Play-and-Stay Blog

Here at Play and Stay HQ in sunny Kent, we work hard to bring you all the latest news and events happening at top UK theme parks. Well, I say we work hard but there’s probably a lot more play than stay here.

Our bosses and the lovely chaps in the People Team have decided that we need time to chill out in between our hectic workload of writing news feeds and blogs. So they spent hundreds of pounds on playtime toys.

Foos, or table football as it more commonly known, takes pride of place as the top toy in the office. This claim to the top spot was reinforced last month when the People Team bought us a second foos table. The queues for the old table were getting ridiculously big and fights were beginning to break out between different departments.

So now we have two tables: New School and Old School.

New School is ok, but it takes some getting used to. It’s faster and smoother than Old School and has a glass lid which stops the ball leaving the field of play every 5 minutes. But this glass lid comes at a hefty price: glare. In certain lights, it is almost impossible to see one end of the table meaning that if you are in goal, the ball has probably already gone in before you can react to it.

Old School, on the other hand, is a legend. It has a raw open-topped design which puts the player closer to the action. The old, stiff and rusty handles mean you have to work if you want to win. The ball seems to stick to the surface in a very uncanny manner. There’s no beauty in this table, just pure, unadulterated foos.

Old School has character that new school can only dream of achieving. “Headless”, for example is the first red mid-fielder in from the right hand side. I have no idea how he lost his head, it was probably a drunken Christmas party shenanigan of some sort. Every other player is called “Rooney”. Don’t ask why, because I really don’t know.

So at 11 o’clock everyday, we go out for a game of doubles. There are two rounds, the first to score ten goals wins the round. Half time comes and you swap sides. Genius. If we are lucky, we might get to pop out in the afternoon as well, but that’s only if the boss isn’t looking.

Next up, and a relatively recent addition is Table Tennis. I haven’t got the hang of this yet, but then I don’t care for tennis too much so I can’t see myself as a budding Tom Hanks any time soon.

Moving on swiftly, and we have Swing Ball. Swing Ball is the sweatiest of all the toys we have. Last summer someone tried to invent some rules for Swing Ball. They didn’t take off to well. The only rule you need is hit the ball back, right?

At lunchtimes, we occasionally get a football out. This ultimately leads to yet another sweat-fest and makes for a rather smelly and uncomfortable afternoon in the office. We have goals erected in the lower field where we like to play a game of either “headers and volleys” or “hit the crossbar”. Needless to say we are all rubbish at the latter - most of us spend too much tome at a computer screen to be any good with a ball at our feet.

So if the news if sometimes late reaching you, or the web page you are looking at seems a little out of place, it’s probably because we are outside playing with our toys.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 3:55 pm and is filed under News, Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.