Word up:Forget your Wii and your Guitar Hero - 60 years after its launch, sales of Scrabble are up 30 per cent this year. It is now the UK's most popular board game for the first time since the early 1980s, when Trivial Pursuit knocked it off its wordy perch. At least some of its popularity is down to the Facebook version, Scrabulous, which attracted 500,000 players a day until Hasbro, the owner of the US rights to the game, shut it down earlier this year.

Pie high:A 30-year-old solicitor last week became the UK's mince pie-eating champion after wolfing down 41 in 10 minutes. The effort of Denzil Gunner (below), while impressive, fell five pies short of a world record, but he still beat 29 others to the £1,000 prize in the Somerset town of Wookey Hole.