This short (and true) story from Beryl Bainbridge in The Guardian this week is effortlessly the best thing I’ve read this year.

The first four paragraphs are like, blah, blah, blah, whatever and then there’s a violent twist of style and focus it becomes Huh? What? Wait. Woah!

I won’t spoil it by quoting and it’s definitely short enough that you can read the whole thing now.

I love the penultimate line: “I don’t think she’d played with guns as a girl, and I didn’t press charges,” as if the first fact was the main reason Beryl stayed her litigation.

Anyhow, it’s a masterclass in succinct understatement.

I can testify to how playing with toy guns (virtual ones, at least) might improve your combat skills. A few years ago, after playing months and months of the first Ghost Recon on the first Xbox, I attended a friend’s Stag Party at which we went clay pigeon shooting.

Despite it being my first time and having never fired a shotgun at a moving target before, I hit thirty out of thirty clays, both those flying through the air and those bouncing along the ground. Now, we were beginners so I’m sure it wasn’t the tricksiest of challenges but somehow, all that time spent tracking targets along horizon lines with my virtual SA-80, judging distance and movement to land a perfect headhsot did translate into a real world ‘skill’.

Of course, that skill was essentially just being able to read and interpret physics with some degree of accuracy, but still, it was one of those unexpected moments that causes you to pause for thought.

Stephen Poole’s recent Edge column on the brilliant DS game Air Traffic Chaos touches on the same subject and is well worth a read if you have another spare moment.