My table is jammed with cocktail pitchers, pints of lager, trays of shots, Jägerbombs, bottles of Hooch, mince pies, pizzas, onion rings and chips. Nothing strange for a man of my epicurean calibre, you may think. (As a student, I was once caught drinking out of a puddle after putting way too much chilli sauce on my kebab.) But it’s all been paid for by people I’ve never met, out of the kindness of their hearts.
I’ve come to the John Jacques in Fratton, Portsmouth, to meet 42-year-old Chris Illman, who started Wetherspoons The Game!! on Facebook in 2018 with a handful of others. This month, membership rocketed from the low 1,000s to 400,000 after a change in the algorithm that Facebook uses to suggest groups to non-members. When the number of members reached 10,000, Illman held good on his promise to have a cloud and a spoon (weather, spoons – geddit?) tattooed on his arm. When it reaches 500,000 members, he’ll have his middle name legally changed to Spoons. Illman predicts this will happen within weeks.
