This afternoon,
I’ll be taking part in what is the Ephgrave family equivalent of playing with
fire: I will be sitting around a table, playing board games
with my mum.
Her problem is she is incredibly
competitive. Not in a friendly, low-key, “I'm having a bit of laugh” way; more
in a high stakes, no-holds-barred, “I must succeed at all costs” way.
The ruthless
ambition displayed when she has a plastic counter at her fingertips must be
seen to be believed; if one of her ancestors was responsible for a totalitarian
dictatorship, I wouldn’t be shocked.
Unfortunately, my
mother’s killer instinct will often bring out the worst in me; I evidently
inherited the same cutthroat genes, in a slightly watered down form.
She will also delight
in my personal gaming misfortunes; the unabated joy she exudes when I get
an answer wrong is similar to that of a multi-million pound lottery winner.
She also doesn’t play fair. A good example took place during a game of
Scattergories, one Christmas Past. For the deciding round, we had to name as
many books we could think of beginning with the letter ‘A’: I went with ‘A Tale
of Two Cities’, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and the like; my mum tried
to get away with Alan Shearer, Alan Sugar and Alan Hansen.
“But you’re just
saying the names of famous people”, I exclaimed.
“Yes”, she
replied, with Machiavellian glee. “But they all wrote autobiographies.”
I argued that
no-one in their right mind would release an autobiography with their full name
as the title. My mum just wouldn’t have it.
A few months
later I exacted my revenge. Whilst standing on the platform at Vauxhall Station
I spotted a poster advertising Alan Sugar’s book ‘The Way I See it’. I took a
photo of it and texted it to her as evidence.
I shall await the
events of this afternoon’s recreational activities with bated breath. If it
ends up as heated as the Toxteth riots, I won’t be the least bit surprised.