Whatever happened to CELEBDAQ?

Back in the days when you had to plug your computer into your telephone line in order to download pornography, sorry, in order to go online, the BBC had a website called CELEBDAQ.  It was fabulous, but it’s probably a good thing that this site no longer exists, for the reasons explained below.

CELEBDAQ was, as the name implies, a trading game.  It was sort of a combination of Fantasy Football and Hello! magazine.  So it was a fantasy trading game, but unlike a game of trading footballers so that you could demonstrate that you were just as fucking clueless as any other manager in the Premiership about squad selection, or fantasy share dealing where you could pretend to be the sort of person who in their day job in the City meddled with the economies of developing countries and fucked them up, then at the weekend continued to spread social ill by supporting the drugs trade and so, generally, being the sort of person Dickens tried to warn us about, you traded in how famous a particular celebrity was that week.

Celebrity fame fluctuated, so if somebody had a film premier coming out, they would get more time in the media and their profile would rise and they would become more valuable as a celebrity.  However, as their fame rose, so their share price did, so if you knew that a blue chip famous person like Tom Hanks was going to be in London promoting his new film, he’s a sound investment for that week but you could only buy a few shares.

Much, much better to go to the ‘B’ listers or, as they were also known, those who appeared on television.

As far as I am aware, ‘personalities’ were not listed.

It was tremendous fun.  You had to register, all the cash was virtual and every week there was a star trader award.

Obviously, it had to end.

The trouble with celebrities is that they have, in recent years, traded fame for infamy.  Jimmy Saville got a lot of press coverage after he died, because it turned out that more than just looking like a nonce, he was a nonce.  Who knew?  Apparently, everyone knew.  People in the industry new and, in front rooms up and down the country when the news broke people who had seen him on telly years ago knew, or at least said ‘I fucking knew it’ under their breath.  Then Operation Yewtree got underway, and might as well have been titled Operation Yewboat because it sank the careers of quite a few telly personalities without trace.

That, as we now know, was just the tip of the shitberg.  Who would have imagined that greasy fucktards would have used their positions of power and influence to take advantage of vulnerable young people.  I mean, really, who knew?

We all know that nonces look like nonces.  We all now also know that any bloke with a fat BMI who is pictured with his arm around a young woman who looks like she is wishing that teleportation were a thing is what the newspapers term a ‘predator’.  And not something sleek that lives on the veldt, or even something with a cool shoulder mounted laser canon that hunts Arnie in the jungle, no, the sort of predator that disguises its distinctive scent of sweat and fat with money and lawyers.

Bluntly, it is no fun trading celebrities when they might make the news for all the wrong reasons.

Celebrities are, by and large, individuals who have used their talent in a way that has resulted in public notoriety in a good way.

The democratisation of the media has meant that anyone with the means to do so can upload a media clip of themselves to a media platform, and other folk can watch it and leave snarky comments.  What this has proved is that although the number of people who think they have a talent is apparently limitless, the pool of really talented people remains finite.

So maybe CELEBDAQ deserves a comeback after all, because of the listing, a bona fide list of who is, and who is not, a celebrity.  Youtubers need not apply.

Chess

Chess.

More than just a fabulous musical, and arguably more than just a game.  Well, actually, plainly more than just a game, as mentioned in the previous sentence, it’s also a fabulous musical.  It takes a few minutes to learn the basics of the game, then a few more to learn how the knight moves, then some more to learn about castling and en-passant.  Basically it takes about forty, forty-five minutes to learn the basics of the game, but a lifetime to master.  That’s why chess is so popular in prison.

Chess is a game of strategy.  It’s actually the game of strategy and don’t ever let any tosser with a games console and a strategy-‘em-up tell you differently.  His (it’s always a ‘his’) new game set in a distant magical kingdom does not, despite the guff on the packaging and several hysterical broadsheet reviews filed by sleep deprived nerds, ‘have the complexity of chess’, although I can quite believe it has ‘the epic scope of the finest of fantasy novels’ and ‘female NPCs with really huge boobs’).

Chess requires you to think many moves ahead.  There are a finite number of openings, and established strategies, and end games tend to be relatively simple too, iso t’s in the middle where the drama is.

Chess, unusually for a board game, frequently ends in a draw or, when played between siblings, a fist fight.  As well as mastering the strategy and tactics, you also have to compete with the smug tosser on the other side of the board, smirking every time you make a move, which is exactly the sort of behaviour that will bet you into trouble on ‘C Wing’, by the way.

The other fabulous thing about chess is the variety of chess sets.  Even the simple ones are things of beauty.  I have an old (not antique, not valuable, just ‘old’, c1970s) travel chess set.  The board has little holes in it and the chess pieces slotted into it like pegs.  In the 1980s these sorts of chess sets were replaced with magnetic sets with the different pieces printed on little magnetic tiles.  Now, it’s probably an app.  Pah.

Once you start playing, you start to accumulate chess sets.  Although, oddly, new kit does not improve performance.  You need to get a robust one if children are learning, as the pieces have to be tough enough for handling by kids, but not heavy enough to do any lasting damage when they are used as weapons to augment the aforementioned fist fights that result from use of the word ‘checkmate’ in an enclosed environment.  You also get a really, really nice one that you plan to get out when playing with friends, but actually won’t let anyone else touch.

