Hide and Seek.

From reading this title, you’re probably expecting to read something deep and introspective, in which I use hide and seek as an analogy for some soul searching. Nope. This is a simple story about the time in lockdown 1 that the Russells enjoyed a week-long game of hide and seek. Enjoy.

In my last SCAB, I mentioned how competitive my family is. We all love games, we all get slightly too into them, and so when lockdown 1 forced us all into the same house for 2 months, we all saw it as an opportunity to play as many as possible. We started simple, some card games here, board games there. My sister introduced us to a lot of new and exciting ones, (Dobble, Dominion, Codenames), but it wasn’t until someone suggested a week-long Hide and Seek extravaganza that things got really interesting. The premise was simple. Over the week, we each take an evening to hide somewhere in the house. A timer is set, and the person who manages to stay hidden for the longest wins. The game is played in the dark (obviously) and to make things fair, the rest of the family waits in the garden for the hidden player to text the group chat that they’re ready to be sought. 
As a form of procrastination from writing my dissertation, me and Charlie (younger brother) made this flyer.

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The next evening, Mum, Emily, Charlie and I are waiting outside for a message to come through from Dad. He’s the first to hide, and I must admit, I thought finding him would be an easy start. My dad isn’t exactly small, and there’s only so many places in the house he could physically fit. But goodness me I was wrong, it took us SO long to find him. We were getting more and more frustrated, and I decided to stand still for a minute and just THINK about where he COULD be. And that’s when I heard the gong, echoing through the house. Yes, I forgot to mention, we have a dinner gong. We have no need for a dinner gong. Yet we have a dinner gong. I digress. I notice I’ve written ‘I digress’ in the last two scabs I’ve written. I really do love writing that. I digress. The sinister ringing of the dinner gong sounded, to let us know that someone in the family had been successful in their quest to find dad. Eventually, we found him, hiding in plain sight. He was under the dining table, lying on the pushed in chairs with the table cloth obscuring him from view. My mum went next, and it took us almost as long to find her. I was getting very spooked, because I could hear her whistling when she got bored. Turned out, she had climbed on top of the wardrobe and was lying flat, hidden by a wooden lip around the top of the unit. Emily hid in a cupboard the following night. Charlie dismantled a shelf to curl up in a storage unit. I was getting nervous for Friday as I had absolutely no idea where to hide. Everyone had been so creative with their spots, and I was dreading being found in the first 5 minutes. In the end, I hid all the bottles from the cupboard above the oven in a different drawer, slid out the middle shelf, climbed up on the kitchen cabinet and somehow managed to squeeze into a 2.5ftx3ft cube, resulting in it taking the family 50 minutes to find me. And was it worth it? Hells yes, just look at how happy I look. Theres few better feelings than hearing the rest of your family get more and more frustrated as they obliviously pass you by. 

After reading this, you probably think we are very strange. And you’d absolutely be right, we are. But if you’re my classmates, better you find out early how weird I am. And if you’re a future employer well… I doubt you’ve made it to this point anyway, as I’m sure you have far more important things to do than read this drivel. But I’ve really enjoyed remembering how much fun we had in the first lockdown. It’s making me feel slightly more optimistic that we can find fun and creative ways to enjoy this next one too. Perhaps ways that don’t involve stuffing myself into a tiny space, but beggars can’t be choosers.

After the lights got turned back on.