GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

I was having a discussion this week with an old friend from University about what constitutes success or failure in life. Both of us are on the point of retiring and this seems an opportune moment to take stock. I have just totted up the many occupations I have followed since leaving my Alma Mater: I have been variously a driver, an occupational psychologist, a civil servant, a writer, a property developer, an insurance salesman, an executive search consultant, a business planning adviser, a grants consultant, an editor, a European ‘expert,’ a seller of labels and the UK representative on a joint project between the European and the European Parliament. Thirteen different occupations that have all at various times helped me to pay the mortgage.

To these I need to add those distractions which have also occupied me without the benefit of pay. The chief of these is, or was, politics to which I became addicted at an early age. Yet I have also been an unpaid impresario, an archeologist, done voluntary work for a UN agency and I still am an amateur actor of which more in a moment.

The list is so long that when I write it down I am amazed that I have managed actually to do anything at all in the past forty years. If there ever was a scout’s badge for ‘Jack of All Trades,’ I think I must have long ago qualified for it. My threshold for boredom is obviously low, for I can’t remember ever being sacked.

What worries me is that this rich vein of experience looks like drying up unless the children carry out their threat and despatch me to a retirement home in Bulgaria. For some reason they think this would be some sort of punishment for refusing to grow old gracefully, but I think, if they could afford it, I would go. I rather like the thought of a Black Sea resort somewhere and having to learn a new language. I could perhaps also learn to sail and the Bulgarians are notoriously hospitable with their plum brandy.

Sri Lanka is another place to which I wouldn’t mind being despatched. If I sold up here I could afford a palace in the hills there with a stream through the broad grounds, an over- and an under-gardener, (the latter doubling as a butler), a cook and someone generally to run the house, which I might call Downtown Abbey. Despite the recent wars Sri Lanka is still run by Buddhists and is therefore broadly civilised. It is most beautiful too.

Both would open a new rich tap of experience but there’s not much chance of that at the moment as I am far too useful it seems looking after Theo, who interrupted this piece of writing while his mother was washing her hair, by climbing on to my knee and watching Queen videos on You Tube until he fell asleep.

He is still just turned two but yesterday he kicked a football on the volley, which I thought a very great achievement in co-ordination in someone so young and this morning (as he or his mother had managed to mislay both his socks and his shoes and he was bruising his toes) I was showing him how to kick a ball with the side of his foot to which he cottoned on quickly. And in case the child protection officers should be reading, we were playing in the house on the carpet!

But back to acting: last Saturday I was pressed into lumbering service for a ‘Murder Mystery’ evening, put on by our local Rotary Club. Together with five other members of CADS we sang not only for our supper but for everyone else's too. The audience had to guess which of us had killed a butler possessed of both criminal and amorous tendencies.

You’ll have to guess which part I played but we were an eclectic and unlikely bunch. Led by the great detective, Inspector Sherlock McClue, we included in our ranks an MP, a flapper, a society thief, a big game hunter, a nun and a French woman no better than she ought to be. We scattered clues and red herrings like confetti; somehow the great and good men and women of Rotary were supposed to guess who’d done it. They’d a one in six chance of being right.

We threw our hearts into it. Amateur became hamateur. Still, we learned later that the evening had raised the grand sum of £1,328 for local charities. This included a copious sum for the wine we had to buy at extortionate prices to fuel our performance. It was the only way to make sure we got through the hour and a half. The butler, though, had his revenge. I’ve had dyspepsia all week.