A year on . . .

Well, here’s a thought. It’s a little over a year since I taught my last lesson and a little over six months since I began my new career as a full time office worker in the NHS. It’s probably an appropriate time to consider – has this changed me as a quizzer?

I’ll tell you why I ask. Twenty years ago when I was in my forties I used to say – when I’m retired I’ll go to a quiz every night if I can find one. – Well, you might well say that I am working full time again, so it doesn’t count. But let’s be honest. Between the middle of March last year and the third week in September I might as well have been retired, since I wasn’t working. Did this mean I was looking for a quiz every night of the week? No. I kept on with my one quiz a week on a Thursday, with the film quiz once a month on a Wednesday.

Whether you like it or not you get changed by time, age and experience. Even before lockdown I was pulling back a little from quizzing. I quit the Bridgend League. I stopped going religiously to the rugby club every week – and I had one particular QM whose quiz I would never attend. I know some people didn’t like how I was when I took part in a quiz and I’ll be honest, I didn’t like myself very much when I was playing in a quiz either. Lockdown, in that way, helped. When I eventually started playing again it was just the once a week and once a month.

Has pulling back from quizzing made me a nicer person in a quiz? Well, maybe a little. It helps that the rugby club quiz now finishes by 10pm. For the first quarter century of my teaching career as long as I was in bed by 11:30 I would be okay the next day. Now If I’m not in bed by soon after 10, then it affects me the next day. It helps that I’ve been happy and have not had a bout of depression for about a year, since occupational health ruled that I was going to be unfit for work until my retirement from teaching came into official effect. Are you ever officially ‘cured’ of depression? Gawd knows. But I largely live in the moment and I enjoy my job now, and I love the team I work with. I loved many of the teachers I worked with, but I certainly did not love all of the kids I was working with. I hated teaching there and I hated myself for hating it. I didn’t want to finish with work the way that things finished in the school. For 6 months I have now felt useful, valued and competent again. When I leave work at half four I don’t take any work home with me, and I don’t think about it again until I go back at half eight in the morning, and when I do I have a smile on my face.

But, you know, if I have changed as a quizzer, it’s only a little. I still moan at what I think is a bad question. I still complain when I think a QM has committed an absolute howler. I still see conspiracies when I think our team has been treated unfairly and rise to what I see as slights to our team or our team members. Well, I suppose you can only get so far by trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Here’s to the next 12 months.