Thursday night at the rugby club - the old fashioned way (but not the old, old fashioned way)

I enjoyed being quiz master again at the rugby club on Thursday night. You might remember how with my last quiz I ‘cheated’ by downloading an old quiz from before covid, changed a minimal number of questions and recycled it? Well, on Thursday evening I delivered a quiz that I’d put together properly in the ‘old fashioned’ way.

Of course, when I say the old fashioned way, I don’t mean the old, old fashioned way. When I first started compiling quizzes for the club in 1995 I didn’t have the net to use. So I’m not claiming that I didn’t use the net when I put Thursday’s quiz together. What I did do though was first of all gather my questions in the categories that I wanted. Then I wrote them out carefully. Then I put them into rounds. Then I road tested them. What I ended up with wa a quiz where the questions must have been pretty clear since there were minimal calls for repeats.

Which doesn’t mean that there were no mistakes. Purely through my own carelessness and stupidity I wrote down Midnight for Moonlight. The error was noticed, and it wouldn’t have made a difference to the final outcome anyway. Just goes to show though, at the end of the day you’re only human.

The outcome was interesting. The quiz was won – and to be honest, by a very large margin – by a team who were boosted by the return to the quiz of my friend Rob. Rob was runner up in Brain of Britain a few years ago. Yeah, I know, serious quiz pedigree. Now, on the one hand I could be mean and sour and sulk about the fact that with Rob back it is extremely unlikely that I’m going to be able to stretch my unbeaten run at the quiz to a full year. I must be starting to grow up a bit though, because that isn’t honestly how I feel. It was just nice to see another of my quiz mates, who I haven’t seen since before covid, and to see that he’s well, and still playing. I’m pretty sure we’ll have some good old tussles ahead of us.

The other thing that struck me, though, was how well Dan and Jess did. Adam and Fran weren’t able to make it on Thursday, which left just the two of them. Now, when you consider the fact that it wasn’t just the way that I put together the quiz that was old-fashioned, I was surprised and delighted with how well they did. They placed 4^th overall out of 6. Every other team had the advantage over them in terms of numbers, and I would say that in every other team it was an advantage to have at least 1 over-fifty year old playing with them.As it was, they ended up only a few points behind the 2^nd and 3^rd place teams who were only separated by a point. There’s no doubt in my mind now, they are becoming quizzers, whether they like it or not. I think that they like it. Jess is question master next week, and Dan the week after. Really looking forward.