Old people don’t have much in their lives. From the outside they seem to have chats with each other at bus stops, or moaning about buses at bus stops to anyone regardless of their age. Occasionally they may buy some Bovril from a Morrisons, or be slightly racist about other ethnicities to their grandchildren. Your parents just tell you it’s because they’re old, but they don’t really know that your grandad is actually Hitler, in an intriguing shrivelled disguise.

When old people talk to each other, they have very little in common, other than they are old and not long for this world. It is for this reason, that a carvery at lunch time on a week day resembles pergatory. Lots of old people, talking to each other because they’re old. “How did you die Doris?” ‘Whaaaaat?’ “How did y… Turn your hearing aid on you old bat.” ‘Whaaaaat?’ “Here gimme that you silly woman. Now, how did you…” ‘Whaaaaaaaaat?’ 

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The normal response to passing an exam may be to go out and celebrate near to where you live. Not quiet, by any means, you would normally make sure you remembered absolutely none of it, with no idea where you are when you wake up, why there’s blood all over your face or in fact why you’re now wearing a red lace thong instead of boxers. You trudge home, happy in the knowledge you celebrated spectacularly.

I, however, ended up going to Edinburgh, via Leeds. It was kind of pre-planned. Nobody goes to those kind of lengths on a whim. I didn’t just decide to go to Scotland, much unlike the original inmates of Australia, who went there because they had no choice.

I drank a lot of beer, but more jagerbombs than I could imagine. I’m pretty sure I spent about £30 in jagerbombs and managed to pass out. I truly and utterly fucked over all of caffeinekind and managed to do the opposite of what it’s meant to induce in me. I played god, kind of, and now I feel proud. Of course at the time I had no idea I had been so divine, and felt very much the opposite, as I deposited, what could have been a new life form spawned out of life giving abilities, but is more likely to have been the beer and a burger I had had as a meal a few hours before.

To wake up on a coach at 9am, seemingly without your bag and just a phone and a wallet is slightly perplexing. I looked to my left to see a girl with two buckets of sick alongside her and pen on her face. I decided that, she, like me, had had a good night, then she turned slightly in her stupor to reveal a wonderfully ornate and brilliantly drawn Hitler moustache, at which I point I decided she had outdone me in the fun stakes.

I went whisky tasting, which, don’t get me wrong, is lovely, but essentially, it all tastes the same. ‘You should be picking up the scent of bananas’ she says. No. I get the taste of whisky and the death and decay of the insides of my body, not bananas, and anyway how the hell do bananas get into whisky, you distill it and put it in a big barrel. At no point did you say they put half the world’s bananas into the barrel. Either, you’re lying to me, or illegally importing fruit. If you are doing the second option, why the hell did you decide to import fruit? There’s no money in it. Heroin? Yes. Not plums and kiwi fruit.

As I returned to London yesterday, once more I was presented with a wonderful Hitler moustache, this time, the person involved had tried to take the emphasis away from the moustache by colouring in their nose. An odd tactic, but surprisingly it worked. Then as I sat down next to a man with his hands taped to his balls I prepared myself for the hedonistic lifestyle of home. Students, eh?

Parties are often more exciting than going clubbing, mainly for the fact that you know someone, or at least know someone who knows them. It’s less intimidating. Instead of being faced by a firing squad of men in uniform with particularly blank expressions on their faces, you’re instead presented with a load of men in bunny outfits and guns full of silly string.

There is however one big downside to hosting a party. You’ve got all the good points and then suddenly your dreamworld made of candy and christmas jumpers is suddenly doused in petrol, set alight, and put out by an unimaginable amount of human shit.

Cleaning up.

For someone like me, who is very OCD about the positioning of rubbish, trinkets and empty bottles of green ginger wine on the bedside table, the influx of people, sleeping bags, empty bottles of beer, bodily fluids and clumsy people with mattresses is, quite literally, hell on earth. It’s not that I don’t want all these people here, because I do, I invited them after all, I just wish that I was not at all responsible for the state the house is in afterwards, or for whether they assault someone, or do something weird like putting their testicle on your face and shouting geronimo or calling your dad and saying they want to rim him.

