Another day back at work, another day spent longing for the next bank holiday weekend, and another uninteresting office meeting. Bring on the next camping trip please, I thought.
Then a bright idea popped into my mind. A stroke of genius, for a game of boxes. I spent the next few minutes carefully marking out the dots on my notepad. Nodding occasionally with interest at what was being said in the meeting, but restraining from the annoying agreeing hum that other box players sometimes adopt when they’re pretending to listen.
There was a choice between two colleagues to be the other player, one sitting on either side of me. Like all good sportsmen, I chose the one I believed would give me the best competitive advantage to play against, and so selected the player to my left. Plus, Gerrard from accounts also happened to be using a rather fetching looking green pen, which would avoid any confusion on the box counting front at the end of the game if we were to use the same colour.
I passed a note across to Gerrard inviting him to a friendly game of boxes. He too looked especially bored of the meeting and so gratefully accepted, and the game of boxes began.
Even though the game was called boxes, I thought there would be no reason why we couldn’t use our initiative and think outside of the box, so I made my boxes, tents.
Being a bit of a stickler for the rules, Gerrard protested, scribbling his objections down on a piece of paper and passed it over to me. It read ‘That is not a box’. ‘No. Tents.’ I whispered. ‘A dome tent, and a pop up tent and a …’ the list of types of tent went on, all hand signed with a made up kind of sign language between us so no one would notice we were playing a game.
But Gerrard had had enough of the bell tents and the tipis and accused me of cheating. And I hadn’t even gotten round to drawing the caravan yet.
There was a small altercation between us, worked out through erratic eyebrow movement and angry nose twitching, in the style of a silent movie. Then ‘You cheat!’ came an outburst from Gerrard. ‘Sssh’ I whispered crossly. ‘We’re supposed to be in a meeting’.
Then like a pair of naughty school children, our fighting gave us away and our game of boxes and tents was exposed. All heads in the meeting room turned and all eyes looked onto the piece of paper in front of us. ‘That one is a fly tent’ I explained, pointing out one of the drawings to the bemused onlookers.
Anyway, in the end the final score was 14 boxes to 10 tents and a ninja, so I took it as a ninja win hands down, because tents are so much better for sleeping in than boxes. A disgruntled Gerrard did of course disagree, but we swapped pens at the end all the same, as a gesture of good sportsmen and ninjaship.