Games People Play Stirling Moss, 68, Racing Driver

IT MAY be feasible to mention Scrabble. I play because I have to sit down and think about it. I'm not particularly good or anything, and I haven't got a great use of the English language, but I do my best with certain things.

I usually play with Susie, my wife. I prefer playing with her against another couple, because she's smarter than I am, so I can use her brain to give me good answers.

I have beaten her at it once or twice, which is quite surprising. In fact, that's the good news about it really, I suppose: I am able to beat her at it sometimes.

I probably win by using little words: "id", and all those ones like that. It isn't often that I get the whole hand down. Susie tends to draw nicer chips than I do, and I would think that overall, she probably wins a bit more than me. Anyway, the point is, neither of us beats the other all the time, so it works out rather well.

I am quite competitive, and Susie says I'm a bad loser. I lost my temper in Morocco once. I got pretty upset because she'd been sitting on one of the chips. I would think that it was quite on purpose. On that occasion, we were with a couple of friends of ours, and she was obviously playing against me with the other person's wife. I have a quite serious sense-of-humour failure when something like that happens.

We don't play Scrabble at home. Playing properly takes quite a bit of thought and it's difficult to find the time when we can sit down and play it together. So I suppose the other good news about it is that when we do play, we're on holiday.

All the permissible two-letter words at Scrabble, from aa to zo, will be found in the new Chambers Dictionary, out this week. The price is pounds 25 until the end of the year, pounds 30 thereafter.