IT was my son’s eleventh birthday on Saturday.
And after a swimming/sleepover party on the day itself, it was off to Nanny and Grandad’s for a family barbecue on Sunday.
As usual, they’d bought enough food to feed the five thousand, and enough purple Fruit Shoots to fill a good-sized swimming pool.
Daddy had spent three days making a cake with Batman, Superman and Spider Man-themed layers in lemon, chocolate and vanilla (putting my Tesco party cake for the previous day’s festivities rather in the shade).
And after we’d eaten a shameful amount of meat and fondant icing, out came the board games.
“Shall we play Pictionary?” chirped some bright spark.
“No!” bellowed everyone else in unison.
Pictionary, in which you have to guess what your fellow team member is drawing before the other teams do, turned rather fraught last year (“What do you mean it’s the Houses of Parliament? It looks more like a blinking caravan than the Houses of Parliament!”).
My team wasn’t party to the bickering. We had 10-year-old Amy on our side, and she had no intention of even attempting the Houses of Parliament, or anything else she was supposed to be drawing. So while the other teams were berating the artistic talents of their partners, we were admiring successive pictures of My Little Ponies, having long given up any hope of winning.
It was all good-natured (mostly), but poor Grandad, who was attempting to bring some semblance of order to the proceedings, eventually snapped. “Right!” he said. “That’s it. If you lot can’t behave, the Pictionary’s going in the bin!”
We thought he was joking, but apparently he wasn’t - so no Pictionary this year. Instead we played a new game called Who’s Who.
You had to pick up cards and describe the people named on them for your team to guess.
There was just as much opportunity for heckling as afforded by Pictionary.
“I was trying to think of someone else with the same first name to give you a clue,” exclaimed Nanny at one point. “But I couldn’t think of anyone else called Stephen!”
“Ahem,” said Uncle Steve from the seat next to hers.
“He was a womaniser. And he liked queens. I think. And the first part of his name is like a fruit that’s like a strawberry!” said Auntie Susie, in a timer’s-running-out panic.
It turned out to be Rasputin.
“You could at least have said he was Russian!” said Nanny. “That would have helped more than raspberries!”
Grandad rolled his eyes.
Who’s Who may be living on borrowed time.
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