Peter Rhodes: Sofa!

OH, dear. I shouldn't have started that party-cracker joke thread. A reader tells me that although TV viewers in Dubai don't have The Flintstones, those in Abu Dhabi do.

'TIS the season to flog furniture. Here's a party game designed to make the most of those infuriating, interminable end-of-year adverts for sideboards, carpets and whatever. Taking turns, each player has 30 seconds with the TV remote-control. The aim, switching between the commercial-TV ad breaks, is to see how many times you can catch the word "sofa."

MIND you, the ultimate winter party entertainment remains the electric-shock game. One player leaves the room. He is told that one item inside the room is electrically charged, and he has to find out which. On re-entering the room, he places a hand on each object in turn – chair, table, lamp, and so on, with his guide quietly saying "no" as each wrong item is touched. When the player touches the "live" object the rest of the party ( having been briefed beforehand) all yell "Yes!" Some players have been known to leave the floor. Note: only works once.

LORD, spare me from any more attempts at the party game where a name of a real or fictitious person is stuck to your forehead and you have to guess who it is. How, you ask yourself afterwards as everyone guffaws at your expense, could you have guessed that yours was a male character of a quasi-religious nature who may or may not exist, without guessing you were Father Christmas? Doh.

IN this week's Mastermind contest for the BBC's top reporters on Radio 4, political editor Laura Kuenssberg revealed she had been told before the referendum that the Queen was in favour of Britain leaving the EU. Kuenssberg says she was unable to find a second source for this amazing tip-off. Weeks later, a newspaper broke the story. I think if I'd been handed the scoop of the year and someone else had reported it, I'd keep quiet about it.

I REFERRED last week to a headline (too long to repeat) which fully captured the essential spirit of 2016. A reader tells me his all-time favourite headline, from about 1969, was: "Nudist welfare man's model wife fell for Chinese hypnotist from Co-op bacon factory."

WE hacks tend not to be very good at arithmetic. This report from a national newspaper on a rise in clamping since the demise of the traditional vehicle tax disc, caught my eye. Headline: "Clamping up 50pc in wake of paper tax disc." First paragraph: "Clamping of untaxed cars has nearly doubled." Second paragraph: "There has been an 80 per cent rise in clampings." So there you have it. Three estimates in quick succession by a couple of journalists who don't really get percentages. Let us call them hackstimates.

AN old friend and I usually exchange drinkable Xmas gifts so I was surprised to get two parcels from him this year, one containing a belt with a particularly fiddly and irritating buckle. A note explained: "I bought two of these and they are rubbish, so you can have one." It is, as they say, the thought that counts.