pandemian

2 July 2006

The Game of Life was my favourite board game as a child. On Sundays afternoons, after the Smurfs and Shaw Taylor while my father slept off three lunchtime pints of dark, speckled beer, my mother and I would set up the board on the living room floor and spend a couple of hours happily guiding our little plastic representitives on their way to riches and glory. Finding the journey from cradle to grave a little too brief for our tastes, we subscribed to a sketchy but useful belief in reincarnation and once we had reached the end leapt straight back to the start, changing jobs and discarding spouses with a kind of flighty glee that I haven't quite abandoned as an adult. Eventually nearly all the pieces got lost and I grew older and preferred to spend my time scouring the local paper, building fantasies around the ads for cheap studio flats and daydreaming an adult life that I never get more than glimpses of even now.

One grey, unoccupied evening, D remembers I have a French version of the Game of Life sitting in my cellar. Physical proof that one should not drink and Ebay, it's been sitting there for six years, unopened, unloved and untranslated. My excitement is immediate and disconcertingly intense.

This version turns out to be a more modern one that the one I remembered; promissory notes replaced by credit cards and speculating on the stock exchange by casinos, but some things have remained the same. I spot the squares along the board that reward you for having as many children as you can and the obligatory halt to get married and take a deep breath, the better to mutter long strings of sentences likely to include the words 'indoctrination' and 'heteronormality'. But then I find myself struck with the sudden memory of the same feeling twenty years ago, cursing as I landed on squares that bestowed children upon me and railing at the compulsory wedding at the start, choosing a plastic peg as rosily pink as myself to sit alongside me in the plastic car counter. On reflection it is this, I am sure, that formed the first twinge of suspicion that eventually led to a long, concerned chat my mother had with me a few years later, perched nervously on the end of my bed, twisting her skirt into a thick knot between her hands. It wasn't a problem for her, or indeed my father, if I was gay, she said. But I should feel free to tell them. They really wouldn't love me any less. Was there something I wanted to say? No amused denials could shift her from my room that day; the only thing that would satisfy her was a promise that I would 'think about it'. She's disappointed to this day, I'm sure.

We play and I think how little the events of the game match the lives of my friends and I. When I was young, I loved this game because it let me pretend I was the adult I longed to be; now I want to take a pen and write over the squares with the real experiences and adventures that punctuate our lives, to scribble down the potential for joy and for grief that would make you satisfied when you reached the end, content not to go round for another go.

I win, though, and win again. The lesson that no status symbol is worth £38,000 once you've reached the Bridge of Retirement is one best learned young, it seems.