Kick off your Sunday shoes

It was board games night last night. Ended up playing Taj Mahal all evening. As it was the first time anyone had played, we spent some time setting it up and listening to Lise critique it for linguistic, historical and geographical accuracy. It was also necessary to go into the "Don't Mention the War" routine after we discovered that the German author of the game had provided a rule about precisely how to place the cards you're bidding with down on the table. Julie pipped me to the post in the end, with PaulB shockingly trailing both of us. Surely a sign of the emminent apocalypse. Unfortunately you get nothing for a close second, so my ranking won't improve.

Afterwards, we ended up listening to old CFD CDs. Apparently it stands for "Computerised For Dancing": all these years and I never knew. A whole generation of people learnt to dance to covers of pop music standards, produced by some chap with a MIDI machine putting in the requisite cheesy beats behind them (in strict tempo, of course). We resolved to have a retro General Dancing at the earliest available opportunity.

For quite naff music, it was surprisingly evocative. I largely avoid the danger of seeing university as a mythical golden age by reading the emails I wrote at the time. But I do have happy memories of cycling into town to quickstep to Walking on Sunshine , waltz to If You Don't Know Me By Now, and to chase girls from the women's colleges. In one of Adrian Plass's books, he talks about how for him, Heaven would be one eternal cricket match. For me, it'd be twirling round that hall. Those were the days. Things are different now: these days, I drive.