Mind Games

Being so far from museums, galleries, theatres and cinemas, we like to expand our minds at the weekends by playing intellectual games, activities that require us to give those little grey cells a bit of a workout. Which is exactly why we played beer pong on Saturday night. The name might suggest that this is some sort of drinking game invented by American college students with diminishing brain cells. And yes, OK, this is exactly what it is but in my defence it does require some adept hand-eye co-ordination, a skill that should never be undervalued. Sadly, we were all terrible at it and after fifteen minutes of taking it in turns to aim the ball at the cups on the other side of the table produced not a single result, it denigrated into a mad ball-launching free-for-all with little yellow balls flying everywhere. When we all agreed that throwing a ping-pong ball into multiple cups of alcohol that you are then forced to drink was extremely unhygienic, we progressed to the numbers game which was just like a maths competition. Well, you had to be able to recognise numbers and then perform the appropriate action that corresponded to that number anyway – extremely high-brow tasks such as starting a rap that each player then had to develop. Hey, that at least involves a certain way with words and sounds. We then played 21, which does require the ability to count to 21 and even remember your times tables. I had to know what a multiple of two was so that I could stand up and dance while I sang it. When that started to hurt the brain too much, we played that intellectual classic, Uno, a game that requires all your mental faculties to be on top form – you have to match colours and numbers. Actually, in the early hours of the morning after a few glasses of wine too many, that really isn’t such an easy task.


Oh God, get me to a city quickly.