We Do Adventure

There are good surprises and there are bad surprises. Today we had a bit of both. We had a floorball game arranged for the team I'm involved in training, Lavovi Jajce, against a team from Prijedor, a town about an hour and a half north of us. The bad surprise was the size and age of their team. Bigger and older than ours. Significantly. I wasn't expecting to play, seeing as our team are all teenagers, but they wanted someone to drag the average age up so I was called into action. The pre-match team talk made it clear what Dina, our coach, thought of our chances: "I want you to keep playing, keep trying, even if you are losing fifteen nil!" The good surprise began with going a goal up shortly after the game started. I was playing in what could be described as a right-back kind of role. I was just waiting for some undefendable attack on our goal. It never came. At least it didn't while I was on the pitch. Floorball is one of those rolling-subs games. The three g...

I forget where I read about the resurgence of the board game as a Christmas favourite. Maybe it’s true; maybe a tired hack needed to make up a few column inches before their festive frivolities. Nevertheless, if it is a trend we are almost up with it, with a twist. Boggle probably doesn’t constitute a true broad game in the classic Monopoly or Cluedo mould, but it is a tabletop game that engages the brain, particularly when playing in another language. Our language teacher would have been so proud to see us and our Finnish friend battle our way through round after round of very foreign word play. While almost every word we saw had three or four letters Rowan and I both managed to hit six letters once. That wouldn’t be much in English but here it felt like a huge literary achievement. With dictionary on hand as adjudicator it was a vocabulary enhancing experience: probably my most educational hour of any Christmas Day ever!