Thursday, 23 July 2026

Frabjous Day.

It has been a very long time since I enjoyed a quiz at the rugby club quite as much as I did tonight’s. Now, don’t get me wrong, the quiz itself was pretty good – although there was just one slightly contentious question – in which sea would you find Corsica? The answer given was the Mediterranean – not wrong, but it’s where the waters of the Tyrrhenian and Ligurian Seas meet and it would have been nice to see some acknowledgement of this in the answer. Well, anyway, as I said, the quiz was good, but it wasn’t just that.

No, it was that Dai, the organiser, has decided that teams will no longer mark their own papers. If you have followed the blog much since Covid you’ll know that this has long been a bone of contention for me. I did understand why it was very important to have each team mark their own in the couple of years after Covid. But you know, after Covid, one particular team suddenly went from being one of the weakest teams in the quiz, to being the second strongest – not just close to our team each week, but so much better than any of the others. To this day I cannot be certain that their scores were not kosher, but come on! Only a few months ago I caught them out giving themselves 15 points on a 14 point round, for example. Now, we all have to swap with a nearby team.

They weren’t there tonight. Well fair enough. We weren’t there last week. It happens. But I am quiz master next week, and if they are there I shall be watching them like a hawk to see if they are using any other kind of skulduggery. And if they can still post a really good performance without cheating that I can see, then bloody good luck to them.

If.

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