Inventing games

When I was little, I was told to go and play outside till dinner time by my parents, that is. This confession itself should be enough to give away my age, which is what it is and clearly marks me from a generation that not only obeyed their parents but also considered playing outside as a safe and healthy activity. 

My siblings and I ran around with other children in our neighbourhood, and sometimes that is all what we did. We ran in circles singing “ring-a-ring-a-roses”, we ran from one side of the yard to another shouting “corner, corner, which corner do you want”, we ran in triangles chanting “I’m a little triangle, I have three sides” and we also made a sort of human train and ran in a straight file, singing “oranges and lemons sold for a penny”.

We would flop giggling and panting on the green lawn and get bits of grass stuck in our hair. Every other day we invented new games from parts of discarded boxes, strings, pens, marbles, seashells or rounded stones. There was no end to our creativity or our collective imagination.

Pieces of newspaper could be used in hundreds of different ways to design paper boats, airplanes, kites, caps, arrows or even slingshots. An innovative game, which we played when we got out of breath, was called Fortune Teller. 

It is long forgotten now so I have to rack my brains in order to remember how it was devised. Here a blank piece of paper was folded in a particular manner to form four petal shaped flaps. Once it was ready, we adorned it with colours and numbers. 

On each of the outer folds, the name of a colour was marked, in words. Inside those flaps there were four more flaps, all split down the middle for a total of eight. On every flap, a number was pencilled, and under those numbers, a predicted fortune was inscribed. The predictions were left to the creativity of the inventor, entirely. 

It seemed complicated but after we got the hang of it, it was quite simple, really. 

The game started by twitching the outer pockets of the Fortune Teller with the index finger and thumb of both hands and you were asked to pick one colour. 

If the colour was blue, an alternate pinching and pulling of the folds was used to spell it out. Each pinch exposed the printed digits on the inner flaps, and each pull showed the rest of them. Then a number had to be selected that was again spelled out in a similar method. Finally, the much-dreaded fortune was revealed to the unsuspecting listener, who pretended to collapse in mock surprise. After recovering, the injured party would chase the opponent around the block in immediate retribution. 

Additionally, whenever my parents did not want me to eavesdrop on any of the grown-up gossip, they told me to go outside and play. This resulted in me being completely clueless about some of the juiciest scandals that occurred right under my nose, so to speak. 

“Where were you when your aunt eloped?” my husband asked the other day. 

“I was playing outside,” I replied. 

“And when your neighbour was arrested on corruption charges?” he queried. 

“Playing outside,” I muttered. 

“Were you ever indoors?” he wanted to know. 

“Yes of course! At dinner time,” I answered. 

“And before that?” my spouse was curious. 

“That’s a classical rhetorical question,” I said in cryptic response.