Well, we haven’t laughed so much for a long time!
Initially, whilst drinking our mulled wine in the adults bar, we gathered all the surprise presents and laid them around the table in an organised manner only to discover that we were two short. It turned out, eventually, to be a lack of counting ability on the part of Sarah’s computer.
 So a couple of dozen of us sat down for our excellent turkey dinner with only Ken and Bernie absent,  probably - after their recent disasters - watching out for the floods that were advertised.

And so to the games
Sarah had decided to do something different and, that as we were mostly in our third age, we could have games equivalent to the first and similar age.
To start with we had the ELEFUN GAME. This is an elephant which has a nose that inflates vertically and blows out butterflies made of spinnaker material. On the first erection (Trevor), not at all what was expected people, fell into hysterics . This game was wide open to cheating - anything not caught in the hand nets were quickly scooped up and placed in same. Trevor’s team was best at this!

The following games both involved play dough. In the first one each member of the team had to make an animal which then had to be guessed by the remainder of the team. Sarah was obsessed with trying to prevent people from cheating, but failed fairly miserably as everyone was pretty adept. Team B’s butterfly was more reminiscent of a Spitfire but there were some brilliant efforts with hippos and snails

In the last game the instructions were to build something as high as possible in 45 seconds and have it remain in position with a marble atop . You had to keep it up for 30 seconds (something which Cliff admitted to not having managed for several years now) and the tallest one left upright was the winner. Chris A brought his engineering skills into action by rolling his play dough flat and then making a tube. Unfortunately, the play dough had not heard about this construction method and actually preferred David C’s more solid  building with legs.

The antics of the various models as they gradually subsided caused uncontrolled hilarity

It was generally agreed that these games were better suited to our aging mentalities than anything more intellectual and Sarah was thanked heartily for organising a good evening with great entertainment