THERE are few words in the English language that terrify me more than: "Grandma's thought of a new game."

On the surface, this might seem like a fairly innocuous little phrase, but it is guaranteed to make my blood run cold. Beads of sweat inadvertently pop out of my forehead, my palms become immediately slick with sweat and the only cogent thought I can muster is "run away, run away".

An over-reaction perhaps. But then you haven't spent the last 30-odd years (some odder than others) trying to avoid playing games so mind-numbing they could actually be in contravention of the Geneva Convention.

My mother is a wonderful human being on many levels. But when it comes to making up games to keep children amused, she is about as adept as a deaf DJ.

Even now I shudder at the thought of "wood, metal, hedge" or "'A'me name is", two of her all-time classics.

As a child, I used to have a 20-minute walk to primary school, usually accompanied by three or four neighbourhood children and a random mother.

When it was my mum's turn to walk us to school, she always insisted we play games to keep us amused and to stop us picking too many blackberries from the over-laden bushes in Gypsy Lane. (If this makes suburban Leeds sound like The Darling Buds of May, I apologise. It was by no means perfick, but it was quite pretty, if a little politically incorrect.)

Her favourite diversion was "'a'me name is", which involved one of us chanting: "A'me name is Alice; me husband's name is Alan; we live in America; and we sell apples". The next would take up the baton with "'B'me name is" and on and on it would go.

By "'E'me name is" we would all be dragging our feet and sighing histrionically. Come "'F'me name is", however, our collective mood would border on murderous.

This was down to my neighbour and childhood chum Fiona. Always two crayons short of a rainbow, she could never, ever come up with anything in the weekly "'a'me name is" championships.

While we randomly shouted 'Freddie', 'Finland' and 'fire-guards', she would always end up muttering something along the lines of: "'F'me name is Fiona; me husband's name is, erm, Fiona; we live in, er, somewhere beginning with F; and we sell, um, furry things."

It was usually at this point that my mum would intervene, suggesting a quick round of "wood, metal, hedge", a game as riveting as it sounds.

Let's just say it involved counting gates, fences and foliage and leave it at that. Any more information and you might be completely overcome with excitement.

These games continued until I was old enough to speak up for myself - and outrun my mum from a standing start.

The horror began again, however, when I had kids. Not only do they now have to play "wood, metal, hedge", they also have to play a cunning variation entitled "cow, sheep, horse".

With that in mind, you can probably now understand why I nearly spontaneously combusted when my five-year-old uttered those six horrifying words when asked what he would like to play during a morning off from his sister and her "look at me, look at me" mantra.

"Grandma's thought of a new game," he said innocently, as I turned purple and began gasping for breath. "It's called the thinking game."

Okay, I thought, that doesn't sound too bad. Maybe for the first time in her life she's actually hit on a good one.

"It's great," he continued, grabbing his favourite dog-eared dinosaur book, "all you have to do is look at the pictures and tell me what all the dinosaurs are thinking."

Head in hands, I began quietly to sob.

Updated: 09:14 Monday, November 01, 2004