You even start to tinker with making your own.  This usually happens around seven in the evening on Christmas Day, when you have accumulated enough champagne/cava/prosecco corks to serve as Kings, Queens, Bishops, Rooks and so on, and enough bottletops of various colours to make pawns.  Board?  Back of a Cadbury’s selection box and a sharpie and you are good to go.  Warning, if this set is not assembled, painted and varnished by 27 December, it will be ‘tidied away’.

Oddly, the most charming chess sets tend not to be the ornamental, onyx, marble, ebony and Swarovski affairs that decorate the living rooms of the apartments of oligarchs’ tarts (although given the fate of some oligarchs, a nice chess set would be handy in their cell), but the ones with history.  This includes, let’s be clear, the Lewis chess men, but more often are the modest but beautiful sets one finds in what used to be known as ‘junk’ shops but, thanks to the proliferation of programmes featuring bargain hunting antique experts on daytime telly, we must now refer to as ‘curio emporiums’ or something.

These are objects that are loved.  Battlefields rightly become places of pilgrimage, a square of turf where sacrifices were made, deeds noble and ignoble done, where history was made, heroes crowned, villains vanquished.  The same goes for that small square chequered battlefield.

Also, you can get Star Wars chess sets!  How cool is that?

Fighting Fantasy, D&D for the socially awkward

Back in the day, which is to say back when I was at school, a period after they had done away with slates but before they introduced tablets, there was a certain cultural kudos to be had from following an obscure band.  Remember, this is before Google came along and ruined obscurity for everyone.  If you wanted to get into obscure music, you had to listen to John Peel like millions of others, or subscribe to fanzines.

The thing was, you could say things like ‘Well, Duran Duran are all very well, but you know they stole the baseline from a single by a Belgian jazz funk crossover band I’ve admired for some years’ and only be beaten up for being an utter arse, rather than an outright liar.  This was an age where the smartphone fact check didn’t exist and one showed one’s allegiance to one’s favourite bands by writing their name in blue biro on your schoolbag.

There was, of course, a difference between liking an obscure band ‘think ‘Kraftwerk’, but with a heavy metal influence’ and shit band.

Back at the start of the ‘80s, Dungeons and Dragons was obscure and back in the 80s, Dungeons and Dragons was cooler than ‘Wham!’

Possibly that assertion may have more, or less, relevance depending upon your perspective, particularly in relation to whether or not you were a teenage girl in the 80’s, and indeed whether your loyalties lay with Wham! or Duran Duran, and indeed with Dungeons & Dragons or RuneQuest.

None of that matters now of course because several things happened that ruined Dungeons & Dragons for everyone, and by ‘everyone’ I mean the guys (and they were all guys) that played it before it got popular, the sort of men (as they are now men) who explain that they were into Dungeons & Dragons before it became popular the same way that some other men (and this is a gender specific thing) will make a point of telling you that they were into R.E.M. before they got famous.

For ‘famous’ read ‘commercial’, for ‘commercial’ read ‘good’.

Mysteriously, Dungeons & Dragons went from a hobby that adolescent boys played in bedrooms and classrooms to spawning a huge games franchise of laughably overpriced books and model figures, inspiring an astonishing number of imitators and then a tee vee programme and then a film.  I remember when I was playing a game so misunderstood that tabloid newspapers linked it with devil worship, which now features on ‘The Big Bang Theory’.

Of course, that was before consoles and then computers and finally smartphones came along and rendered dice throwing and imagination obsolete.

Back in the aforementioned day, me any my adolescent chums would spend our lunchtimes avoiding rough kids, and girls (equally terrifying) by battling orcs and goblins.  I was lucky enough to have a group of friends who enjoyed rolling for initiative as much as I did.  However, just as Dungeons & Dragons really, really took off, somebody had the genius idea of producing a game you could play solo, and the Fighting Fantasy books were born.

They were, to put it mildly, quite successful.  Role playing gamers love books, rule books, monster companions, anything, they devour paper like a shredder in a US Embassy with evacuation helicopters waiting on the roof.  So would they buy a book that will let them play a social game without the encumbrance of friends?  Indeed they did!

The idea of Fighting Fantasy was that you made your way through a non-sequential book.  So you find a fork in the road, do you turn left (go to paragraph 41) or right (go to paragraph 52).  Left.  You die!  Shit, shit, no, I meant right, right.  You see a bunny.  Phew, and so on.

The thing is, this is role playing gamers we’re talking about here, they would never flip forward or back, and they would never cheat.  To do so would be to ignore our inner Dungeon Master and also, you could just tell when somebody was lying about completing a Fighting Fantasy book, shame clung to them more tangibly than a cloud of Lynx.

Fighting Fantasy, the adventure app for the analogue age.

Clubabble Computer Games

Gentleman’s clubs.

Misogynistic bastions of privilege where men retreat from a world they do not understand and which values they do not share, in short, a world with females in positions of authority.

