Mornington Crescent....

[BratFarrarsPony]

Well as I won the last game fairly and squarely despite not being as quick as the old lags....I will start another game.

Gants Hill

Pingu, dear heart, you say you raised the tone; well, I suppose everyone should try everything once with the traditional exceptions identified by dear old Tommy Beecham. Incidentally, where is the toasting fork and did you manage to straighten it out?

That greasy spoon holds a place close to my heart after the business with the Viscount and custard creams and the Manx kitten - eh, Saints? What a mess that was!

Haywards Heath I think. With a bit of luck it will be snowed in tonight. For good and all.

Before being snowed in, better remember to fill the flask (with tea, so no shenanigans). Few trains in the south of England again tomorrow thanks to the people allied with ASLEF. If only they had played MC when they were teenagers then none of this frightful business would be happening.

A 12 coach journey back to Clapham High Street to check on what is happening in the denizens of Lavender Hill nearby.

Sorry to be so long; the Secretary-General is somehow convinced that the business of the UN, or whatever he calls that place he runs in one of the American colonies, is more important than that of MN. People have no sense of proportion, have they?

It is time for something imaginative: Kingston-upon-Thames will get the game moving. But do beware of MacMillan's Manoeuvre and Rule 273 (xviii)(a) - this is the second Sunday, you know.

Who's for the Big Bash, people? Des Moines '17 beckons and It should be good. The Chief Justice of the State promises that the local rozzers will stay away and hopes to get that nice Mr Trump to crop in, although she tells me that dear Donald has taken some sort of job in the Federal bureaucracy and may be too busy.

It is a bit wet to remain in Kingston for a long time unless you dive into Bentalls for a bit of shopping. I used to live nearby for a part of my childhood (before my parents introduced me to MC).

Happy memories of visits to Teddington and so I think a return visit is long overdue.

Wet? Not at all. You just order some of the peasants to get out of "their" house - don't you?

I hope you feel ready to show your face in Bentall's again, Saints. It's been a long time and the manager of the men's hosiery and soft-core porn department has retired. They paid the hush-money compensation and let him keep the pepper-grinder as s souvenir.

By Word Association rules after Teddington comes Lockwood.

But surely, Saints, shenanigans are precisely why some people devote so much of their adult life to MC. Well, that and the bail conditions.

I doubt the Donald will make it to Des Moines. As well as the minor inconvenience of his federal pen-pushing job, there's also the proviso that, as I just mentioned, under the 1827 Rules of Comportment for Gentlewomen and Gentlemen Partaking in An Uplifting Game of MC, we can accept a little liveliness in interactions between the sexes but, well, I'm sure you get my drift.

Victoria

The Donald would be a much less cantankerous and provocative person had he been brought up on MC. As would most of those who voted for him.

Anyway, politics on a Sunday is not really cricket- well neither is cricket in the winter on these shores, though apparently it is taking place in India as we play.

Victoria was indeed a clever move given that the District line and most of the Victoria line have already featured in this game, and the new entrance near to M+S in Victoria has not yet opened. Which if you had wished to purchase some of their finest cakes for Sunday tea would be a challenge or even lead to a social faux-pas.

So I have to invoke for the very first time since about 1910 the Edgware Road and Victoria Railway variant of the proposed tube lines rule, which takes me to Kilburn High Road The House of Commons Committee would not have rejected the proposal had Maud been around then.

Bold, Andrew, very bold. Refreshing to see a return to the old ways.
I dislike stereotypes, but I have rarely come across many of our transatlantic chums who can really grasp the subtle nuances of the great game. Though I don't go as far as the Colonel who got into all sorts of trouble when he chased Mr Kennedy out of Chequers with a poker for playing Throssletons Double Twist On A TUESDAY!
An easy segue to Marble Arch.

Indeed, Saints. The one consolation of passing through the den of iniquity that is Victoria station is the M&S spiced iced bun. I saw the Commandant General eat a whole tray full of them at Bielefeld in '67. Strange days.

So, let's spice things up a bit

Ongar

Do you think we are all too silly to see through your little game, Saints?

Before I play: am I the only one online who remembers Tipperary in '74 when that barmy bishop from the C of I tried the very same move and came to such spectacular grief?

Take warning from his fate and think before you reply to my next move4 which is - as you will have guessed - Wolverhampton - on the diagonal!

Ah, time for the Midland Metro rule then, which cannot be played on alternate Saturdays. I don't recall the Tipperary incident of 1974 as this was the year I was unable to take part in MC after my parents decided they were sorry and hadn't a clue about Radio 4 and defected to listening to this new thing called local BBC radio. Some excuse about the controller being a friend, even after I had embarrassed the wife's father at their wedding a few years before.

