Today I’m going to teach you all to play the bottle top game. You have to be very very bored to play this game. It’s probably only worth bothering if you’re a) at work or b) a prisoner of war. If you work in a prisoner of war camp then that’s perfect.

All you need is a 500ml bottle of Dr Pepper. I’ve been told that other carbonated beverages work too, but I can’t confirm that first hand. I can’t make it clear enough that I take NO responsibility for injuries sustained or lives lost through participation in the bottle top game. You play entirely at your own risk.

Having acquired the necessary materials - to wit, the aforementioned Dr Pepper bottle - you must next remove the cap. As the name of the game suggests, this is the bit you need. What you do with the rest is up to you - I recommend consuming the Dr Pepper, but I realise I’m in a minority in actually liking the stuff, so you can please yourself. Quite frankly I don’t care. Just keep the bottle top, that’s all that matters.

Lining the inside of the cap you will find a circle of clear plastic, slightly concave. You must remove this - long fingernails may be required here. If you don’t have long fingernails, you may wish to let them grow before embarking upon the game, but your sense of excitement is likely to be so high that you chew your nails off altogether, in which case a knife may work in their place.

Having successfully removed the plastic circle, you must now face your greatest challenge yet. Concentrate - here comes the science part! What you have to do now is turn it over, and put it back inside the bottle top where you got it from. But now, you see, it’s not concave at all. Now - and this is the clever bit - it’s convex. Beneath it, if all went well, is a trapped pocket of air.

But what, I hear you cry - except obviously I can’t and obviously you don’t - is the good of trapping a pocket of air under my clear circle of plastic? The good of it is this: you can now poke the plastic circle with your finger, and it feels nice.

I recommend that you don’t poke it more than twice. That’s the point at which the novelty wears off. But for those few seconds, it’s almost (but not quite) fun. And in these moments of sheer boredom, what more could one ask for than that?