Gentlemen like women in a position of authority in only two circumstances, when they are dealing out either punishment, or pudding.  Imagine a typical Gentleman’s club, such as the Apostrophe Club just off Pell Mell, founded in 1742 by greengrocers, or the Europa Club, universally known as ‘The Green Door’, founded as a retreat where Valets could relax and bitch about their employers (and of course famously fictionalised by P G Wodehouse as the ‘Junior Granymede’).  They conjure an image, do they not, of deep armchairs, blazing fires, dusty libraries, members flaccid beneath The Times or the Pink ‘Un, and the aroma of cabbage and spotted dick emerging from the dining room, although it will never be called the dining room, it will have some preposterous title such as ‘The Restorvation’ or ‘The Games Room’, the latter an excellent example of how clubs like to fuck with strangers by giving each room a title totally unconnected with its purpose, leading to visitors defecating in ‘The Billiards Room’, meaning a lifetime ban for them, and Korky Gussalt winning twenty guineas for pulling off the most impressive, and disturbing, trick shot ever achieved on the brown baize.

Gentleman’s clubs, it could be argued, by their very intransigence, are preserving our heritage.  Manners, decency, drinking at lunchtime, smoking, racism both institutional and personal, a fear of the underclass, the greatest fear being the realisation we can’t do without them and, of course, the most unfashionable value of all to hold, that as a chap you don’t understand women, that you will never understand them and that, deep down, this is because they don’t want to be understood.

If you doubt me, look to Shakespeare, look to Dickens, look to (Amis, once upon a time your name would have been here, not any more, you arse) Barnes.  Look to any chap who has ever put pen to paper and they will tell you women are unknowable.

It’s not charming, it’s a fucking conspiracy.

And that’s the sort of attitude that allows you to establish a club called ‘The Citadel’, to admit only male members (ooh er!) and then, and this is the genius part, charge £5,000 a year for membership but make it so difficult to get into that people are pathetically grateful to pay to get in, like a shit night club on rainy Thursday in Droitwich.

With all the oak and tweed about the place, not to mention testosterone, gentleman’s clubs are an excellent place for the playing of games.  These include games of chance, such as card games, games of skill, such as backgammon, and games of social exclusion, such as Dungeons and Dragons.  Where chaps gather, a game will soon be in the offing, even if it is ‘club cricket’ played in the Short Room with a bread roll as ball and copy of Wisden as bat.

The only other place where the female presence is this unlikely is the bedroom of a teenage boy.

These too, are environments where the playing of games is indulged in, although in this case ‘backgammon’ is likely to be the name of the level VII war-warg that ‘Acroblaster the Destroyer’ (AKA Simon) rides into battle.

It’s time that the console came into the club.

Men join clubs because they are socially awkward.  If they weren’t, they would be able to make friends without having to be in close confinement with others, with alcohol, that they know generally share their views.  What I am suggesting is that instead of feeling comfortable starting a sentence ‘I’m not racist but…’ they should feel comfortable flopping down in an armchair, picking up a controller and doing unspeakable things to one another during a 72 hour Halo tournament.  Or even better, challenging other clubs, or ‘guilds’ as they will quickly become known.  Gambling may be involved, it’s one thing to play for honour, another to bet your chef.

Naturally, a gaming room would have to be established on the premises.  I suggest ‘The TenBox Room’.

For chutney's sake

This post is about profanity.  Naturally, I have no wish to cause offence unintentionally and so have decided on a simple substitution system to keep things just the right side of filthy.

So, for the ‘F’ word, I shall be using the term ‘chutney’.  For the ‘C’ word, the term ‘pillow’ will be employed.

For the milder profanities, I have come up with something I think is quite ingenious.  ‘Bugger’ will be used for ‘bloody’, ‘bloody’ will be used for ‘bastard’ and ‘bastard’ will be used for ‘wanker’.  Hence, using the term ‘bloody bastarding wanker’ makes it a grammatical nonsense, robs it of its potency and rather neatly defuses the chance of somebody taking offence once the whole profanity substitution thing has been properly explained, probably in court.

The development of profanity has, by and large, been stagnant since the Middle Ages when a short life of miserable toil interspersed by war and plague provided all the inspiration one needed when one needed to find expression through expletive.  Today, an office drone may reach for the swear box when their database crashes, but the word they use was probably coined by some Anglo Saxon type who had just dropped a newly completed cathedral on their toe, or been careless with their scythe.  The latest addition to the lewd lexicon, the ‘M’ word (we’ll use, let’s see…’pantomime horse’), was coined in Viet Nam, I think.  At least, it was certainly used in a lot of films about the Viet Nam war, and as war movies are like documentaries for lazy people, that’s all the authority I require. 

Viet Nam was the right place for a whole new profanity to be coined, because the draft ensured that people who did not want to be there, often from rural communities so having a rich heritage of swearing around cheeky threshing machines, were put into an extreme situation, involving shooting.

If you have even played Medal of Honour on your console with the ‘team talk’ option enabled, you will know that nothing gets young men more excited in a sweary way than combat, and that’s just sofa combat, where the worst thing that will happen to you is picking up a DVT from all the sitting your backside is doing.  Still, it allows people from all over the world to scream obscenities at one another and indulge in the sort of homophobic abuse rarely seen outside the Premiership.

