My Boy Done Good

I did say last week that I’d let you know how Dan get on being Question Master down the club on Thursday night. Well, I’m delighted to say that the lad done good. Or to put it another way, he produced a good quiz that everyone seemed to enjoy. Ever since I learned that he was going to be question master, I’d tried very hard to bite my tongue and not barrage him with advice – goes with the territory being a teacher, I’m afraid – but one thing I did say was that while people might complain that a quiz is too hard, they don’t tend to complain that a quiz is too easy. Dan produced a quiz that gave all the teams the chance to achieve a high score, while there was enough to separate the metaphorical men from the boys of the same ilk.

My favourite question of the evening was this one – I don’t remember the exact wording, but the gist of it was this:-

In the Waldorf Salad episode of Fawlty Towers, when the American guest explains what a Waldorf salad is, he gives a list of five ingredients. If you can name three of them, you get one point. If you can name all five, you get 2 points.

Nice question. I imagine that most teams ticked off apples – celery – walnuts as we did. We had mayonnaise, but missed out on grapes, so got just the one. 1 point, and a good question that I shall undoubtedly steal and reuse a couple of years down the line.

On Thursday Adam from our team volunteered to be question master in a couple of weeks’ time. I’m looking forward to that. Then my daughter Jess told me this morning that she is currently compiling a quiz, and when she is ready, then she will tell Dai Norwich. When this happens then all regular members of our team will have compiled a quiz and acted as QM. I may possibly be wrong, but I believe that may well make us the first team in the more than a quarter of a century that I’ve been attending the quiz where all the regular members of the team have acted as QM.

There was just one small incident at the quiz on Thursday. Dan asked which rank in the British Army is immediately below Lieutenant Colonel. Now, we have a group of about a dozen people who come every week, leave just after half time, and don’t play as a team, but do listen to the quiz. When Dan pronounced the word lieutenant as ‘lootenant’ one of them shouted out “It’s LEFFTENANT! – We’re not in America!” As one, my team all glared at her, and one of us quietly said “Leave him alone! It’s his first quiz. You’re not even playing.” Yes, of course it was me. Well, I’m not saying that she heard me, but she did come up to our table at half time and asked us to apologise to Dan for her, but it was just something she felt strongly about. I did briefly consider explaining to her the French origins of the word lieutenant, but let it go. Does this mean I have to turn in my certified pedant’s membership card now?