Housekeeping and parlour games

First of all, a bit of housekeeping.

I am off on holiday to Paris in a few weeks and I won’t be blogging while I’m over there. I’ve only ever had one guest post on my blog before and I thought this would be a good opportunity to have a few more.

So, if anyone’s interested here’s the deal – during my week off I would love to do a sequence of guest posts on the subject of holidays. You could regale my readers with stories of your favourite holidays, your absolute nightmare holidays or anything else with a holiday theme.

If you want in, email me with your submissions via the address on my profile. I’d rather we kept them to a thousand words or less but apart from that anything goes. The best ones will make it onto my blog while I’m swanning round Paris, I reckon I have room for six or possibly seven if I get that many submissions.

Oh, and you don’t necessarily have to have a blog, if you’re a regular reader or lurker who fancies taking part that’s fine too. If you do have a blog, obviously I’ll link to you in the post and say fulsomely lovely things about you.

The closing date if you want to send me something is end of Friday 2nd October. If I don’t get anything I’ll probably just end up reposting some stuff people may not have read, and nobody wants that do they? Exactly. So go on, you know you want to.

Oh, and the other piece of housekeeping is that I’m doing my first competition on the blog. But I’ll get to that at the end of this post.

The subject of holidays is quite appropriate because I’m off for a long weekend this weekend in sunny (fingers crossed) Dorset. I will be staying in a lovely cottage with a group of friends and I fully expect to have a civilised time – a nice day trip to Lyme Regis, a spot of loafing, lots of wine and conversation. Just to set the tone for what to expect, last time we all got together we were having dinner at a relatively posh restaurant in Norfolk (this term is actually wide enough to cover anywhere without (a) a carvery or (b) a laminated menu with pictures of the food on it, but never mind). We got funny looks from the other diners – well, funnier than usual – which I thought was uncalled for as we were having a perfectly innocuous conversation about amputee porn.

Honestly, some people.

Incidentally did you know that amputee porn was very popular in Japan? No, me neither. And apparently the in thing is to wrap the stumps and bandages and cover them in fake blood so they look good and recent. And best of all, for once I wasn’t even the ringleader in this conversation – I could sit back, drink my red wine and watch the torrent of smut without having to say a word. Sheer bliss.

Events are however conspiring to drain all the smut from my weekend. First of all, it turns out that we’ve missed the Knob Throwing Festival in the village by several months. And it didn’t just feature knob throwing either. I also won’t have the opportunity to experience “knob painting”, “guess the weight of the big knob”, “knob darts”, the “knob pyramid” and – most upsetting of all – the “knob and spoon race.”

The fact that the “Dorset knob” is some kind of miniature scone rather than some grotesque rustic phallus is the only thing that keeps that paragraph on the right side of the border between smut and filth that I spend so much time loitering around with intent.

Without any knob related action, things were looking a bit grim. Then, to heap disappointment upon disappointment, I found out that the village pub where we’re eating on Saturday night has stopped serving faggots. I for one was really looking forward to having my mouth full of a couple of juicy faggots but no. They are no longer on the menu. You have no idea how gutted I am that they’ve chosen to pull off the faggots.

The fact that a faggot is an English meatball rather than… all right, you surely get the idea by now.

Without all this we’re just going to have to make do with plenty of booze and lots of board games. I know it’s hard to believe nowadays in a world of Wiis and Playstation 3s but I think there’s a lot to be said for these. For that matter it’s hard to believe that Manic Miner on the ZX Spectrum kept me spellbound for months on end, but back then we had to rely heavily on our imaginations. Mainly to pretend that we weren’t living through the 1980s.

But anyway, I’ve always had a real soft spot for board games. I think that’s because my parents realised very early on that these were one of the most effective means of crowd control at their disposal that didn’t involve chloroform. They were always brought out at Christmas time, largely as a coping strategy to try and help us all survive a week together in a confined space.

It didn’t always work. No Yuletide was complete without us desperately trying to explain the rules of some game or other to my Aunty Mary. She found The Game Of Life especially difficult - a sad fact laden with unfortunate parallels, as she struggled with the real thing as well. For years I thought that getting emotional on Christmas Eve, breaking down and telling everyone in your family that you loved them was just what people did. I worked out that it wasn’t roughly around the same time that I also came to the realisation that some people kept a bottle of vodka in their handbags.

In subsequent years we moved on to charades. This too had limited success, mainly because my dad also treated Christmas Eve as an excuse to give the drinks cabinet the sort of punishment beating that even Camp X-Ray would consider excessive. The time I will always remember involved us all sitting on our brown draylon sofa watching my father desperately failing at charades. First, he theatrically extended both his arms.

”It’s a song.” we shouted in unison.

He nodded. Then he raised a hand.

“Five words.”