Why do people swear?  Chutney knows.  English is the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Churchill. There are, and I went on Wikipedia so I’m fairly sure about this, well over a thousand words in the English language, so why is it that when reacting to pressure we reach not for the magnificent cathedral of expression to express our emotions, but simply reach into the shed of profanity for something juicy kept on a metaphorical high shelf out of the reach of children?

Possibly it’s because of the importance of the right tool for the right job and sometimes that tool is a blunt, simple one.  Want to stir paint before decorating?  You don’t reach for your blender, you reach for a stick.  If you are a bloke, this will be a stick you have kept, in your shed, for this specific purpose.  It is simple, it is blunt and it does the job, a bit like an F bomb.

I have recently graduated from swearing at the television whenever the news or ‘Antiques Roadshow’ (chutnying how much?’) is on to swearing at the radio.  In my defence, I was being sorely provoked, as the Jeremy Vine show was on.  This is a show that somehow manages to contrive to be more offensive than me, even though I am the one screaming ‘you chutnying pantomimehorse’ at an innocent little box with sound coming out of it.

F Bombing is called F Bombing for a reason.  Profanities, like munitions, should only be used by a responsible adult who knows what they are doing and who has had training, or an over-excited X Box wielding teen, crazed on Red Bull, Haribo, or occasionally by over-excited X Box wielding adults.

The art of the loaf

The art of loafing is nothing to do with twisting some seeds into your dough, calling the result ‘rustic’ and charging three quid for it, rather, it is dedication to relaxation.

Not that I have anything against work, industry and achievement, as long as it’s done properly, for instance the production of traction engines rather than the industrialisation of penguin genocide.

Don’t worry, this is not going to be another bloody post extolling the virtues of the shed.  But I will just point out that, generally, anything produced in a shed is likely to improve the world.  Brass clockwork novelty delights are made in sheds.  Destructive ideologies are not.  They, like bummers, are made in prison cells or public schools.  Workshops too turn out useful components and a number of workshops combined can turn out, for instance, charming cars.

Things start to go wrong when you industrialise on a factory scale, because not long after you get fed up with all the whinging and move production somewhere with a far more relaxed attitude to the minimum wage, where quality control can be enforced through the occasional execution.  The downside to this is that your workers will occasionally either try to smuggle themselves out of the country in the boot of the car they have just built, or record an impassioned plea for better conditions on the ‘phone they are boxing up.

The British Empire was, of course, founded on outsourcing and foreign labour.  We exported the British brand, and the pox, around the world and imported all sorts in return, like a lingering sense of entitlement and assumption that everyone should speak English.

Actual work can be measured thusly: do you start with a task that has measurable goals?  Do you end with a sense of a job well done and a well deserved pint?  Then that’s work.  Anything else is just dicking around.

In the twenty first century, it’s getting harder to relax.  Otherwise, why would there be a whole industry dedicated to helping us do so?  Time was, relaxing was easy.  You toiled until you were shaky with fatigue then drank cider until you were lying down.  Uncomplicated. 

Now, we think we are relaxing when we are in fact not.  For instance, sitting in front of the television might be considered by some to be a form of relaxation.  And it is, if you are watching a DVD of; a flickering fire, a lady playing the harp or a blank screen.  Anything else is too much stimulation.  Soaps now frequently end not just with a drum roll and an actor holding an expression in a manner unencountered in real life outside of anyone pictured straining for a shit, but with a help line for people affected by issues.  And ‘documentaries’ that are ostensively intended to make us feel better about ourselves by chronicling the dysfunctional lives of those with for instance amusing mental health issues, an addiction to biscuits, being fucking clueless about how to organise a wedding, a predilection for acts of self pollution involving Pot Noodle or just being chavs, simply result in the viewer being made to feel simultaneously uncomfortable and sad.

Mobile ‘phones have put an end to the micro-loaf, those few minutes where one might reasonably be expected to not think about very much at all.  No bugger looks out of train windows any more, they are all either playing games or updating their status to from ‘on platform’ to ‘on train’.

Loafing takes effort.  First off, you need a free afternoon in the week.  Then, you need to get into your pyjama trousers AND to be comfortable answering the door in them if required.  Then, you need find somewhere comfortable to lie horizontally that is not a bed.  Finally, you need to go through all the tedious things you should be doing instead, and realise that they are either not that urgent, not that important, or will be so much better achieved after a rest.

After a while, you will wake up.  With luck, the light will have drained from the sky meaning a) your attire is socially acceptable and b) you can now uncork dinner and move to phase two: unwinding.

Business School

Boredom, bullies, balls and buggery. That's the lot of the English schoolboy, if he is fortunate. By fortunate I mean attending a decent public school rather than a state comp. where 'double Greek' refers not to ninety minutes of classics, but rather being rubbed up against, in quite an alarming way, by two big boys in the sports locker.

A private education prepares a chap for deprivation, random cruelty, ritual cruelty, imprisonment and facing crushing defeat at sporting occasions with fortitude. All useful life lessons, especially if one follows the English cricket team.

With the economy in the state it's in (pretty soon the only AAA rating one will see will refer to a type of battery), it's not wholly unreasonable to see private education flourishing, rather than contracting.

