ABSTRACT
I intend Larkin’s poem of Dirk and Jan’s drunken revelry (The CardPlayers’) to serve as a talisman as well as an epigraph in this essay; I hope to attach the essay to it. So that however pervasive the claims I shall make about the playing of dominoes of an evening (on the dominoes-table in the Eagle pub in the rural, northern, English village of Wanet), and however abstract my analysis, I am always brought back to an appreciation of how dominoes, like card-playing, is a physical activity-part-and-parcel of a physical, bodily communality-and also a recreational activity, deliberately without consequence for the serious, workaday world which proceeds alongside its playing.
