I don’t know if you’ve ever had an enforced lay off from
quizzing for a couple of weeks, when you’d normally go to two or three quizzes
every week, but I find it a very disorientating experience. In the normal run
of things, the only thing which would make me miss quizzing for this length of
time would be a visit to Spain, and even then I’d get in a crafty quiz if I
could find one. I won’t go on about my illness over Christmas – I’m starting to
even bore myself about it now – but I worked out the other day that due to said
illness I went from the 18th December right through to the 4th
January without attending a single quiz. That’s worse than famine rations,
that’s starvation rations.
It’s just as well I went out on Sunday, though. I wasn’t
feeling completely recovered, but knowing that I was definitely going back to
work on the Monday I thought that I needed to give myself a little reward, and
so attended the quiz in the Fox and Hounds in Blackmill. This is a little gem
of a quiz. It’s home made, there’s a small and regular number of teams who
attend, who are all very friendly, there’s no prize for the main quiz, and the
questions are all pretty wide ranging. My best mate John was still in Hong
Kong, so Jessie said she’d come, and so off we went. Now, I say that there’s no
prize for the main quiz, and that’s not strictly true. The winning team wins 4
free drinks, but we never take them and always pass them on to the 2nd
placed team. There is also a prize for the jackpot question, though. The
jackpot is always a number question.
Last Sunday we were asked what was the total area of
Bridgend County in square miles. Now, how should I put this – John is the king
of the jackpot question . . . and I’m not. I don’t even live in Bridgend, so I
didn’t really have a clue. I thought that if it was about 10 miles long by 10
miles wide, then it would be 100, minus a couple of miles for luck, so I
plumped for 98. When the answers were taken in the question master announced
–“Well, one of you has obviously heard it before. The answer is 98.4 square
miles.” Cue much explanation on my part, but nobody really believed that it was
a guess. Oh well.
We won the quiz, which was a nice start to the week, but
this was followed by our first Bridgend Quiz League match of 2015, against
TyRisha. Every year we seem to have one of those nights after Christmas, and last
Monday kind of was too. Everything in the garden was rosy until we came to the individual
round. I’m not exactly sure how I did it, but I managed to ensure that although
at least one member of the team knew the answer to 3 of our 4 questions, the
wrong person was matched to the wrong question, and our lead was practically
wiped out. In the end we scraped a draw, and I feel a little sorry for the boys
from TyRisha, since, if I’m honest, they probably had the better of the match
overall, and we couldn’t have complained if they’d have won. We’ve been drawn
against them in the cup quarter final, and they may well fancy their chances in
that. Don’t blame them if they do.
On to last night, and the end of year quiz. Ah, when I look
back to years gone by – going back maybe 4 or 5 years ago, and way back into
the mists of time before that, if my team didn’t win the end of year quiz in
the rugby club, then I would feel like sulking for the whole rest of the year.
How times change. Maybe three or four years ago we had a couple of teams make a
mockery of it by using their phones, and since we stopped that, the relative
strengths of the teams have changed. On a good night we’re second best, and
there’s no point me crying about it. So while I never thought I’d say this, the
fact is that I wasn’t unhappy that we were able to cling on for second place
last night. Time was when I would try to spend a few nights preparing just for
this quiz, but, I don’t know, life sometimes just seems to get in the way of
your quizzing. Enjoyed it though, even though the name ‘Uber’ just wouldn’t
come.
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