So with the aid of the Midland Metro rule I can go easily back to the environs of London and Headstone Lane

And from Headstone Lane obviously to . . . no, contain your souls in patience for a moment.

Saints, dear Saints, I appreciate that what happened in '74 was not your fault. But you must make the appropriate penance which as you know will involve a bowl or red blancmange and a recording on 78 r.p.m. vinyl of Fidelio and will require the services of one of HM Inspectors of Taxes. We know we can trust you to undergo the process.

. . . and now off to Gravesend.

I am glad to see that you have referred to this town in Kent mentioned by Charles Dickens himself as Gravesend and not the spin doctor name of Ebbsfleet. I think that Mr Dickens would have been a mean player of the game had it been around in his time.

Keeping close to the River Thames but more upstream I move to Woolwich Arsenal

Yes, I think Mr Dickens would have been a demon at MC. I also think that, if more of the Russian writers had taken up MC, they would have felt less need of that interminable bore, chess, and ghd vourse of world history might have been so different. I know Chekhov did try to introduce the game to Moscow society, but got a very frosty reception.

With that in mind

Charing Cross

I've never heard of the current President Elect playing MC to any decent standard. But goodness me, that game in the Oval Office back in '95, who'd have ever though that Al Gore was such a devilishy good player? Hillary's face when he declared Tudor Court Rules in play, thus denying her clever approach to Finchley Central. I'll admit to a degree of surprise that a Wellesley graduate hadn't been taught the classical approach to the game...

But I digress. I've recently been studying the ggame of the great Chines MC Masters and have had my personal scale model of the London underground Feng Shui'd. Clearly the only possible move from Charing Cross is

Baker Street

Mr Dickens was a very fine player - it was around in his time but people were more discreet. You will find all the references you want in the early Serbo-Croat translation of Edwin Drood.

My great-grandfather told me that his grandfather was present when Mr Dickens trounced "Mary Ann Evans" so decisively with a half-Wallington to - inevitably - Rochester.

She was a very bad loser and one of the bystanders had the scars to prove it. Not of coruse that she could show them in public.

An inconvenient truth is that along with the period of time listening to local radio, the model trains I had as a child of the LNER not the London Underground (though some bits became part of the Northern line with a direct service to a station just south of Camden Town).

So we have wound our way to Baker Street and it seems that both the Bakerloo and Jubilee line are now played in this game and out of moves.

So I am left with the Circle line. In a bit of a pickle, as the Major's second wife would put it. Eastbound was played with the move to Great Portland Street last week, I must move west. To a place near to that of recent royal births, Edgware Road (Met), as it used to be known.

The train has been stuck in the station for two days now, so time to play the consecutive moves rule, rarely played this century (or in the last, come to think of it).

Time for the Post Office Railway rule to come into play, which takes me to Farringdon.

Nice one but not nice enough. You have brought Peterson's Protocol into force and drive is out of zones 1-3. There is no help for it. Watford it is.

Pingu: I hope the President-elect remembered to send Mummy Pingu and whichever husband she is on this month their tickets for the events tomorrow. We want video of them swinging at Donald's balls.

Oh Saints, a 2 day delay is less than nothing to those of us with the misfortune to live on the Brighton Line. I was holding out for the full week!

I cannot permit play to remain in Herfordshire for longer than is strictly necessary, so I'll invoke Featherstonehaugh's Finagle to bring some sense and decency back to the game

Wood Green

Andrew, still the same husband as last week, I think, and of course they're there, Mummy P is in line for White House Chief of Staff. It's not what you know etc etc, and Mummy P knows everyone (and has been married to most of them!)

Well, I suppose that in recognition of tomorrow's momentous events we should go to

White [House] City

I do hope Mummy Pingu remembers that she'll never get her commodious hip flasks though the metal detectors.

I would have thought Mummy Pingu would never get anywhere near the White House because shopping at White City in the nearby large shopping centre would be too much of an attraction.

So I play the new lines rule and move to the station which will be near the US embassy, Nine Elms

Yes, I did hear that for Mummy Pingu the biggest attraction of husband number 7 (or do I mean 8, one gets so confused?) was the platinum credit card. It has helped her get on top of her little shoplifting problem.

I'm feeling arithmetical, so

Seven Sisters

In memory of Trollope (whose hidden MC clues are the subject of my future DPhil thesis) and in recognition of the inflation to come Tenways

I think that I should play the temporarily closed lines rule and move to Wanstead Park. Before they have this strange means of train propulsion called electricity. Trollope himself I am sure preferred steam traction on what he would have known as the Metropolitan Railway, or in the case of Wanstead Park, the GER.