The Hopping
It is currently 4:44am, and I’ve already been awake for 30 minutes. I’m not usually an early bird like this, but I am in Bangkok on Morning Number One of our holiday, and jet lag has got one hell of a grip on me. My wife on the other hand, seems to be jet lag free, casually sleeping just a few feet away from me, with what appears to be, zero effort. I’m sat by the window at the desk, and Bangkok doesn’t even seem to be up yet. I’m awake before the city! I win. There are a few weird noises outside from creatures that are unfamiliar to me. One in particular sounds a bit like one of those crinkled tubes that I used to swing around when I was young and it made a kind of whirring and whooping sound. It could be a bird, but it could also be a frog. Either way, it seems to be properly pumped for the day ahead and it wants everyone to know about it.
I didn’t want to lay there awake flippin’ and a floppin’, so wanted to use this time wisely to tell you about a new game in town. At the time of writing, there are only two people that know about this game; one of them is your author and the other is wrapped up like a sleepy burrito at the perfect tempurature. I have no doubt that as soon as this game gets out there, my phone will be buzzing off the desk with requests from large corporate gaming companies, but that’s a problem I can deal with, and not anything that you have to worry about. I’m not going to let it ruin my holiday, let’s just put it that way. The game is called “The Hopping”.
Crucially this game as to be played on the London Underground (or somewhere a bit like that), and the longer the commute you are taking, the more exciting the game. We had a long journey on the London Underground yesterday on the Piccadilly line, from Holloway Road to London Heathrow Terminal 2. This trip normally takes just over an over, but we made it fly by.
Nominate one person to keep score (I was the score keeper and used a notes app on my phone). Once you are on the tube the game begins. As soon as the train starts leaving the station, the server (more on that in a minute) chooses a door and has to predict the Hopping number for the next station. The Hopping number is created by the number of people that hop on AND off the tube from that particular door at the next station. So for example, at the next station if 3 people leave from the selected door, and 4 people embark from that door, the Hopping number would be 7. The server always has first pick of the door, and has first choice of the Hopping number. Whichever door the server chooses, is the door that everyone must select the Hopping number for. The position of the server switches at each stop. If you correctly guess the Hopping number, you get 3 points, if you are one away, you get 2 points, if you are 2 away, you get 1 point. We played the version that if someone guessed the Hopping number bang on (a hop run, a hopscotch, a hop skip and a jump, a hopdunk) then the other person had to perform a very short improvised song for the winner. Whoever has the highest score at the end wins.
Annoyingly for us, it was a draw. Which when it comes down to The Hopping, is as frustrating a result as one could possibly get.
When I say that this made our journey fly by, I wasn’t messing about. We made our 1 hour journey last 7 minutes! Seriously. Time actually sped up. We were so immersed in the game that we weren’t sure if we were causing the time acceleration, but we thought it was too much of a coincidence to ignore. It started gradually at first. The first 5 minutes lasting about 50 seconds each instead of the usual 60. Quicker, but not enough that you’d notice it straight away. When minutes started to feel even shorter, it really hit home. A slight murmured panic ripple through the carriage, when we noticed people tapping their watch faces and comparing phone screens with strangers. It got even wilder again, when I started to notice the stubble of the man opposite. I’m pretty sure he was clean shaven at the start. We were surrounded by chaos but we carried on playing the game, safe in the knowledge that we are the sort of couple that turn up to the airport too many hours early for a flight. But on this occasion, it was just right.