How do astronauts play Scrabble in space? With lots of Velcro

I’ve been a Scrabble player my whole life. I’ve had a perpetual Scrabble competition going on with my mum for 50 years.

On the International Space Station, our psychologist encourages lots of little habits to help keep us sane. One of these is Scrabble – they recognise that games are fundamental for peace of mind.

Our Scrabble board had Velcro on the back, as did each alphabet piece. Everything on the inside of a spaceship has Velcro on it.

The Scrabble board was attached to the ceiling in the same place that we ate our meals. So once you’ve heated up your bag of mash and you’re squeezing it in to your mouth, you can be working on your next word.

The beauty of a spaceship is that if you lose a piece you only have to wait until it turns up in the filter. Everything is pulled towards the airflow – even us astronauts, which is why we have to be tied down when we sleep.

Some of our Scrabble games would last months, because we were so busy. Boredom isn’t an issue in space. There is mission control in Germany, Russia, Houston, Montreal and Japan and they are all scheduling your day, for the entire time you are up there. If you do have three or four spare minutes, you watch the UK go by – it takes a minute to cross it. If you’ve got 10 minutes, you could cross the US, or fly through the northern lights.

There is never a shortage of things to do. It’s an over-saturated life, where you occasionally get the time to play Scrabble.

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life, by Chris Hadfield, £8.99, published by Macmillan