Again came the affirmative response. Then he raised a solitary finger.

“First word.”

So far, so normal. So none of us were prepared when my father – by this stage exceptionally drunk – began to frantically goose step round the living room. His hand came up again, again with all five fingers extended, but he was no longer telling us how many words were in the song. Then he put a solitary finger horizontally under his nose. This was, quite clearly, a Nazi salute.

Some people, when nobody can guess their clues in charades, have a plan B. “sounds like”, perhaps, or trying different words in the title. Not my dad. It was, as in so many other things, his way or the highway. We got more and more baffled, he got more and more frustrated, the goose stepping got more and more jerky. He was recreating the Nuremberg rallies in our suburban lounge and we were all genuinely none the wiser. Eventually - only slightly more exhausted than we were - he slumped back in the chair, totally defeated.

What followed was over ten minutes of arguing and recrimination as we tried to explain to him that it wasn’t called Adolf The Red Nosed Reindeer.

Another time he tried to get us to guess popular Eighties TV show The Equaliser by miming its star Edward Woodward having a heart attack on set. At least it was never dull, although we had to explain it to Aunty Mary several times.

As a creature with a delicate temperament and a rabid fear of failure many games were just ruled out for me. Fundamentally if the consequences of defeat were loud, jarring or scary I was best left quivering on the sidelines. Not for me the terror of Operation or the clattering horror and humiliation of Jenga. All far, far too scary. So instead I moved on to word games, the sort of genteel pursuits well suited to a boffin with nerves of cotton wool.

Scrabble was a particular favourite. I’ll never forget the time I was playing obscene Scrabble with my friend Deidre. It’s like normal Scrabble but you get double points for obscenities. As my turn came round I was almost beside myself with excitement because I had a bona fide rude word there just crying out to be played. When it got to my go, I derived great pleasure from getting my quim out and triumphantly plonking it on the board for all to see.

Can you believe they disallowed it?

I was crestfallen. Nobody likes sitting there with a verboten quim all over their rack and nowhere to stick it. But don’t worry too much about me, because I had my revenge a little later on. “NITROGEN”, on a triple word score, all seven letters down in one foul swoop. Nobody scorns my quim and gets away with it.

(I think that might be the most embarrassing paragraph on my blog to date. Let’s all just move along and pretend it was never written.)

We may play Scrabble on my weekend away (if I am very unlucky) but charades is all very passé. Nowadays it’s all about Pictionary, and there’s no pleasure quite like drunken Pictionary in my experience. Several years back, I spent New Year’s Eve in a cottage in Dorset with a bunch of friends playing a Pictionary game that passed into legend. The more you drink the worse your drawings get and the more convinced you become that, despite looking like they have been etched by Stevie Wonder on a galloping horse, they in fact are the finest illustration humanly possible of what’s written on the card. Take this effort by my friend Glenn for example:

Glenn drew this in seconds flat to his team’s complete nonplussed confusion. Then, in a direct nod to my dad’s method in charades, rather than draw anything else he simply pointed at the drawing and then glared at his team. The blank stares he got in return suggested that this hadn’t worked. So he then started stabbing at his drawing with his marker pen - first the image on top, then the image underneath. This was followed by some further Olympic standard glaring. Perhaps Glenn was trying to convey the meaning through his highly developed powers of telepathy. If so, I’m pretty sure he picked the wrong crowd for it. This went on for another two minutes, during which time he got so aerated that I thought the vein throbbing on his forehead was going to burst and shower us all, Carrie style, with blood.

That drawing is meant to be of an armoured car. I know, I feel so foolish as well. It’s obvious when you think about it, right?

But that was a mere appetiser compared to the banquet that was to follow. My friend Laura produced the most awe-inspiring drawing I have even seen in my life. None of us had the foggiest idea what it was. Even after the timer had long run out and Laura had tried to explain it for the fifteenth time, we still couldn’t see any way that even the most fevered mind could have thought it was a depiction of the noun in question. Here it is for your delectation:


And, before I sign off ready for my trip to the West Country, even if it’s a knob and faggot free zone, here is my first ever competition on the blog:

What do you think Laura’s drawing is supposed to be of?

Send me a mail (my address is in my profile) with your guess, your name and your postal address. Closing date for applications is Monday 28th September. After that, all correct answers will be put into a hat and the winner drawn at random. If there are no correct answers – and given Laura’s penmanship you have to say that’s pretty likely – the closest answer will win. If nobody comes close all entrants will get entered into the proverbial hat. The winner will get an excellent CD from the Mr London Street Audiotheque Of The Obscure, postage paid to anywhere in the world.

So send me your entries, send me your submissions for the guest posts, don’t forget to comment on this post and have a bloody marvellous weekend. Oh, and try not to miss me too much.