Recently it was the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens and the country chose to celebrate by arranging for society to closely reflect the plots and characters of his novels, with an increasing divide between the very rich and the very poor, and lots of grotesque characters established in positions of power. With the Government looking to re-introduce cholera as part of their NHS reforms and welfare reform policies consisting of 'reopen the workhouses' and 'replace the family tax credit with gruel', Dickens would have felt very much at home in twenty first century Britain.

In these desperate economic times, fortune rewards those who can think creatively about how they can earn a living. Certainly, there's currently a vogue for stepping aside as the 4:40 from Preston thunders past and then making off with 200 yards of copper signalling cable, but other career options are available. This is especially true with the Government wanting ordinary members of the public to provide the services that government and councils have hitherto. And while one cannot, it would appear, drive one's own nuclear submarine around the coast, nor just pitch up at your local hospital and announce that even if you are not a qualified brain surgeon, you are a volunteer and that and your keenness and really sharp carpet knife must count for something, it would appear that just about anyone is trusted to run a school.*

If you follow a few simple pointers, you can't go wrong. The first thing to settle on is the location. Ideally this should be in an isolated part of the country. Type 'desolate' into Google maps and you should get some locations. Such an approach will mean that you are likely to be able to pick up an appropriate property (gently decaying stately home being sold by gently decaying fag end of the aristocratic family that have lived there for generations, or a former army camp) at a decent price, that boys will be discouraged from running away from if they have to cross miles of unforgiving, booby-trapped, heathland before reaching civilisation in the form of the local hamlet where they can be immediately apprehended, and of course that any outbreak of child-friendly maladies like mumps, acne or typhoid can be easily contained.

The next thing you have to do is establish a sense of history.

By which I mean fake a sense of history.

Thanks to Wikipedia we now live in an age where rewriting history is no longer the exclusive preserve of victors or those writers who imagine a world where the Parliamentarians won the English Civil War (fact checked on Wikipedia) and one can, from scratch, come up with a glorious or convincingly inglorious past for your place.

You will need some famous old boys. Choose people who are dead or, although famous, are also safely anonymous, like the bloke who invented blu-tak, or did something ghastly to Rommel. Aristocrats from now extinguished lines are also a good bet, but don't use too many as this will give the impression that the local water makes you impotent.

This sense of history extends to the uniform. Do not, whatever you do, incorporate anything that a parent might pick up at any store other than the one you have done a deal with for kickbacks. No to trousers, yes to knickerbockers. No to black blazers, yes to capes. No to caps, yes to modified coal miners' helmets. And a big yes to some sort of ceremonial baton, twelve inches long and made of oak should do. Dressed like that your boys are going to need to be able to protect themselves against perverts and toughs.

You will now need to recruit teachers and this is where the global economic meltdown really comes into play. Foreign academics have seen their salaries and research budgets cut to the point where they are humiliatingly reduced to posting 'make maths fun' videos on YouTube in the hope of selling advertising, writing essays for private school yahoos, or simply running their own crystal meth labs are ripe for recruitment. Recruit broadly, this will ensure you have an attractive mix of foreign accents and also drive your bursar to distraction as he tries to seat the staff at high table in a manner that ensures that no two staff members from countries recently in conflict sit next to one another.

Always make sure your Latin master is a German as they are surpassed in their talent for sadism only by the Welsh.

Make your PE teacher a Welshman.

You are going to need term names, and the more exotic the better. Avoid terms such as 'Witsun', 'Spring' or 'New'. Instead you want a terms like 'Long Minge', 'Conkers' and, in an emergency, anything named after a fishing ground. Ideally, you're aim is to have a child baffle their parents by asking if they are coming to pick him up at the end of 'Dogger'.

Remember as you set the cirriculum that you are preparing people for life. How to dine should be taught, as should proper comportment abroad, on public transport, or upon finding out that one's mistress is pregnant.

And in these troubled times, how better to prepare lads for life than the establishment of a cadet force, not only will this instil a sense of discipline and encourage self and team confidence, but if they show talent, then the is no reason why the senior boys cannot make the school some money during their annual exercises during 'Umbridge Vac' by providing private security in Iraq, or overthrowing a small dictatorship somewhere in Africa.

Despite a secluded location, it's still important that your school develop close links with the community as one wants to develop a sense that your boys are trusted and dependable. Those signs forbidding more than one boy in the shop at a time can be seen as a failure, especially if that shop is a Tesco superstore.

Finally, you need the School Game. Certain schools are famous for inventing games or variations of games. As England are so monumentally crap at so many sports these days you are not expected to set the bar very high, indeed setting the bar a bit high might be the game. As long as it is something dangerous. Essentially, you are looking at something that will cause at least one exploded splidney - a sporting injury so unique that they have to invent a new organ for it - every term, which requires something dangerously violent, ideally with a squash ball and a length of rope stiffened with tar.

* except registered peodos. If you are unregistered, you're fine.

Topical chocolate

In the run up to Easter, the shops are brimming with chocolate bunnies and eggs. What is it about a Christian event that compels one to eat chocolate?

