The week after the gig was a bit of a blur: Chris & Leyla left Glasgow on the Sunday, then Ash took off to Canada for her month-long placement. I had a day or so to marvel at the tremendous silence that followed, and then suddenly it was if everyone else conspired to keep me busy so I wouldn’t notice she was gone. My parents had me over to the dark side of the Forth for a surprisingly competent dinner in the Crusoe on Friday night, then I drove back to Edinburgh the next day for a dinner at Neil & Vanessa’s.

Jeff & Devon (yet again putting up with me/putting me up), Moritz and I caught a taxi up to Newington with clinking bags of booze and the night’s entertainment: Trivial Pursuit Greatest Hits Edition. Vanessa came and went from the kitchen, bringing ever more tasty food to shovel into our hungry maws. Jez & Serena and Neil’s Mum and sister arrived in due course, and eventually, out came the game.

Now we’d also “played” it at New Year. The game started around 2 am if memory serves, and it almost certainly doesn’t, and we split into teams incorporating the surviving gatecrashers—two of the three girls conveyed back from the street party on the gilded wings of Doug and Tim’s Hogmanay chat. They were plastered. We all were, as far I could tell, but with age comes the ability to hold one’s drink upright and to pronounce the letter ‘s’ without slurring, so the rest of us at least gave the impression of holding it together. Both the pristine living room rug and the virgin copy of Trivial Pursuit were, unfortunately, subjected to constant marination from our guests’ wobbly glasses of rum & coke and by the time we gave up at some ungodly hour of the morning both had suffered mightily.

So, at Neil & Vanessa’s, out it came again. Jeff prised the board open to an audible sucking noise. Oh dear.

Briefly, the main claim to fame of the Greatest Hits edition over the normal, old school edition which your parents subjected you to back in 1986, is that it has two self-explanatory categories of questions, and one which defies sensible definition: ’80s, ’90s and “Pop Culture 2″. Some of the questions seemed particularly fatuous:

’80s: What is KITT’s catchphrase?

  1. I ain’t getting on no plane, sucka
  2. Whatchu talkin’ about, Willis?
  3. I am a cheaply mocked-up robotic car of ambiguous sexuality

Inevitably, Devon would pipe up “Oh! I know this one,” to the most squarely American questions and the rest of us would mop up the others. Each box of questions had also been liberally bathed in Cube Libre at Hogmanay so every move was followed by a tentative peeling-off of a new card, complete with ripping sound, to reveal a question and answer of varying legibility:

Pop Culture 2: You are an underwear gnome. What is your plan?

  1. Collect underpants
  2. (unreadable)
  3. Profit

The game lasted for approximately a decade. Empires rose and fell. But back in those days, we made our own fun. We might only have had a tacky Trivial Pursuit board and stuck-together questions about retro American TV shows, but we were happy.

Anyway, I seem to be coping reasonably well with my temporary solo occupation of the flat (although having decided to air that bizarre digression about Trivial Pursuit might argue otherwise). My upstairs neighbours deserve special mention for doing their level best to keep me occupied—or at least awake—by holding impromptu cocaine-fuelled karaoke competitions, talking loudly and animatedly into the night and engaging in aurally pornographic, mid-morning sex marathons to an accompaniment of bass-heavy chav music. You’ve gotta love Glasgow.