Deborah Ross: Students home for Christmas? There's fun in store for you!

If you ask me, I have thought of another new game for university students and this is also a fine game and a splendid game and this game is played when you come home for Christmas and haven't seen your mother for months, and it is called, "IF YOU DON'T PUSH PAST HER TO GET AT THE FRIDGE, IT WON'T KILL YOU".

It is such a simple game that any student can play it, if they've a mind. Or a sensitive bone in their body. Or remember all the hours the mother has put in being in goal or playing dinosaurs or attending all those nativity plays during which the one child who knows all the lines shouts them into the faces of the others.

Do you think your mother ever considered this quality entertainment? Do you think she would have attended if it weren't for you? Do you think she would have said to herself: "I must book tickets so I can see one child who knows all the lines shouting them into the faces of the others? I would hate to miss that?" Do you?

Anyway, there are only two instructions to this game, and the first is:

1) Don't push past your mother to get at the fridge, it won't kill you. (According to the British Medical Association, not a single death has yet been linked with not pushing past your mother to get at the fridge, or even an instance of cramp.)

You may wish, however, to play variations on this instruction, which include:

* Don't push past your mother to get at the fridge and then complain: "Haven't you done a shop-up?"

* Don't push past your mother to get at the fridge, complain she hasn't done a shop-up, drink the entire carton of Tropicana at the fridge door, and then burp so lustily that your mother is all but blown across the kitchen.

And the second instruction is this:

2) Do kiss her on the cheek and say "Hi, you all right?", which is all she wants, although if you also wish to tell her about your sex life and how much you are drinking exactly and whether you are doing drugs or actually attending lectures, it will save her from having to bombard you with questions at a later date.

I hope you will enjoy this game and, if so, you may wish to look out for other games in the series like "Don't Just Dump Your Stuff In The Hall" and "What? You Think Taking It Upstairs Is Going To Kill You?". There was a suggestion, at some point, that taking your stuff upstairs could lead to Irritable Bowel Syndrome, but even this has lately been disproved.