Torture played a large part in the word game.   Plumbing was simply one form of Architectural Hygiene, stairwells and flues being examples of others.  Some houses in that area backed on to cobbled ginnels; they were called tunnelbacks by some or back-to-backs or two-up-two-downs.  Rodney was faced with a terrible dilemma, when he took part in more than just a rôle-playing game: a game that was virtually reality, indeed realler than reality ever was.  Where words became what they were.  His family home was one such tunnelback, with regularly blocked chimneys and unplungerable sinks.  Even the fat formed itself into geometrically exact shapes at drain level. 

                The crowd came at two.  On the dot.  There was much raucousness, multi-coloured counters in leather bags/ multi-facetted di(ce) wagged around by even drunker wags and cads and bounders.  They knew that Father Christmas couldn't thread the chimneys in poor areas, because the flue-walls were constricted like sick veins.  The joke of one game was to unclog them and there was a board a bit like snakes and ladders, a bit like ludo, scrambled into a slow-motion computer screen that was losing its re-booting even as one tried to pump up the power.  Rodney was dungeon-master.  Where chimneys had their roots.  Which was a place of torture before history was learnt in school as recycled reality.

                Drains needed ventilation just as much damp courses.  A drip slowly dangled from the start-with-a-dice-throw-of-six sqaure and wound sinuously along the ungrooved hatching of the counter's route.  Only one or two perforations tried to stem its worming flow.  Then one of the wastrels chimed in with a scenario quite anathema to the Christmas spirit.  Santa was coming up into the plug-hole by mistake.

                Rodney's head exploded because there wasn't any overflow or sick-bag for synapses.  Torture was never what it was in real time and self-inflicted during a game was downright daft.

(published 'Bibliofantastic' 1999)