Pick a letter any letter.....

Hubby and I come from different holiday backgrounds. Whilst his family holidays were firmly located on a beach and as he got older, hot Greek beaches. My parents on the other hand didn’t do hot or beaches so when we eventually took our first family holiday to Greece I needed to work out how I was going to survive two weeks of sunbathing.

Whilst we had different holiday backgrounds, common between both of our families was the tradition of family board games and card games. Scrabble was the favourite in our family and some of my fondest memories growing up was playing Scrabble with my fabulous Nan.

So armed with our very first Travel Scrabble I challenged hubby to a game. Armed with a microscopic board and even tinier magnetic letters we had our very first game of Scrabble me in the shade, him in the sun – plan delivered so far…. except hubby had never played Scrabble before and whilst the rules are second nature to me, in his words some of the rules simply didn’t seem fair....

To put it bluntly when he first started playing he was rubbish - seriously rubbish. I decided to invest time and effort to get him better and therein lies the rub. 20 years later and Scrabble is an intrinsic part of our holiday routine. We have graduated to a deluxe Travel Scrabble set and each holiday always features a tournament. Each tournament carries it's own name too....

I have lost the last five years’ tournaments outmanoeuvred by a man who once thought a four letter word was a triumph. But I bask in the reflected glory that he was once my pupil and without me he would be nothing……

Over the 20 years we have evolved our own set of house rules, eradicating the unfair ones hubby disliked so much! Blank tiles are given the points of the regular letters and we don’t take points off each other at the end of the game. Scrabble aficionados amongst you will know exactly I’m saying here! We never play Scrabble without a drink (a real drink) and sometimes we abandon games because they’re boring. It also amazes us that when playing poolside people want to help us – thanks but no thanks, we do not share our Scrabble with anyone – ever.