anagrams

“Piddlers… Piddlers!? Can you imagine?

It’s eight o’clock on a Wednesday evening in leafy south Co. Dublin. The tea has been poured, biscuits passed around and I’m about to get my ass handed to me in Scrabble by a woman old enough to be my grandmother. The popular board game is celebrating its 70th birthday this year. In that time, 100m sets have been sold in 29 languages across 121 countries.

But the Irish Scrabble-playing community are a small, tight knit bunch. Anne Lyng knows most of the faces. “One of our regulars is an inmate at the Central Mental Hospital” she chuckles. She rummages in the cloth bag, plucks out seven tiles and passes the bag across. “He’s very good,” she says. “He has them all playing up there now.” Read the rest of this entry »