Here is an outdoor game for all the family. After singing lustily at the Sunday service, and having a little chat with the vicar on the church steps, you should repair to a patch of waste ground, taking with you a couple of battered iron pails, an unopened packet of processed cheese triangles, and some strips of bark from a pugton tree. Each family member should don a red balaclava, apart from the tiniest one, who goes bare-headed. One side of the patch of waste ground is designated Nobby Stiles. The opposite side is consecrated to David Blunkett. The object of the game is to get from Stiles to Blunkett as directly as possible, cleanly and without undue dithering. If the patch of waste ground is assailed by inclement weather, for instance a howling gale, a teeming downpour, or thunder and lightning, the family may be accompanied by beetle-browed urchins from beyond the railway tracks. Use counters and a tally stick to keep score.
After a bout of Glossop, survivors might equally enjoy a game of ‘Deadman’s Catch’, ‘Hangman’s Cricket’ or ‘Sheep and Tides’.
For guidance, watch ‘Drowning by Numbers’, in which Peter Greenaway leads the delighted viewer through a surprisingly HootingYardesque plot involving the three murderesses Cissie Colpitts, Cissie Colpitts, and Cissie Colpitts, the weak-willed coroner Madgett, and his self-circumcising son Smut.
Many more games are played, and funerary fireworks are discharged in most memorable fashion.