dear the interwebs,

ok. so thursday is games night.

i am going to do one of the following: detail a game i have invented; a game i have played; or the concept of games. it's something i feel strongly about - as i'm sure will come to be apparent.

i think i'm going to start with "lemon cricket". myself and my best friend at the time (it would be untrue to describe him as such now, given that i haven't seen him for over a decade and the last time we did i was so deeply depressed i couldn't speak) were trying to invent another game to play indoors. we had, you see, just broken an internal window with a game of "sock soccer".

michael, as that was his name, is a deeply anglophile swiss-german whose father is a diplomat and with whom i shared an abiding interest in european politics, british sport and the norwegians' collective affection for donald duck. he may be the only swiss child in the world to have ever created a game based on the english national game.

his room, the scene of hundreds of self-invented games, was turned into the "lemon wicket" by placing the spare mattress lengthways towards the stumps, leaving a foot or so as the crease. the stumps themselves were an elaborate concoction comprising three parts: a cylindrical, cardboard whisky container; a red playmobil carriage; and, a knock-off ed the duck hand puppet. the wicket was not taken unless ed fell.

the methods of dismissal were exactly the same as normal cricket - although lbw decisions were rare. what made "lemon cricket" such a beguiling pastime and, indeed, gave it its name were the peculiar dimensions of the ball. no quotidian sphere for michael and i! following a game of sort-of-actual cricket in the garden where we had broken a tennis ball, we had repaired indoors to repair the orb. only, with packing tape and the patience of children, we managed to create an ovoid playing object. we tested it, and the spin and bounce were unbelievable. what made this an even game, however, was the fact that instead of facing the random deliveries with a mere bat, the man at the crease was armed with a red, plastic snow shovel. huzzah.

we broke a window with this game too.