Take Christmas! Traditionally a time not just for the sort of commercial excess that the government hopes will kick-start the economy but also a time of feasting. A time of year when you are not only accepted but expected to have alcohol with your breakfast, when folk who normally watch their weight can be seen adding double cream to just about every dish they cook, including gravy, and where nothing makes more sense after a huge roast dinner than to serve a heavy fruit pudding, with cream, on fire.

These days I have a glass of something fizzy and a bacon sandwich for breakfast but, when I was a child, my breakfast consisted of as much of the contents of my Cadbury selection box as I could manage before the sugar rush made my hands shake so much I couldn't unwrap any more chocolate.

The selection boxes of my youth seemed huge things, as long as your arm and stuffed with many different sorts of chocolate. If you had siblings, then complicated trades were established as favourites were exchanged. Ultimately of course this was futile, it was all Cadbury chocolate, and each different type of chocolate bar was essentially the same product in different coloured wrappers with either a sporting or space theme.

As important as the chocolate were the games on the back of the box. Expensive toys were left unattended, traditional board games that would, later over Christmas lead to bitter division (has a game of 'Risk' ever ended harmoniously?) were forgotten as one hunched attentively over the back of the box, studiously reading the rules for a turn based game, the object of which was usually to get to the centre of the board, thereby making your opponent cry.

Essential to making progress round the board was the colourful six sided cardboard spinner that was used instead of a dice. You cut the spinner out of the back of the box and pierced its centre with a match stick, making it spin. Luckily, back in the day everybody smoked and so matches were never in short supply. Oddly, you never thought 'let's just use the dice from the Monopoly set that's lying open over there', but always went to the trouble of making the spinny thing. These days you could devote a whole hour on QVC to flogging a bit of coloured card and a spent match as some enthused-to-the-point-of-medicated woman bangs on in a slightly shrieky voice about 'crafting'.

You could almost taste the disgust as the parents looked on and wondered how on earth the 99p selection box had become the star prezzie.

Today's selection boxes seem a bit dull by comparison. I think the way forward must be the retro selection box. I don't mean some sort of crap nostalgia trip requiring you to bid on line for antique chocolate that results in your kid exhibiting a baffled expression on Christmas Day when confronted with their Six Million Dollar Man selection box with the contents two decades past their use-by dates. I mean a home made selection box!

All you need is a load of chocolate bars, some cardboard, pens, imagination and a boundless disregard for modern manners and equality legislation.

First things first, the chocolate. You'll need to combat the problem of the shrinking snack. It's not just your imagination, nor the fact that your hands have got larger as you have grown older; chocolate bars are smaller than they used to be, both by dimensions and weight. So, you need to find a way to upgrade the chocolate from bite sized to a respectable portion. The best way is of course a saucepan and some new moulds, but if you're in a hurry glueing two bars back to back using melted chocolate will do the job just as well.

Wrappers should be scanned, enlarged and then printed onto grease proof paper prior to being used to wrap your chocolate bar. Be sure to remove any product information that is not in English and may offend. This is especially important for any product information about a chocolate bar in printed in Arabic. Chocolate may be many things, but the snack of choice of desert dwelling people is not one of them. Replace any nonsense about daily allowances of fat or sugar or amphetamine or whatever with a single letter of the alphabet inside a gold circle. Do not explain why you do this. Children will automatically scent a competition of some sort and start hoarding wrappers. This means you can also remove the 'keep Britain tidy' symbol, your wrappers will not be blowing about in gritty concrete shopping centres, they are going to be safely in a box under some child's bed.

Next up, the selection box. Pick a theme; Christmas is always popular but is it Christmas under the sea, or on the moon, or is it tied to a popular television character, like Brucie? Up to you but if you're stuck for inspiration, you can't go wrong with a picture of Santa in a rocket ship. Ticks all the (selection) boxes.

Right, now the game. It's got to be simple, it's got to turn based and it's got to allow for reversals of fortune and for the lead to change for reasons other than a simple throw of the dice, or rather spin of the twirly thing. Pick your theme; 'lunar space race', 'race car race', 'catch the gypsy' and so on and design your course, remembering to place the all important forfeit squares, such as 'your joke about being able to see some sort of alien ship approaching earth backfires as you spark mass panic across the globe, go back two squares', 'you are suspected of using an illegal diffuser, miss a turn' or the classic 'you arrive at the illegal travellers encampment in the dead of night, but have forgotten your petrol and matches, go back to start'.

Finally the spinner, numbers or symbols or both? Certainly it's numbers for simplicity but symbols add a certain something to the gameplay. I favour the seven sided spinner with a drink symbol meaning that if it comes up, it's time to knock off for a glass of fizz. Remember, you can have that appearing as many times as you like, seven being the ideal in this case.

Bloomin' marvellous

Well, Valentine's day has come and gone for another year. A forest of trees has been felled to provide the cards while the pollen count in supermarkets has gone through the roof thanks to the amount of cut flowers for sale.

An anonymous message of love sent to somebody you have amorous feelings for! On the fourteenth of February, this is considered romantic; any other time of the year and it's stalking.

