Sunday 24th December 2017, 1.55pm (day 2,313)
Christmas Eve games at the parents’. Brother-in-law Pete makes what may or may not have been a crucial move. Look at the lean…
Christmas Eve games at the parents’. Brother-in-law Pete makes what may or may not have been a crucial move. Look at the lean…
Evening entertainment at the end of a very cold day. Joe contemplates whether he should exchange three cucumbers for a pallet of fish in the costermongers’, or possibly whether he should felch his mortgage and cast down his pie to prevent his opponents accumulating so many nickels that he will no longer be able to buy any rabbits. At least, I think those were the rules. My haziness on these matters is probably why I finished third (out of three).

Here’s how to play the hat throwing game. Take two four year olds, one hat, and a stairway. Have the four year old at the top throw the hat down to the other. Change places, and repeat for quite a long time.
Seems an awful long time since Joe was at school, but he returns tomorrow, which therefore also marks the resumption of Clare’s school-related job duties. So today was the last day of anything resembling a ‘summer holiday’ for either of them. They mourned its passing by knocking hell out of each other at Warhammer. Clare won convincingly, so I heard.
It’s a board game, quite a good one in fact. Not an exciting weekend thus far but it doesn’t matter. I won, so hey, I rule.
You can tell my holidays have started. Here’s today’s board game, with added murder weapons: the vase, the mugs of tea, the Art Deco lamp.
It began in 1964. The prison camp in the Urals, when chess was their only distraction, and they could suck the damp off the pieces to stay alive. Igor (on the left in this shot) was a double agent; his opponent, still known only by the codename “King’s Pawn”, had been picked up trying to infiltrate Tomsk dressed as a Mongolian sheep herder. The Cold War thawed and half a century later they still meet once a week on this field of combat, speaking only rarely, but both with an inner shiver as they recall the white hell of February in the Petropavlavravmavstok encampment.
After the annual Giving of the Gifts rite comes the next morn, where the populace indulge in the subsequent rituals, the Assembly of the Little Plastic Bits, the Finding of the Batteries and the Arguing over the Rules.
The rain came down again. It won’t be a white Christmas this year, unlike the last two. When my sister & her family came round, indoor games were the order of the day. I like this shot for its signs of movement. Joe’s 4-1 up, but I don’t know what the final score was. His tactic is usually to twizz both spinners round at maximum velocity for the entire game. Sometimes it can be devastatingly effective.