How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [59]
I’m not so sure, though. Take Monopoly as an example. To begin with it’s good fun but, like the banking and property system on which it is based, there is a flaw. It never ends. You go bankrupt so you borrow money from your mum, who has loads. Then you go bankrupt again. So you borrow more money from the bank. And then, when there is no more money left in the box, you write out an IOU and keep on borrowing by which time it is Thursday, everyone is bankrupt and you have realized that unchecked capitalism doesn’t work whether it comes in a stock market or in a box. That’s if you’re lucky. If you’re not, there will be a ‘bad loser’ around the table who will land on your hotel in Northumberland Avenue and in a hysterical rage will burst into tears and throw the board, his dog, your iron and all your dad’s houses into the fire.
In theory Scrabble is much better and yet it, too, is flawed. Well, it is for me because I always end up with seven vowels. So while my opponent is writing ‘underpass’ across two triple word scores and claiming it’s a game of skill, I’m getting five for ‘eerie’. Again. And they are looking at me as though I might be a simpleton.
I have a similar problem with backgammon. So far as my wife is aware, dice have six faces all of which feature six dots. I, on the other hand, have only ever thrown a two and a one. Even without a player coming the other way, it would take me about eighteen months to get all my pieces to the other side of the board.
To eliminate the element of luck, I always suggest chess but this doesn’t work either because the only person who knows how to play in my family is my son, who’s twelve and consequently charges around the board on a wave of testosterone, endlessly leaving his queen in silly places and then mocking when, out of kindness, I pretend I haven’t seen the danger it’s in. Or that he’s just moved his castle diagonally or that, for the past two hours, he’s been one move away from checkmate.
In fact, playing any game with children is hopeless. Charades, for example. They sulk when you give them ‘The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B’ or ‘Versailles: The View from Sweden’ and you, in turn, get cheesed off when they endlessly mime their way through a film which has two words and sounds like Carry Hotter.
Even Tri-Tactics – the only board game I really enjoy – is ruined when your opponent is under sixteen. Because you sit there thinking: ‘Oh, for God’s sake. How are you able to text a friend, talk to half the world on Facebook and watch some American drivel on television, all at the same time, when you cannot remember that the piece you attacked thirty seconds ago with your puny little destroyer is still my aircraft carrier?’ Board games, then, do not bring a family closer together. They rip out its heart in a seething cauldron of rage, hysteria, accusations and hate. And I fear they have a similar effect on world peace.
To understand this new and interesting theory, we need to look at the world since Pong. This was the first commercially available video game; it featured two bats, a square ball and lots of irritating noises, it came along in 1972 and since then the western world has, for the most part, been at peace. We can therefore conclude that Pong and other games of its ilk ended the Cold War because, for the first time in history, leaders had something better to do than rush about threatening to bash one another’s heads in.
I realize, of course, that this doesn’t apply to Tony Blair or George W. Bush but that’s because they were too busy reading the Bible to play Space Invaders. I, on the other hand, played a lot of Space Invaders and I’ve never wanted to invade anywhere.
When we look at the world’s trouble spots today – the Gaza