This weekend was also marked with a trip to my local megamart, a shop so vast that it has its own tribe, called shoppers or, to give them their common name, Chavs. They even have their own language - the snarl. Such as 'yer, well, like, that's what I'm looking for innit, follow-on crisps for toddlers'.

I was taking the opportunity to purchase some flowers and, for reasons to far-fetched to explain, was paying for them at the 'Digital Counter'. This is not, as one might expect, a huge clock but is instead where you might, for instance, purchase 'Medal of Honour' while also indulging in some blooms.

The chap behind the counter expressed shock at the cost of the flowers and suggested that I could get a value bouquet for a couple of quid.

Looking at a bloke who works behind the computer games counter at the supermarket, advising a customer who was spending thirty quid on a console game to go with a cheap bouquet, one had the feeling that cupid really has his work cut out sometimes.

Family Monopoly

A few years ago, the people who make Monopoly came up with the genius idea of local editions. You could go round your home town buying up the cathedral, the local footie stadium and so on. It was also, of course, tremendous fun to see if your street was of a high, or low, value – congratulations, you live in a shit part of town and now everybody knows it.

You can even have a truly bespoke edition:

http://www.mymonopoly.com/home.php

Surely this is a fantastic idea for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can have a really, really local version. Live in a tiny village? The sort that only famous folk singers and homicidal maniacs ever come from? Well, why not have a village edition, with local landmarks like the war memorial, church and bus shelter. In fact since they closed down the post office, that’s it for local landmarks, so you have to get creative, ‘that spot where Darren shagged our Sally’, ‘Where Jon was sick after he drank all that scrumpy’ and so on.

But why are we restrained by geography? Monopoly comes out at family gatherings when the usual arguments have been exhausted and everyone needs some fresh material to bicker about. So how about some properties that have a special place in family history, ‘where Cousin Sadie had her first wedding’, ‘where cousin Sadie had her second wedding’, and have the second location cheaper than the first? Or the classic: ‘The house Tom’s bitch wife got in the divorce’?

Or moments or occasions, like your twelfth birthday party could be a low value square because you peed yourself with excitement in front of everyone when you opened your present and it was a Back to the Future toy car, oh the humiliation! Other low value squares: the time your cousin tried to touch you, the time you held a funeral for your pet dog (that wasn’t actually dead, you were just going through a morbid phase). High value squares could be ‘My first drink’, ‘passing my driving test’ or the ever popular ‘out and proud’ (adjacent to ‘dad makes full recovery from heart attack’).

(Best version to unwrap on Christmas morning: family secrets edition. But is ‘Tina’s little problem’ a high or low value square?)

Of course, the real benefit would be to use people, not places. Fed up with having to put up for years with Granma’s sadistic game of arranging family photographs in order of current preference? Then imagine her delight at finding that the least expensive property on the board is ‘Grannie’s Hovel’.

I predict a fist fight before the top hat makes it once round the board.

Ping Pong

The only two sports that are called what they sound like are ping pong and canoeing. Ping pong isn’t even called ping pong, it’s called table tennis – what blatant crap, when was the last time you saw a table offer a choice of surfaces, grass, clay or that blue stuff that‘s probably made of rubber or something? It’s ping pong because that’s, sort of, the sound it makes.

Canoeing is so called because when you are rolled upside-down by a wave and are being swept towards some deadly rocks, the sound you hear when seventeen gallons of water are forced into your ears is: ‘canooooooooooo’

Problems present themselves. Many winter sports simply make that ‘shussshh’ sound.

But not when you listen closely. Skiing makes a ‘shush, shush, shush, shush, shush’ sound, speed skating makes a ‘shushshushshushshushshush’ sound. The four man bob sounds like this: ‘Aggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh’. The luge is quite different, not only is the pitch of the scream several decibels higher, it’s follow up with: ‘Fuuuuuuuuuucccccccckkkkkkkkk!’.

The great thing about renaming sports is that it pricks pretence. For instance, boxing. Boxing would be renamed ‘Oof!’. Boxing can be defined as two blokes knocking the hell out of one another, but the boxing federation spits people up by weight, so suddenly there’s bantam weight, seagull weight, vulture weight, heavy weight, yo momma weight and Of Course You Don’t Look Fat In That Outfit weight (women’s boxing). Still want weight classes? Okay, It’s called Oof! And you can differentiate by using different fonts and point sizes.

Formula 1 racing? Easy. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

To be good at sports you can’t rely on natural ability, or even magic boots. You can’t even rely on drugs anymore, not just because of the testing but because you just know that the bastard in lane two has managed to get some of the good stuff.

The situation is fast developing where just about everything we eat has some kind of banned substance in it, at least that’s how athletes facing a ban plead. Apparently their kebab, unknown to them, had ginsing root, steroids and some sort of horse stimulant in it. Unless they are able to pull a horse-shoe out of the chilli sauce bucket at the kebab van to substantiate this, it’s unlikely to get them off.

The argument that an athlete can accidentally take some sort of banned performance enhancing substance is, of course, complete tripe (100% steroid free tripe). If everyone is unknowingly chowing down on food adulterated with performance enhancing drugs, why is the news full of stories about everyone getting fatter? It should be about burger inhaling kids breaking the world record for the egg and spoon race on school sports day.* (Headline: ‘fast food!’).

