John remembered, with a great fondness, those glorious days when he would happily let his youngest son win at everything. After all, that was what parents were meant to do, wasn’t it? Instil a certain level of self-confidence and self-esteem into their offspring which would bestow them with the positive attitude necessary to approach life’s many challenges. But then at the same time it was also a parent’s job to ensure their children realised that sometimes in life you lose, and it is important to lose graciously, take it on the chin, learn from your mistakes, and try, try again.

It was a delicate balance. Too much in one direction and you were left with someone who was somewhat cocky, arrogant, who wandered into every task, chest puffed out, head held high, as if they had some sort of divine right to succeed, and they were left unable to cope whenever they didn’t. John MacEnroe or any one of those idiots off Big Brother sprang to mind, thought John. Too much in the other direction and you could well end up with a pathetic, nervous, shivering wreck, someone who was resigned to defeat before they had even lifted a finger. Lemmings and British sportsmen were the obvious examples.

John knew all of this. Not from Dr Phil, Richard and Judy, or some fancy parenting book. Oh no, he knew it from experience. He had successfully fathered two other children before Bradley came along. Success, he realised of course, was a matter of opinion, but seeing as neither of his elder children were currently (or ever had been) in prison, or had sex videos of themselves posted on the internet, he was happy enough with the job that he had done. He was certainly a lot happier than Ken down the road, who had failed on both these counts, and he was a police sergeant.

Of course, John was the first to admit that he had made a few mistakes down the line. Perhaps if he had insisted Lewis spend a little less time painting his fingernails black and a little more time kicking the football around in the garden, Lewis might have been playing for Manchester United now, and John could have retired from work, been his agent, secured a box seat a Old Trafford, and been the happy recipient of all his son’s cast-off trainers. And maybe if he had learnt what MSN was sooner, John could have stopped Gemma from spending four hours a night on it, and then that unfortunate incident surrounding the compromising photo of her geography teacher might not have occurred.
But this time, John had it all sorted. Third time lucky. Bradley was going to grow up to be a well rounded individual, who knew right from wrong, knew how to win and how to lose, and who ideally could do sixty kick-ups whilst blind-folded.

But with Bradley, he had hit a problem. No sooner had John deemed it the appropriate time to start teaching Bradley that it is okay to lose sometimes, he found himself unable to win.

The first game to fall from John’s grasp was Snap. After a fairly even encounter, both players had roughly the same number of cards in their hand with quite a hefty pile building up in the middle. John knew that whoever reacted fastest and snapped the next round would have a pretty good chance of taking the whole match. Just the right opportunity to teach my son how to lose, he thought as he cracked his knuckles and blew on his hand in preparation. The seven of hearts lay waiting expectantly at the summit of the pile in the middle, and on top of this, very slowly, very carefully, Bradley placed the… five of clubs. John’s heart skipped a beat. He quickly drew another breath and focussed again, staring only at the pile of cards in the middle, flexing his fingers, forcing all other thoughts out of his mind, daring not to breathe until he had turned the next card over. Many of these techniques he had picked up from the Linford Christe autobiography, but they seemed equally applicable to the game of Snap as they did to 100 metre Olympic sprinting.

It was then, when he was at his most focussed, that his son spoke.
“I don’t know why you are so tense, Dad”

Breaking away from his trance, he looked up and was surprised to see his youngest son slouching back in his chair with his arms folded.

“I mean, I estimate that I have twelve cards left in my hand, there must be a similar number in yours, and we have already played two fives previous to this one. And so, to summarise, the probability of the card you are about to turn over being the last remaining five is about one in twenty-four, which is relatively unlikely”.

John was so taken aback by what his then eight year old son had said that without looking he turned the next card over and placed it down on top of the pack. It was only when Bradley smashed his hand down on top of it and screamed “Snap!”, that he realised what it was.

In the coming months, John went through each and every game in the games cupboard, becoming increasingly desperate to find one he could beat his son at. Hungry Hippos was a no-goer. His son had the reactions and the appetite of a particular ravenous fly-catching frog when it came to gobbling up those marbles. Noughts and Crosses? Forget it. Apparently Bradley was mathematically certain not to lose so long as he adopted a very simple game strategy, and so continuing to play was just a waste of time. Jenga was going well for a while, until Bradley got onto the internet and found a way to work out the centre of mass and the pivotal point of a vertical tower of wooden blocks. John promptly used AOL’s Parental Controls to block the website, but by then it was too late as the knowledge was already etched deeply into his son’s brain. All of John’s business acumen and natural stinginess with cash was soon undone at Monopoly, where a now nine year old Bradley displayed an unnatural grasp of the laws of supply and demand, real estate development and the art of successful negotiation. He also always bought the orange properties as they were apparently statistically the most successful, and nearly choked when his father invested heavily in Bond Street and its green cousins.

Scrabble was the last to go. As recently as six months ago, John had been able to consistently beat his son at the famous word game, but that was largely because he cheated. He relied on the fact that Bradley still had a certain amount of trust in his father, and duly exploited this. For example, when he played the word “TREXOCY”, and Bradley challenged, and no dictionary in the house could find a definition, his son reluctantly accepted his father’s explanation that it was the technical name for the fruit of a very rare tree in Venezuela, and as the tree had only been discovered last year, the word hadn’t made it into the dictionary yet. Thirty-four points, thank you very much.

But soon, even lying wasn’t enough. Bradley had saved up his pocket money and bough the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, and had promptly learnt every single word in it. And so, on this particularly cold December night, it was little surprise to his father to see, after no more than three minutes of consideration, Bradley scooping up all seven of his tiles from his rack, arranging them on the board, and announcing:

“QUASSIN, as in the medical compound obtained from the wood quassia. And that’s on a double word, and it also makes QI, the vital force that in Chinese thought is inherent in all living things, and UP, as in the opposite of down… so it’s eleven points for QI, five for UP as the U is on the double-letter, seventeen doubled is thirty-four for QUASSIN, plus the fifty point bonus for using all seven of my letters, makes… one hundred points. Which moves me onto three hundred and eighteen, and you are on sixty-five. Your go Dad”.

John looked down at his letters. He had six vowels and an L. He didn’t think his son would accept “AAAOOEL”, even if it was the exact sound he wanted to scream at the top of his voice right now.

Still, John thought, as he carefully placed his O, L and E after his son’s S to pick up a handy four points, if consistently being humiliated by his freakishly intelligent ten year old son was the only thing worrying him this Christmas, John would have been a very happy man indeed. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.


"Secrets and Mince Pies" will (hopefully) be in a book shop near you some time later in the year...