Craic On

The Artist, the one who drives the Rollscanardly, told me that her family played a lot of parlour games when she was growing up. Her siblings were keen on the Name Game. That’s the one where someone writes the name of a famous person on a post it note and sticks this to your forehead. By asking lots of questions you have to figure out who it is. It might have been Mary Queen of Scots or Florence Nightingale. She got the Fat Slag. In my family we used to play Charades when Fierce Granny came to tea. This was largely because it gave us all something to do to take our mind off Fierce Granny and put her at a disadvantage if she got landed with “Wacky Races”, which she invariably did. We were more Lionel Blair than Marcel Marceau with our brash, exaggerated and unrelenting house style. We were encouraged to make large gestures for the benefit of the “gozzy” one (that would be me) amongst us. Often this would be accompanied by a murmured narration of what was going on, as well as a lot of guess work and shouting.