My life may (effectively) be over. I was playing Risk with my nearly dead, but thankfully now fully alive if a little sluggish friend tonight and he claimed to have sent the Scrabble cartridge back by recorded delivery a week or so ago. But I have received nothing. The postal service in Shepherd's Bush is notoriously rubbish and I have had incidences before where someone has sent something recorded delivery and the post man has not bothered to put the little card through the door when he has failed to deliver it and it has then been returned to sender.
Hopefully this is all that has happened this time, but there is the dreadful possibility that my game is gone forever. I have spent a month playing chess on the gameboy, which is some kind of substitute, but not nearly as good, mainly because I am rubbish at chess and don't win anywhere near as often (and certainly not at the top level). Some psychic part of me must have known my game was in jeopardy because I attempted to buy a back up version on Amazon last week (second-hand), but then got an email back telling me the item had already been sold. The Gameboy Colour versions of Scrabble are famously hard to get hold of.
Which makes me wonder if I have not been a victim of a sophisticated Scrabble sting. Sure my friend claims that he's been ill and his evidence seems good - he was forced to come home from a supposed year long round the world trip with his wife because of this illness and he looked weaker than usual today and couldn't bend over and even showed us his operation scar. But what if he and his wife never went on holiday? What if they spent that five months holed up in their flat, hatching a plan of how they could get their hands on the elusive Gameboy Colour version of Scrabble? What if their plan was for him to fake a serious illness which would require a hospital visit, then ask me if they could "borrow" my game to help him pass the boring hours? They knew if the illness was sufficiently serious that there was no way I could refuse, even though my Scrabble game is more precious to me than the lives of my unborn children. Then after a couple of weeks what if they "claimed" they had sent the game back by recorded delivery, banking on the fact that the British postal system is renowned for its crapness? They could have wangled themselves a Gameboy Colour Scrabble game for absolutely free in return for the minimal dissipation of only half a year of effort.
I suspect if I start arguing that they should buy me a replacement cartridge that my friend will suffer a "relapse" and then if I am still insistent that I deserve recompense my friend will "die" and his wife's clothes will be found piled up on a beach somewhere and everyone will assume she has committed suicide because of the grief. But only I will know that they have truly had plastic surgery and started a new life somewhere far away (possibly Leicester, where no-one would dream of looking for them), under assumed identities, where every night they will play Scrabble against one another on a Gameboy.
It is the perfect crime and I feel like a fool for having fallen for it.
