While I definitely pushed him, it is preposterous to suggest that I intended my cousin, Surjit, to go into the Christmas tree, causing it to fall, the Perspex cover of the record player to crack, a number of selection boxes to be irreparably damaged, and the angel (atop the tree) to fly across the room before coming to an emergency break against my late grandmother’s forehead before tumbling downward into her almost full bowl of daal. While my extended family is happy to reminisce about many Christmases past, this single, solitary Christmas Day has never, is never, and will never be mentioned. It is only ever referred to in hushed tones ... we call it 'Monopoly-Gate'.

To this day, over three and a half decades on, I am adamant that (despite the collateral damage and collateral daal) my cousin Surjit deserved to be pushed. Whilst some families accept “cheating” as the raison d’etre of capitalism, I have never and will never turn a blind eye to purloining pink $500 notes from the bank while you think no-one is looking.

Tomorrow is 'World Monopoly Day', a day designated to celebrate the family board game that generates great fun and greater rivalry. I’m sure that my low-level fisticuffs with Surjit was but one of myriad moments of Monopoly madness since the game’s invention more than eighty years ago.

I doubt American, Elizabeth Maggie, could have imagined that the concept she created in 1903, 'The Landlord’s Game', would become this board game behemoth - more than a billion people across more than a hundred countries will build property empires in forty three languages on one of the 275 million boards sold. There is even a braille version, a chocolate Monopoly set (the entire game being made from chocolate) and a 23 carat gold board version with diamond studded dice, costing a cool $2 million. And while we would spend a tense, competitive but invariably fun afternoon playing, the longest ever game lasted seventy days.

Maggie’s original vision was to create a game that posited the notion that wealth creation was a better economic model than state owned monopolies. She was hugely influenced by the political economist Henry George, a man who believed that government should be paid for by a tax on land rather than a tax on workers - and while that was the original premise for the game by the time Parker Brothers got hold of it and renamed it Monopoly, the game could not have been more antithetical to its creator’s vision. Rather than realising the utilitarian dream of wealth being redistributed, Monopoly does exactly what it says on the box - it’s all about one player dominating the game, wheeling and dealing to amass an empire that will finally crush the hopes, dreams and aspirations of all those around them. Yet we loved playing it. Summer holidays, Christmas holidays, long weekends were all about 'Monops' as me, my two brothers and my two cousins affectionately called it.

The profound joy of the game is that it is supremely simple. I was never going to be a regular winner because I had a soft spot for the two cheapest streets, Whitechapel and Old Kent Road - they would never garner enough rent to make me a filthy capitalist success story, but I liked them. Add to that simplicity 'house rules'. Every family had additional embellishments to the actual rules - our family decided that any fines levied on players, rather than be paid to the bank, be placed in the centre of the board. The money would remain there until a player landed on 'Free Parking', that money would belong to them.

I’ll never forget the summer of 1981 - our days were spent watching 'Grease' the movie every day followed by marathon 'Monops' sessions into the wee small hours. At that time there was a major TV ad campaign for a product I can’t remember. What I do remember is that the punchline to the innocent commercial was some fisherman sipping a hot drink and saying “scrummy, scrummy”. For some reason, this phrase, when repeated during a Monopoly session would send us all into boyish hysterics. Obviously this uncontrolled laughter was far from conducive to world domination through property acquisition. My big brother came up with a great plan - anyone who spoke the mirth-making phrase “scrummy, scrummy” would be fined $100. This worked brilliantly until we all decided to simple pay $100 just to say the phrase and have a laugh. Nothing could have been less capitalistic. And while we all ended up broke and busted, we had seldom been happier, seldom laughed as much. It seemed a world away from that 'Monopoly-gate' moment. Clearly, capitalists are significantly less content people.