to pick up new words from songs, so who is your favourite artist?
That would have to be Billy Joel and one of the reasons I like him is because I think he has interesting and thought-out lyrics, not just something formulaic.
I did once learn an eight-letter word with five vowels from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, so I put down what looked like this jumble of letters. The word was “patootie” from the song that goes “hot patootie bless my soul”. I was playing someone much better than me and he said “What the hell is that”, and oh how he fell when my word was proved right.
Other than Scrabble, what are your favourite board games?
I got given one for my birthday called Reef. It’s got no words, you’re just using pieces to build up your little reef. There’s a lot of really intense strategy games where you can undermine what the other person is trying to do but, this one, it’s still competitive but you can’t actually do any damage to anyone else’s reef.
I like pretty games with coloured pieces. I love Balderdash – where you make up a dictionary definition for an obscure word and people vote for the most likely or the most funny. If you’ve got the right group of people, it’s so much fun.
The Trans-Tasman Scrabble tournament will be live-streamed for the first time on the New Zealand Scrabble YouTube channel on November 15-17.
Olivia Reid is a multimedia journalist based in Whanganui.
