Games for ageing boaters

We've been having quite a few lazy days lately, what with moving only an hour or two in a day. Once the washing up is done, and perhaps a bit of hoovering (our new Dyson handheld is proving to be just the job for the boat), and I've refilled the stern greaser and done a bit of mopping outside, there are siti quite a few hours left in the day. Much of it I have been filling in by pressing on with my blockbuster novel, which is now at 45,652 words. It would have been more words, but on re-reading Stephen King's "On Writing", I have been trawling over earlier chapters stripping out unnecessary adverbs, eliminating passive sentences and generally simplifying some phrases. It seems I am too late for the Mann Booker prize this year. Somebody said this year's winner was 800 pages long. Blimey! I wonder how many words that is.

Anyway, on to the subject of games for ageing boaters, which is what we try to think up to keep our geriatric (i.e. The same age as us) friends entertained when they spend evenings with us on board. We have hit on a couple of good ones lately. For these your will need:

A) a tablet, or smartphone or laptop PC with Internet connection

B) a bunch of sad old cronies like us

Game 1. This to me, is always an amazing experience. It is a well known fact that when you get to our age, we can't remember anything, and if we do, our recall is slow. Well let me tell you, this game always produces astonishing feats of instant recall of things from 50 years go. This is what you do. From the internet, Amazon, iTunes or wherever, download a cheap compilation album of 50s and 60s hits. All you do then, is play two or three seconds of intro from random tracks, and ask people to identify it. Now, you might say that you and your friends would be no good at this. Maybe you are not that interested in golden oldies. Well I guarantee you that as long as you play people snippets from records from their teens, you will be gobsmacked at what, and how quickly, they can recall. What's more, everyone seems totally amazed by their own performance. They can't get enough of it.

Game 2

We discovered this one by accident the other day when we were sitting here with Rainman. This game is somewhat more selective because it requires competitors familiar with the Archers (how sad is that? ). You don't have to actually like the Archers, you just have to listen occasionally and perhaps grumble like me that you hate them all. For some reason I can't now recall, I had occasion to look up the Archer's web pages ( like you do) and found the pages with photos of the actors. I held up the photo of Kenton Archer and said "Who do you think that is?". Nobody knew of course, but the fun bit came when I revealed it was Kenton and the others said "oh no, he looks nothing like that" (in their minds). And so we carried on with howls of disbelief and laughter at the "real" appearance of these imaginary characters. I suppose you could play the game with any radio personalities you don't normally see photos of.

 

If you are not as old as us, I'm sorry to tell you that this is what you have in store for your dotage. It could be worse.

Have you got any games to share?

 

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