Four days into our torrentially rainy cottage holiday in Devon and we’re still indoors playing Kimmeridge. It’s a tiresome game of Nigel’s devising, thus incomprehensibly complex. On day one, the wretched man appointed himself Permian – a role somewhere between pettifogging bureaucrat and capricious God –and hasn’t stopped explaining, elaborating and enforcing arcane rules since. We’re all supposed to be competing for the oolite, a tiny plastic ovoid no-one could conceivably want. Kate walked out on day two, unable to play Danny Boy on a three-stringed cornbrash as the rules – punctiliously extemporised by Nigel - supposedly demanded. For three days, Geoff relished the game, amassing points – Lias, Nigel calls them, pronouncing the italics - before being disqualified for not knowing that an ampthill was a fourteenth century alchemical flask. Now, Sally and I face the Final – the Corallian, Nigel calls it – an Esperanto riddle. Why go on? It beats watching television.
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