Oh gosh! What a disappointing match! Will they ever score a goal? Paul has been watching the game for about an hour but he's nearly dropped off.

What has come over his favourite team which hate always seemed invincible? With a play like that they are going to lose the match. He pushes the button and the screen goes dark. Paul, who used 5 to be a regular 'Manchester United' supporter, gave up going to football matches some years ago. He'd rather stay at home now and watch the telly. You get a better view and Paul loves the action replay. Another reason is that he's too afraid to go, really! When he was a kid there could be an occasional fight on the terraces, but nothing like you see these days—whole gangs of teenagers who aren't interested in football at all. They 10 aren't real fans, they just come to look for trouble. And there is much violence on the field too. Why can't referees get tougher with players? Why don't they send the players off for deliberate fouls? There ought to be more discipline on the terraces and on the field. They'd better do something about it and do it soon! Otherwise attendance at football matches will keep falling. Paul has always been keen on some form of physi-15 cal activity—be it a 'team game' like football, volleyball, basketball or just cycling, swimming, or jogging and, in winter, mountain skiing or ice hockey. In the past few years, however, there appeared quite a number of new exciting sports, some of them rather dangerous: pot-holing, abseiling, hang-gliding, parascending, stock-car racing and others. One of Paul’s friends is a member of the World Bungee Corporation. In his free time he jumps of bridges and hangs upside down with an elastic rope around his ankle.

Most of Paul’s friends have taken up material arts-karate, Judo, kung fu and others. Yhis art of fighting is something special and requires deep knowledge.. That's why high physical qualities alone won't make a good fighter. No wonder the best fighters used to go to Buddhist monasteries where they lived in solitude side by side with monks, away from civilization and where they spent long hours in meditation pondering over the true human values. Paul is now reading a manual on karate. The book is a mine of information about the history of one of the most ancient types of Japanese martial arts.

When Paul was a child his favourite pastime was playing various board games. In fact, there were lots of them—draughts, dominoes, anagrams and crosswords. But the game he enjoyed most was Scrabble which is one of the most popular word games ever existed. It was Alfred Butts who invented the game. He was an out-of-work architect in the USA with a passion for mind games, who, in the Depression of the 1930s, decided that he was going to invent a game to make him rich. He researched the kinds of games people were playing at the time-card games, dice games, number games people were playing at that time – card games, dice games, number games and word games- and decided to take up a simple form of anagrams and improve on it.

Now days people from all walks of life play the game. So does Paul. It helps to take his mind off things he doesn’t want to think about.