Just about the only stimulant left to athletes is an iPod with some inspirational music on it (‘Gold’ by Spandau or the ‘Rocky’ theme), or a coach willing to stick a dab of mustard on the end of his finger and stick it up your arse at the start of the race. Even then the Japanese would have the edge: wasabi.

*A nostalgic aside, I recall that at my primary school the starter was always the caretaker, because he had a pistol. As a child I thought nothing of it but now realise that it was obviously some revolver he’d probably prised out of the hands of a Jap in Burmah after a machete fight, and that sports day organisation meetings probably went thus:

Deputy Headmistress: And for the position of Starter this year…
Caretaker: I have a gun.
Deputy Headmistress: Yesss, I’m not sure that’s appropriate.
Caretaker: I have a gun.
Deputy Headmistress: Maybe the children would prefer something less…
Caretaker: I have a gun.
Deputy Headmistress: Just because you have a starting pistol does not mean…
Headmaster: (Smiling benevolently, filling pipe) That’s not what he means Marjory.
Caretaker: I have a gun.
Deputy Headmistress: Oh.
Headmaster: Our Caretaker will be Starter. As usual. Next?

I thought all school sports days had a caretaker with a WWII sidearm starting races. To this day I can’t really run unless I have the smell of gunpowder and the screams of an accidentally shot badger to encourage me,

Let's a go!

The dirty dishes are piling up, the laundry hamper overflows and the ironing pile has snow on its peak. Why? MarioKart Wii, that’s why. I’ve played MarioKart for many years, in its many incarnations and it’s good to see that the game has lost none of its charm. Race one and, just as I am about to cross the finish line in first place, Luigi zooms past me, from nowhere.

I screamed ‘C**T!’ and settled in for hours of joyless grind, unlocking levels and racing racing racing.

Quite why it is that software manufacturers think it’s acceptable to charge people for a computer game and then lock up half of it is beyond me. Certainly, the advanced features on my mobile were not only available after I’d spoken for ten hours and texted my thumbs off.

The real joy/anguish is, of course, on-line multiplayer mode against others worldwide. You might think that games like ‘medal of honour’ online are frustrating where you might as well name your character ‘respawn’ because at least you’d get to see your name, a lot – but that’s as nothing compared to racing round a charming and lovingly rendered cartoony racing circuit against a French kid, who beats you. I spent the entire weekend alternatively punching the air with joy or screaming abuse at foreigners.

Like an child, I have banned myself from playing during the week. Otherwise, when would I be able to watch telly and, you know, eat.

Never mind Jane’s Addiction, let me tell you about mine

Addiction used to be simple, you were addicted to drink, or drugs, or gambling. Other behaviour, such as touching your balls in public places can more properly be considered a compulsion. The difference between compulsion and addiction is that compulsions are normally free of charge while addictions are not.

Men make better addicts than women, as they either show imagination or are weaker in character, depending on your point of view. A woman may consider herself addicted to buying shoes, for example, but this is not addiction, this is a hobby. You want addiction…go to a toy shop and watch a man buy a new piece of kit for his ever expanding train-set, studiously ignoring the mewling from his kids as they want to go home and play on their games console while doing crystal meth, sunny delight or something equally as foul.

Conventional addictions can be obvious. The other morning I missed my train. In my defence, I missed it in style – I ran for it and was able to watch it pull out of the station, all that was missing was an animatronic hand on the back carriage flashing the V sign at me. As it was, I was able to get a coffee, take a seat and read my book for twenty minutes while waiting for the next train.

(This, until I came back through my front door that evening, was the best part of my day. This has been, if not the week from hell, at least the week from a suburb of hell.)

From the opposite platform, with the startling acoustic clarity that comes from being in an almost deserted station comes the unmistakable sound of a cork being pulled from a bottle. Across the tracks I can see a chap in a suit taking a pull on what, from this distance, appears to be a bottle of wine he has produced from his briefcase. This is at 8:42 in the morning. I hope it’s something light, like a hock. Good breakfast wine.

My first reaction was to pitch up next to him with two glasses and a cheese platter, but as I had my coffee I stayed put. I might know my way around a drink and, even worse, I know that once I’ve had one there’s a domino effect as my will crumbles and I want another, but even I only rarely drink at breakfast. Or instead of breakfast.

As for my addiction – in a word ‘travain’. This is basically a stripped down sim-city game where you increase the level of your resources and use them to purchase troops and conquer new villages and so on. The difference is it’s on line and multiplayer. Which is charming when you are in an alliance and all getting along, but a royal pain in the arse when you are, as I presently am, engaged in a village vs village war of attrition with an illiterate tosser. Oh yes, you can message one another, which is where you soon learn that the sort of people playing the game can’t spell. As I guess most of them are schoolchildren, this is more worrying still.

I think I’m going to have to cancel my account with the game, I’m rapidly approaching the point where it’s just not fun.

Or better still, close one account, open another under a new name and plot to destroy the tosser in question? Or yet better still, use the time I have invested in playing the sodding game to get my life back. The ultimate ‘I win’…but of course that’s a little empty without being able to hand out the ultimate ‘you lose!’.