He shoots - he scores!

We're in Canada. By 'we', before any enterprising sod thinks it would be a good idea to work out where I live, I mean just me and the spudlet; the frog has ducked out of this particular cross-Atlantic trip to stay home and look after the cat.

This is fine, although the spud is beginning to wonder exactly what's going on. He woke up this morning and looked at me hard, then said pointedly "we're having a lot of sleepovers here, aren't we?" "Yes" I said. "And we miss Daddy, don't we?" "Yes we do" I concurred.

Five minutes later he was upstairs in one of his three default positions - talking non-stop to his Grandmother, fawning over the dog or hard at play over one of the thousand new toys his grandparents thought would be a good idea to buy for him.

Today we dragged up from the cellar our 30-year-old Crossfire game, sadly no longer on the market. This, for the un-initiated, is a large board with a wire goal at either end and a large ball-bearing wrapped in a plastic puck in the middle. Each player gets a plastic gun sort of thing that fires ball bearings down a shute and essentially all one does is fire at top speed until the puck lands up in someone's goal.

What I remember about this game is my brother getting all tactical about the ammunition and waiting for me to fire all my ball bearings across the board so he could hoard them. He would then shoot them manaically, giving me no chance to retaliate. The puck inevitably slid through my goal. I thought this was unfair. Apparently not.

Well, it turns out that either this is a boy thing, or blood runs thicker than fair play. Two minutes into our first game and the spud had all the ammunition and a devilish gleam in his eye.

Two minutes ten seconds later, the puck was in my goal.

SOOOO not fair...