Sunday afternoon was specifically designed for you to sit miserably in your house watching rain pissing down the windows. The shops shut early, so you have to collect all your supplies to get through the evening, or spend hours driving round looking for a petrol station that sells matches.

TV stations, knowing that there’s nothing else for you to do and will therefore watch whatever they throw at you, compete to show the poorest clip-show – Tramps do the Funniest Things, It Shouldn’t Happen to a Neurosurgeon or The World’s Funniest Cricket Pitches.

For some reason, in the bottom of a cupboard in every single house in the country is a tatty, battered game of Monopoly. Never a brand new, shiny copy, because who goes out of their way to buy one? They just exist, passed down from one bored generation to the next, never taking the sensible route and slinging it in the bin. Nope, that gormless dog and rubbish iron (who ever picks the iron? It’s all about the race for the sports car.) sit in the bottom of the box underneath the jumbled up money and torn cards.

The Monopoly people have noticed this, and have come out with a million and one variants – you can play in your home town (that is, if you live in a large-ish city and not a village just outside one. Although Southam Monopoly would be fun. The most expensive side would be Market Hill and have the chip shop and video rental place.)

Or there’s the weird, gimmicky editions – Manchester United, The Simpsons, Star Wars. Seriously, Star Wars Monopoly. How massively, massively geeky is that? And the Man Utd edition sees you start out £600m in debt.

If you ever get past the argument of who gets to be the sportscar, it’s time to play. And so the whole thing rolls out in a tediously predictable manner, inevitably ending up in an argument when someone won’t agree to a swap.

Forgetting the pointlessness of the game, Monopoly arguments also come about from the C word. Not “Clarkson”: Cheating. Whether it’s distracting someone when you owe them rent, or straightforward stealing from the bank, that’s the real game that’s being played. Followed by the game of pretending not to know what you did wrong and finally the game of picking plastic houses out of your eyes.

Oh, wait – the pub is open on Sunday. Never mind.