We used to have a board game based on the Beatrix Potter books called Peter Rabbit’s Race Game. The game consisted of five playing pieces - Peter Rabbit, Jeremy Fisher, Mrs Tiggywinkle, Jemima Puddleduck and Squirrel Nutkin - which have to race around a board and get back home, but each on their own path, with their own special pitfalls and pleasant surprises and forfeits to contend with.

The paths looped in and out of each other, crossing bridges and hopping over lilypads. The whole game took about an hour to play, and was all painstakingly illustrated in the Potter style - all pastels and anthropomorphic woodland creatures, which is fine if you like that sort of thing.

One by one, we lost the playing pieces. Our family was always doing that with board games, losing vital bits and making last minute substitutions from other games, or from drawers of random junk.

I think I’ve mentioned here before how our version of Cluedo involved truly terrifying murder weapons such as the rubber band, the matchstick and the bulldog clip. (”The victim’s final words, as he lay dying in the study, were reported to be ‘No, no! Not the bulldog clip! Anything but that!’”)

In our version of Monopoly, the players included the Top Hat, the Iron, the Bottle Cap and the Lump of Blu Tack. Bagsy me the Top Hat, every time. Please.

See, because there was such a shortage of actual playing pieces, there was always a bit of a scramble for certain pieces before the game began. In Cluedo, Anna and I used to fight over being Miss Scarlett - oh come on: those pouty lips? That sultry frock? Way better than fumpy old Mrs White any day…

And in Peter Rabbit’s Race Game, we both invariably wanted to be Jemima Puddleduck, because she was the only identifiable female (apart from Mrs Tiggywinkle, but we didn’t count her because she was spiny and wore a pinny) and besides, she was called Jemima. Great name, we thought.

Slowly, we lost the playing pieces for that game, too. Jemery Fisher, the frog, was replaced with a small plastic frog that had come out of a cracker once. Mrs T was replaced by a small chinese pincushion (even under ten we had a sense of humour), poor Jemima ended up buried in the garden out of spite and was replaced with a small yellow rubber duck (not quite the object of lust we originally had) and even Peter Rabbit himself disappeared into the ether and ended up being played by a mobil play figure (we called them busybodies). Only Squirrel Nutkin remained from the original cast.

Only no-one wanted to be him, ever. Was it because of the bushy tail? The rather dowdy tweed jacket? His prancing stance? The vague resemblance to Basil Brush? The way we couldn’t quite remember his story? Or was it because we, living in London and being surrounded by a distinct lack of nature, had been indoctrinated into thinking that squirrels were cunning, devious little rats with big tails, and not the cuddly ickle tree-dwellers that they would like us to think? Perhaps.

We played the race game for years, and each time, the poor ceramic Squirrel Nutkin figurine sat in the box, lonely and unexercised, as the other players, for all their physical faults and lack of resemblance to the original Potter characters, raced around the board towards the finish.

Further proof that squirrels are little bastards. Can I just point out that this inventor lives in a house called Crackpot Cottage? Does anyone else smell a small rodent (with a big bushy tail or otherwise)…?