Mama mia, it's murder!

I'd never done a murder mystery until last Friday and thought they always sounded a bit rubbish. Well how wrong I was. Oh yes. The whole idea was that we were in Little Italy, New York in 1995. Pepi Roni (Pepperoni, geddit?) had been killed and we were all gathered at the family restuarant to discover 'whodunnit'.

The thing is, you have to stay in character all the time. As you can see from the photo, I made an extremely convicing Italian gangster (Rocco Scarfazzi) along with my 'fiancee' - Tara Misu (genius, that one). The rest of the 'cast' were Mama Rosa, Angel, Marco Roni (they get worse) and the lone Frenchman - Bo Jolais (dear God).

The evening consisted of listening to a tape (it's a very old murder mystery game), reading your characters' speeches and acting your nuts off whilst attempting a convincing accent. The accents were, mostly, appalling. The most fantastically abysmal of these was delivered by my father-in-law who was playing Marco. His accent lurched from one bizarre vocal extreme to another as he butchered the Italian accent, then the New York accent and finally a mish-mash of Welsh and Pakistani. A triumph of enthusiasm over ability.

As it was an Italian theme, we had lasagne, Italian wine and Tiramisu. As the alcohol flowed, the accents became worse and the whole thing descended into a boozy chaos. Finally we discovered (after all accusing each other with varying levels of aggression) that Bo Jolais was the murderer. None of us actually guessed it was him as we'd been so overwhelmed with information, mis-information, wine, poor acting and gargantuan amounts of lasagne that our feeble brains were on the verge of a meltdown. Brilliant.

So, Bo 'dunnit' and we all had a cracking night. I looked the part with my suit, hat, fake cigar and obligatory violin case and loved every minute. In fact I never realised that cold-blooded murder could be such a laugh.

I guess you really are 'born and then you die'. Capiche?