Argos | Rosie Amber

Read a great article in the Daily Telegraph Weekend section. Harry Wallop reviewed the game Bananagram which sounded intriguing. The game has even been proclaimed the “Official word game to the London 2012 Olympics” although I’m not sure when the athletes would have had time to play it! The game is similar to Scrabble but without a board and players each take tiles and make up their own free-form Scrabble boards around the table using 15-20 tiles. The first person to use up all their tiles shouts “Peel” and everyone has to grab another tile. This may help out another player. At any stage during the game a player can rearrange letters to form new words. The winner is the first to use up all his tiles. There is no scoring, speed and accuracy beat large difficult words. The game is available in Argos, WHSmith, John Lewis and Tesco. It costs £11.70 in John Lewis.

Read “Thrift” by Phil Church yesturday. A funny tale set in a term at an English secondary school. Failing kids and teachers, will they survive an OFSTED inspection and pull through for the end of term play? A good book.

It’s the holidays and some of you will have children who believe that they are “bored!” Well the new Argos catalogue is out; I always found that my kids loved getting hold of this and going through it. It’s free, get them one each and they can use it to make birthday or Christmas wish lists. They can cut out the pictures to make “mood boards”, collages, pictures or anything that their imaginations can think of. I always try to buy the kids something cheap and new to get them outside for some fresh air, while we are at Argos. Perhaps tennis rackets, space hoppers, outdoor badminton, Frisbee, water pistols etc. If it’s an indoor type of day, how about looking for a jigsaw from the Wasgij range. These fun jigsaws are celebrating their 15th anniversary and there is the chance for you to win a diamond too worth up to £12k inside their anniversary special edition boxes.