SOME serious questions have been asked in our house over Christmas, and we revisited some family issues from decades ago.

It’s been a right old game, frankly. Trivial Pursuit first burst on to the market in the 1980s, and we hadn’t played it for years, but Father Christmas brought us the brand new version of the game this year, and that’s bad news if you are related by marriage to my wife’s family.

I don’t normally like to name and shame, but I have to say if you are ever offered a game of Trivial Pursuit with the Freemans, make excuses.

Their problem is not that they don’t know the answers, but rather they have terrible problems with the questions.

Your first problem is only half of them will have listened to the question, so it has to be repeated three times, and even then not everybody in the team has heard it because, whenever they need to leave the room, for some reason they always wait until it’s their go. Of course, hearing the question and understanding it aren’t necessarily the same thing, so we have to read it another three or four times before everybody knows what is required.

Let us imagine that they have been asked to name the capital of the Netherlands.

First they will debate whether the person who set the question meant the official capital, the largest city or the seat of government. That takes another ten minutes.

Then comes the most annoying part of the game, when every member of the team who possesses Freeman DNA feels the urge to explore every possible answer, no matter how unlikely or how irrelevant, so they all start naming every Dutch city they can think of.

Another ten minutes are lost in a pointless debate about whether Utrecht is even in the Netherlands (because one member of the team thinks it might be in Belgium) and they also take ages to eliminate other ‘answers’, including two or three that aren’t cities, but rather surnames from the Dutch World Cup squad of 1974.

Just when you think they are ready to give their final answer, somebody in the team insists on ascertaining whether Netherlands is the same as Holland, before they all have a chat about that time they went there on their holidays.

By now it has been so long since it was first asked that most of the team have forgotten what the question was, so we have to read it again.

The game was even worse when my mother-in-law was alive. Unlike most other mothers-in-law, mine was a lovely woman, who only had one fault, as far as I could see.

Whenever she played Trivial Pursuit it never mattered whether it was her team’s turn or not. Either she would blurt out the answer or nod and shake her head during that vital stage when the opposition is coming up with ideas, so they only needed to test each one out on her to find the correct answer.

As I have discovered in the last week, my wife has inherited a similar trait.

While we all know it is the questionmaster’s duty to conceal the true answer until the last moment, when she has the answer in front of her she thinks she should offer as much help as possible, even inventing her own extra clues.

My only consolation is that, when we were married and the in-laws were asked if they knew of any lawful impediment, they didn’t have time to confer.

But I’m sure one of them would have been thinking: “Is it Amsterdam?”