Hang onto your bread and butter

 There’s an old saying. I can’t remember which of my quiz mentors said it to me first, but it goes something like this – you win more quizzes by answering the bread and butter questions correctly than by answering caviar questions correctly. By which he obviously meant that there’s a body of knowledge that you get asked about quite a lot in quizzes, and if you have that knowledge, then you’re not going to do badly. Last night’s quiz in the rugby club was, for my team, a good, old fashioned bread and butter quiz. While we by no means had every question right – I’ll come to the last round shortly - - I can’t think of any whythe’ell questions (as in – why the ‘ell is he asking that?) that came up last night. Question master last night was a member of the team we just about scraped past last week, so they were weakened, and right up until the last round a relatively comfortable win looked on the cards. The last round consisted of 10 questions, and we had a five point lead. Now, up to this round, I’d say at least 8 of the questions each round we’d known, and in most of the rounds we’d had one or two correct guesses. Well, we knew 5 for definite in the last round. . . and none of the guesses came off. So while our lead was not completely wiped out, we ended up scraping home by a point.

The most annoying thing about the last round was not that we had the answers on the table for several of the ones we had wrong, and zigged when we should’ve zagged. No, the really annoying thing was that the other ones we had wrong were things that I know that I used to know. Now, not including the family quizzes I made during lockdown, I haven’t made a quiz for the club or anywhere else for probably over 18 months. So not playing in quizzes for much of that time either, I find I’ve lost some of the bread and butter. The shame of it.