I found this old game in a village hall sale not far from here. They are always worth looking in because you never know quite what you will find. Also, the halls themselves often have a slightly odd, faded ambience to them. Some it is true are very spruce and modernised, but others have scarcely changed for decades: I remember one in Herefordshire where the distinctly garish, semi-psychedelic curtains looked like authentic survivors from the Seventies.
It was here that my colleague Mr Howard, incidentally, discovered on one of the trestle tables in a bumper book sale a guide to St Bertrand de Comminges: how or why it had ended up in Herefordshire did not appear. The stalwart lady keeping the door and taking the money at once recognised its significance, murmuring 'M R James' as if it were some secret password.
This game, Noises in the dark, published by William Sessions Ltd., The Ebor Press, York, looks like the sort of thing that might have ended with untoward circumstances in an M R James story.
The box contains several copies each of twelve different cards containing a word in raised letters. The lights are turned out and a judge hands out the same word to all the players. When all have a card, they each feel the card to find out what the word is, and then the first to enact the word is the winner of that round, and so on.
"An amusing complication," it says, "is to issue two different noise cards simultaneously to each player . . . Both words must first be deciphered and then the two notes performed simultaneously." I see what they mean, although I can't help thinking that certain combinations might be physically somewhat enervating to perform.
Weeping and kissing in the dark... sounds like a Cure song.
ReplyDelete-Jeff Matthews