Prosit

It is undoubtedly one of life's little ironic nose-tweaks that, at the very time I'm on next to no alcohol due to the accutane, I have been given three bottles of wine in as many weeks.

One of these was for replacing my sister as a judge in a Schools' Debating Tournament. My sister is a big wheel in Schools' Debating circles, and I was sort of accepted as her proxy. My childhood was spent as my father's son, and now I'm my sister's brother. Curiously, there was an occasion in my undergrad career when my other sibling was drafted into our understrength college football team, and for the first and last time I was my brother's 'keeper.

Debating is not easy, and to be fair to the students most of them did a fine job. But that didn't stop me jotting down their more amusing slips of the tongue or less than elegant phrases:

'Some other points of clash'
'The Liberal Democrats went "eek!"'
'People dying, as you're putting it' (is there room for dispute?)

and my personal favourite -

'You could suffer from cancer, leukaemia, hair loss...'

Alcohol reminds me that 'I Have Never' was also a drinking game we played as undergrads. One player would declare 'I have never [whatever it might be]', and all those players who had, would have to drink.

It should be immediately obvious that the purpose of this game was public exposure of sexual peccadiloes. It should be equally obvious that, with no device for enforcing honesty, this tended to be a game beloved of sexual exhibitionists and/or those with the desire to embarrass their friends.

We didn't play this game very much. We preferred Bunnies - which, to my slight alarm, can be found at http://www.mydrinkinggames.com/bunny.htm. Truly, everything is online these days. Prosit!