Charity Quizzes - a welcome return

D'you remember Charity Quizzes ? Back in my salad days, at the outset of my quiz career back in the tail end of the 1980s, and the start of the 90s, Charity Quizzes were fairly common. If you take just Port Talbot, the Bay View club, now sadly gone, and the Seaside and Labour social club seemed to hold them fairly often. Then when you factored in a few other clubs as well, you can see that you could easily take part in between half a dozen and a dozen in a year.

Now that I'm into my third decade of quizzing they seem far fewer and further between. I'm not really sure why this is. Maybe its something to do with the decline of league quizzing in South Wales, and maybe its due to other reasons - I just don't know. Still, I've always enjoyed Charity Quizzes, so its a pleasure to be able to write about anything that bucks the trend.

Last night I joined a team for a charity quiz in a school in the new development in Margam. Very good it was too. There were 8 rounds of ten questions. Thats a good amount of questions, especially for a charity quiz. By way of comparison we also do 8 rounds of ten questions in the rugby club on a Thursday night. in addition to this, there were two handouts - one of 25 pictures, and one of 30 advertising slogans. We only have one handout in the rugby club. To put it into perspective, the only other regular quiz I know which delivers more for your money is the Monday night quiz in the Pill Harriers Rugby club in Newport, where you get three rounds of 20 questions on General Knowledge, a pictures handout, and a handout requiring normally between 40 and 50 answers on a wide range of topics. I don't know how long it takes Trevor Parry to put together the Monday night quiz, but it must be hours. When I do the Thursday night quiz for Aberavon it takes a good three hours at least to put it together. So full marks to last night's QM - it must have taken a long time.

One question was intriguing.
Canada has the longest coastline in the world. In miles, in total , how long is it ?
Now, bearing in mind that the circumference of the Earth is a tad less than 25,000 miles, what would you think ? 5,000 miles ? 10,000 miles ? Well, actually , its -
151485 miles !
Staggering. I would be lying if I said that I didn't think that the question master must have misplaced a decimal point, but when I got home and fired up google it turned out that yes, its absolutely true, and this is one of those questions is just so much bigger than you would have imagined. But when you straighten out all those huge crinkly islands and the huge crinkly mainland, you actually get a line that would go round the world a little more than 6 times !