Trying to recapture your childhood is always dangerous. Books you read, games you played and TV you watched as a child are all things you can dig out and read, play or watch again; sometimes they'll be as good as you remember, but often they won't.

Usually that's because you have changed, of course; but not in this case. This month I remembered a game my father taught me some time around my late teens: you take the four digits of the current year, and you attempt to combine them arithmetically to form each number from 1 upwards and see how far you can get. You're allowed to add, subtract, multiply and divide, you're allowed to use parentheses (of course), and you're also allowed to start by concatenating some of the digits into larger numbers if you want. The catch is that you have to use all four digits every time; if one or two of them can easily be combined to produce the target you're after, you have to find a way to safely dispose of the others. The next year, you can start all over again and it'll all be completely different.

So in 1992, for example, I might have started with 1=2-1+9-9 and 2=1+2-9/9, got as far as 22=21+9/9, and had trouble with 23. It needn't stop there, of course; I might have skipped 23 and tried for things above that.

Like so many things one remembers fondly from one's childhood, this game is not as much fun as I remember it being; but this time it isn't me who's changed. When two of the digits of the current year are zeroes, it gets very boring! If anyone is contemplating having a go at this game, I urge them to wait until at least 2011; and I don't think the game will really recover all of its fun until some time around 2134.