So - is the spark still there?

In all honesty I’m not sure. I a post that I made a few days ago I explained how a chance meeting with one of the regulars from the quiz at the rugby club led to me thinking seriously about giving it a go and seeing how I felt. I enlisted my youngest daughter and my son in law, and we decided to have a go.

For my first 25 years or so playing in this particular quiz we always began at about 9:15, which meant that we wouldn’t finish before 11, and often it would be around 11:30. The thing is, though, I’m no spring chicken any more. Bitter experience over the last two or three years has shown me that if I’m going to teach the next day, then I really have to be in bed by 10:30. That’s one of the reasons why I stopped going. Well, after the first lockdown, when the quiz did come back it was shifted to start at 8, which is certainly a good development for me.

Thursday’s quiz was a good, old fashioned General Knowledge quiz – 8 rounds of 10 questions. In the final analysis, I feel that we probably benefitted from not having a handout. To be honest, for the first 5 rounds, we seemed to be really playing for second place. In these rounds the best we could do was to post the same score as the leaders, and in 3 rounds we lost a point to them. Then in round 6 we wiped out the deficit, and in round 7 we established a 3 point lead. I’m not really sure how that happened, other than there were quite a few either/or questions in both rounds, where we zagged correctly, and maybe the other team zigged. We held on to 2 of the 3 point lead we took into the round.

So I’m buzzing about going back, and getting a win? No, actually, I’m not. Which really surprises me. When we last went to the quiz for several weeks in August last year, I was absolutely bouncing when we managed a few wins. Now, meh, so what? But then that may well be a good thing. If you twisted my arm, I’d admit that I’ve always taken quizzes too seriously. And I’ll be honest, there was another good sign when I didn’t badger the question master after he asked, “Who scored the first 147 break at the snooker World Championship?” You see, as I see it, the answer to the question the way that it has been asked is John Spencer. For whatever reason, the TV cameras were not running at the time, and it was several years before Cliff Thorburn came along and did it in front of the cameras. Rather than hectoring the question master, whom I don’t know, we just played the man rather than the ball and wrote down Cliff Thorburn. That was the answer he gave.

We’ve invited a couple of Jess and Dan’s friends to join us next week, so we’ll see how much we enjoy that. One thing I don’t see myself doing, though, is volunteering to compile the quiz for the foreseeable future. 25 years is enough, I’ve done my whack with that.