Winning is bad enough, but winning by too much . . .

Yes, dearly beloved, it’s that time of the weekend again. You know, I have to say that I do often feel a little bit of a fraud when I make these weekend posts at the moment while we’re between seasons of Mastermind and University Challenge. Still, at least it lets you know that the blog is still going, and I haven’t ground to a halt again.

If you read the blog last week you might recall that I mentioned it was time for the monthly film quiz at the Gwyn Hall in Neath last Wednesday. In the end I was pleasantly surprised to know three things that none of the others on the team did. So much o that I can still remember what the three questions were:-

Which was Disney’s fifth full length animated feature film?

In the title of the 1969 live action film, the what wore tennis shoes?

In which year was Steamboat Willie released?

The answers were, respectively, Bambi – The computer – 1928. I aso contributed towards probably he best answer of the night. We were asked – Walt Disney’s last words were allegedly the name of which young actor? Now, the thing is that I did my usual thing of burbling off everything I know about the thing I know that nobody else does, explaining that The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes starred a very young Kurt Russell. All of which led Dan to suggest that maybe Kurt Russell would be the answer to the last words question. So it proved to be.

Now, I’ll be honest, in my salad days I rarely worried about winning by an embarrassingly wide margin. Well, I’m older now, if not any wiser. I’ve not played in every monthly quiz in the last year, but I have played in quite a few, and we’ve won all the ones we’ve played in. None of my doing, I hasten to add. Still, the regularity with which we’ve been winning the cinema tickets which are the first prize has led to the organisers, in the nicest possible way, saying they hope that we lose, and do it soon. Now, the way that the quiz works is that each round is collected before the next one starts and allocated to another team to mark. Two rounds at a time are marked. On Wednesday evening, after the fourth round, a plaintive message came over the mic, asking if anyone still had one of our rounds. I smelled a conspiracy. Wrongly as it happened. Still, when the final scores were announced, we’d only had five questions wrong all evening, and the fact was that even without the score for the temporarily missing round, we’d still have won.

I’ve said this before, and I’lve no doubt that I’ll say it again at some time in the future. I do think it would be a good thing if we lost in the quiz in the Gwyn Hall. I definitely think it would be a good thing if we lost in the Thursday night quiz in the rugby club as well. Only. . . I can’t play to lose. In fact I’ll go further than that. I can’t not play to win. Seriously, it is so ingrained within my quizzing soul that once the questions start flying, I can’t help trying to win. Alright, I haven’t lost in a quiz since I started going back to the rugby club, but I’ve lost plenty in my time, and I’ve no illusions that it’s only a matter of time until we lose in the club. But there’s a difference between being beaten and deliberately losing.

Well, there we are. Hopefully they’ll still let us play next month – although I may well be away when it happens.