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IDIOTPROOF Today Atkins Down The Road and I played a new daft game. The idea is for either Atkins or me to pretend we are someone who is mentally ill and has been released into the community, while the other of us acts the part of his carer. An opportunity to try out the game presented itself this morning when I passed a shop that sold cameras and telescopes. There was a large SALE sign in the window that drew my attention and I had stopped to see what they had in their window as I’m on the lookout for a some zoom lens binoculars. There weren’t any binoculars in the sale but there was something far more desirable. Gold. In the form of a small camera, on offer at £10.99, which was claimed, according to the sale sticker on it, to be idiotproof.     Before anyone else could buy it I immediately called in on Atkins, and thirty minutes later we were in the camera shop asking to see the idiotproof camera. The sales assistant got the camera out of the window and placed it on the counter for our consideration. “There you go.”      “It is idiotproof, is it?” I said, looking at it doubtfully.      “Oh absolutely.”      Atkins looked at the camera in big-eyed awe then turned to the assistant and said, like a little boy in a pet shop asking if he could hold a puppy, “Can I hold it please?”      “Jimmy is on day release from the mental hospital,” I explained to the assistant, in hushed tones.      “Ah,” the assistant nodded knowingly. He didn’t know anything, poor bugger. “Of course you can pick it up, Jimmy,” he said to Atkins, with a condescending smile.      Atkins picked up the camera, examined it as though it could just as well have been a piece of moon rock as much as a camera, as far as he knew, then smashed it down viciously on the counter top. The first time he did this it probably rendered the camera beyond repair but just in case it hadn’t Atkins repeated the treatment two more times then dropped it on the counter. It sat there looking like something that had just emerged from a car crusher.      Atkins looked at me. “It broke, Arthur,” he said. “Camera broke.”      “Yes Jimmy,” I said. I turned to the assistant and said: “I thought you said it was idiotproof?”      The assistant was in shock. He just stood with his mouth open, looking at Atkins.      “I thought you said the camera was idiotproof,” I repeated, this time a little testily.      “But…but he smashed it,” the assistant said, still not quite able to believe what he had witnessed. “He smashed it to bits.”      “Well of course he did,” I said. “He’s an idiot. That’s what idiots do.”      “I’m an idiot,” grinned Atkins. He picked up a piece of the camera and examined it. “Camera no good now Arthur,” he pronounced, wisely.      “Not much good in the first place if you ask me, Jimmy,” I said, with a meaningful look at the assistant. “And certainly not idiotproof. Come along, we’ll try Boots, I believe they do a good throw away camera.”      “Can Jimmy throw it away?” said Atkins. “Jimmy like throwing things.”     We left the shop without looking back. Five yards down the road I thought I heard a shout of ‘Hey, come back here!’ from the shop but I probably imagined it.