Well now, I'm not much of a one for banning things. Most bans seeks to protect people, but only people who don't need protecting obey them. And those who do, don't. So bans backfire.
Nevertheless some things are so outstandingly dangerous, so malign in their influence, that everyone agrees a ban is needed. Our better selves try to protect us from our less-than-better selves - the selves that bubble with greed and the lust to destroy, that would rather be king of a heap of rubble than a citizen of an orderly world. So we ban such things as the trade in plutonium or smallpox germs. And we urgently need a similar ban on Monopoly.
A game of Monopoly was Mike's idea and I leapt at it. I hadn't played for half a century. The moment he suggested it I had an image of my bedroom as a 10-year-old and a winter's afternoon and maybe five of us on the floor round the Monopoly board of whom I remember most vividly my best mate, Dave Collier, and Bambi-eyed Mike Morris over whom every mother melted and who was capable of quite spectacular violence. I was afraid of Mike Morris but I loved Monopoly.
It turned out that the board hadn't changed in 50 years and neither had the little metal pieces. 'I'll be the dog,' I said, because I'd always been the dog. I liked dogs then. I like them now. But I had forgotten the problem with the little metal dog. It falls too readily on its side as if shot.
There were four of us playing: Mike, a young English actress (and if anyone objects to that word they will kindly explain to me how otherwise I might convey with such precision and concision the information that the person makes her living in the theatre and is at the same time female), Mike's daughter who is also my goddaughter and whom I have known since the week of her birth 14 years ago and who is for me the symbol of all innocence and hope, and me.
You start Monopoly as equals - everyone has a sufficiency of money. And you start it as friends - a dog, a hat, a boot and a smoothing iron all setting out on an adventure together. What could be nicer?