Classic Clarkson: When Christmas was saved by mum

‘Mother knows all the best games’

First published on Sunday January 01, 2006

Can we be honest for a moment. You didn’t have a good Christmas, did you? Your turkey was too dry, your kids spent all day glued to their internets, and you didn’t bother watching the Big Christmas Film because you’ve owned it for years on DVD.

What you should have had to liven things up was my mother. She arrived at my house with a steely resolve that the Christmas holidays would be exactly like the Christmas holidays she enjoyed when she was a child. Only without the diphtheria or the bombing raids.

My mother does not like American television shows because she “can’t understand what they’re on about”. She doesn’t like PlayStations either because they rot your brain. And she really doesn’t like internets because they never work.

What she likes are parlour games. And so, because you don’t argue with my mother, that’s what we played.

The kids, initially, were alarmed. They think anything that doesn’t run on electricity is sinister and a little bit frightening.

So the idea of standing up in front of the family and acting out a book or a film erred somewhere between pointlessness and witchcraft.

Strangely however, they seemed to like it. Mind you, playing with a seven-year-old is hard, since everything she acted out had six words and involved a lot of scampering up and down the dining room, on all fours, barking. Usually, the answer was that famously dog-free movie with four words in the title, Pirates of the Caribbean.

My mother, on the other hand, could only act out books and films from the 1940s, but this didn’t seem to curb the kids’ massive enthusiasm. They even want to watch The Way to the Stars now, on the basis my mother made it sound like Vice City.

I loathe charades but even when I tried to bring a halt to proceedings by doing The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, they cheered me on with roars of encouragement. Other books I used to try to ruin the day were Versailles: the View from Sweden, which is nearly impossible to act out and even harder to guess. And when that failed, Frank McLynn’s completely uncharadable 1759.

Eventually, with my mother still chuntering on about Trevor Howard’s impeccable and unAmerican diction, and the seven-year-old still under the table barking, and me trying to act out If, mercifully, we decided to play something else.

“We put a tablecloth over the jigsaw she’d been doing and played cards. What a buzz. It was a blizzard of smoke, wine, trumps and tension”

Not Monopoly. Dear God in heaven. Please spare me from that. I’m due in Norway on Thursday and if we break out the world’s most boring board game, I’d still be cruising down the Angel Islington in my ship. Happily, it turned out that in my mother’s world Monopoly is far too modern and that in her day you made your own entertainment.

So out came the pens and paper. I can’t be bothered to explain the rules of the game she chose, but in essence you have to think of countries, or girls’ names or things you find in space that begin with a certain letter. It sounds terrible compared with watching The Simpsons or shooting an LA prostitute in the face, but you know what, the kids loved this even more than charades.

The seven-year-old was so keen she developed a sudden and hitherto unnoticed ability to write. I’m not kidding. We pay £5m a term to have someone teach her. She has a nanny. And we spend endless hours trying to get her nose out of Pirates of the Caribbean and into a book but to no avail. She has never, once, written anything down that could pass for a word.

But that day she wrote until her pen ran dry, and wailed like a banshee when it was time for bed.

With the kids tucked up, I did what any sane man would do and reached for the television remote. But my mother had other plans. So we put a tablecloth over the jigsaw she’d been doing and played cards.

What a buzz. It was a blizzard of smoke, wine, trumps and tension. There’s no television show, no internet site and certainly no PlayStation game that provides you with the same thrill as sitting there, a bit drunk, in a room full of lies, with a fist full of rubbish. A game of cards, it seems to me, provides everything you could possibly want out of life. It’s as exciting as any drama and as convivial as any dinner party. It’s also fun, free, environmentally friendly and something you can do as a family.

What’s more, having discovered that my seven-year-old can write, I also discovered the next day during a game of Blob! that she can perform complicated mental arithmetic. She’s claimed for 12 straight months that she can’t count but she can sure as hell count cards. I swear to God that in the three days of Christmas she learnt more than in the last three years of school.

There’s more, too, because I also swear to God that we had more fun as a family than could have been possible if we’d powered up the Roboraptor and turned on our internets.

So, today, while you are stabbing away at buttons on your PlayStation, wondering why you keep being kicked to death, or watching a film that you’ve seen a million times before, only without advertisements, might I suggest you flip the trip switch on your fuse box, light a fire and break out the playing cards, the pens and the paper.

Just avoid the charades. Because that’s just nature’s way of explaining why you never made it as an actor.

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