Surely it's a Sport?

It's all been a bit literary round these parts of late, and I've even been lured into the twenty-first century, so it's time to mention something a bit more quotidian and old-fashioned.


I do like Scrabble. When board games are concerned, it's always the simplest which are the best - when you don't have to be rifling through the rulebook every few minutes, or remembering that you can't take contraband substances onto blue squares when travelling back to the moon (points for anyone outside The Clan who recognises that game?) We had a game called Investor once, and each go took about ten minutes of mathematical calculations. Our family isn't adverse to maths (two of 'em have degrees in it) but...


Sometimes we play Scrabble because it's the only board game Our Vicar isn't guaranteed to win. In the dozens of times we've played Trivial Pursuit, for instance, I can remember him only twice not winning. Sometimes Our Vicar's Wife, The Carbon Copy and I team up against him; we still lose.


When playing Scrabble, I tend to go for words which are nice, or form pleasant cubes of words on the board. I become increasingly irascible as the Carbon Copy places 'words' like 'yep', 'hi', 'oh', 'qi', 'mo'... he'll probably try to defend his actions in the comments, but I maintain that Scrabble should be played for the beauty of the language, not to use lots of two-letter-words which would be employed in no other context. The difference between an English student and a Mathematician, I suppose...


Any more aficionados out there?