Welcome to the House of Fun
   I was introduced to the concept of a fun house during my visit to the fabulous location of Spirit Lake, Iowa. It was erratically constructed (they had obviously employed the same builders I had used in Britain for my kitchen extension) and had the added bonus of being free - so I bowed down reverentially and ventured in through the rhombus shaped door. 
  I instantly found myself groping and stumbling my way around the angular undulating floors, like a crew member lurching on the bridge of the USS Enterprise in an old Star Trek episode - after being hit with a particularly large photon torpedo. I have actually lived in English houses built in the mid to late 19th century that actually conform to this concept – where you start on one side of the bed and find yourself slowly slipping down to the other side during the course of the night. Where peas decide to migrate across the table from your plate and sheets of Velcro are required to stop kiwi fruits doing the same. 
   Using all available handrails and posts (like a trained gymnast) I clawed and grappled my way through the madness; they had the patina of stickiness from the years of candy covered children’s fingers that had gripped them before me - everything was tacky except the floor, which was actually required to be sticky. As children sped around me (they had obviously not cut their toenails in several months) I struggled to gain the necessary purchase needed on the mountainously steep wooden floors to make any progress.
   I came out dazed and confused and with a green complexion (not unlike the flight that brought me here from Heathrow) – this was in part due to the fried cheese curds I consumed just moments before I entered; there must be a lesson here somewhere, but I can’t find it!

   I decided to visit the Jackpot Junction Casino in Morton – this complex is the largest Casino in Minnesota; it was first opened in 1984 as a bingo hall so I decided to try my luck at the game - having never played bingo before. In Britain Bingo is solely the refuge of the elderly on a Friday night.
 I purchased an expensive loose collection of different colored tickets (reminiscent of the Sunday newspapers mixed with a year’s supply of junk mail) and sat down - poised and ready with my shiny new dabber. It was then, as the whole process got underway, I realized that half a lifetime of schooling and further education had failed to pick up a debilitating number dyslexia - as the digits on my paper danced around with mocking assignation, like a numerologist’s nightmare version of Disney’s Fantasia. Numbers came and went with alacrity and I barely got my dabber moist before bingo was called somewhere in the auditorium. I tried to focus harder and my brow became furrowed as I concentrated on the task in hand - with the kind of apprehension and frustrated application that transported me back to an exam I once took in a cold school hall (somewhere in east London during the summer of 1981).