Getting to the stage where you have no control over the, by now rat-arsed, occupants of your living room is the worst. The idea is to be far, far more drunk than them, and not care. It’s a bit like Hitler and Stalin, with Stalin being an absolute massive bastard to everyone, not just the jews, but then it isn’t really because everyone loved ‘uncle joe’ until he kind of went mental and wanted to blow up the world, and, let’s be honest, nobody has ever really been a fan of Hitler. Apart from Germany at the time, but that has less to do with the fact he kept his atrocities secret but more to do with the little known fact that he had a hypnotic moustache. Trust me. A level History.

It wasn’t hypnotic.

It was psychic.

The morning after is the biggest punishment. To be greeted with a mass of writhing hungover bodies is far worse than to be greeted with your own writhing vomiting mess and perhaps a drunken mistake beside you. To try to then organise a rabble less organised than the french army is too difficult, and it becomes a solo cleaning effort. If however they had been more like french industrial workers, they would be very efficient in the art of destruction and setting alight to cars. These are not skills required for mopping. If they were, the world would resemble Mordor.

Parties are good, the best in fact, but relying on others not to fuck off when you need them to help piece together your abode and your life is something that, a bit like the ability of the British public to vote in a non-nazi conservative psycho as prime minister, cannot ever be banked on.

There’s a beautiful pun on the word board games, and I intend to, to the best of my abilities, use this as a basis for a depressing and scrooge-esque deconstruction of such a fine art.

Let’s start with the pun itself. Board, bored. It’s simple. The actual playing of a board game is only to stave off boredom for just a few more minutes. In that respect it’s like faking an orgasm; by making a weird and often over the top noise, there is some actual enjoyment, and hence delaying the boredom induced by the pathetically awful man who is slaving away in his own time, for his own pleasure. He’s trying really hard, but the fact that your vagina is as wide as the pacific ocean, it’s hard to feel worthy, so you just get the deed over and done with. No phone number exchange, just walk away. It’s much better to leave the shit stinking slag in the gutter than to acknowledge that she is a human being.

The wide variety of board games does, at least, offer some variety. You could go with Scrabble, or Monopoly, or Risk, or Strip Poker Harry Potter Edition, but eventually you will succumb to the plague of boredom and nudge on over to your sleeping uncle and shove a fork in his eye. It’s a natural, and widely recognised progression.

The invention of travel board games bemuses me. In an age of being banned from doing just about everything, including using a hollowed out baguette as a rod warmer, in your car, surely having two overly competitive children in the back of said vehicle pummelling the shit out of one another because ‘he didn’t have the right to take my bishop’ is not something that should be encouraged. Otherwise the already hideously maintained british motorway system would be strewn not only with the deserving carcasses of bratty children and slightly balding idiotic fathers, but the lovingly machine crafted chess pieces that Hasbro and other such conglomerates took a few seconds to make. It’s a waste of plastic. It’s not a waste of people. They deserved to die. They were idiots. Other deserving deaths include those of Harold Shipman, Trotsky to some extent, Hitler, Princess Diana and Mufasa from the Lion King.

I toy with the idea sometimes of playing board games on my own. Obviously this is a sad and strange concept, but it’s far more socially acceptable to do than to sit in your student house and watch a porn marathon, or draw vicious cartoons about world leaders involving knives, phalluses and five kinds of stationery. To sit and play Ludo on your own looks a bit nerdy, and a bit odd, but it’s not offending anyone, unless they’re allergic to brightly coloured plastic pieces of shit and a bit of paper with a pattern on it. In which case I apologise for inducing your seizures, but you shouldn’t really be out of the hospital. Surely there’s no genetic mistake for this weird illness you have. So deal with it. Eat more fruit or something. Take a nurofen. Fuck a horse. Usual procedures.

So next time you regretfully roll a dice, or put your hand lazily into a bag to pull out a letter, think twice. You could be fucking a horse, or being poked in the eye.

Or maybe someone weird is having a wank over your facebook photos.