Pub Quiz Night

11Mar10

Well, every month it happens. And every month its the same. Here is how I spent last night.

Mr & Mrs A call for me, we exchange code words & library books. We walk up the hill. We enter the pub. We buy beer. We sit at OUR table (far room, LH corner). We discuss a lunatic policy for increasing trade to a nearby town. The lights flash. There is an explosion. I see a white blue flash. A lightbulb has projected itself across the (luckily) empty room. I blame Mrs A as she had just kissed Mr A. We discuss cutting her scalp & making her bleed so we can sue. We decide against this. We talk about Coventry. Ric comes to our table to say hello – he is on my other team. I am hoping for a team transfer.My other team has enough members tonight. My old team is lacking members, as Funny Little Fat Man has failed to turn up. I stay where I belong, in the corner. The pub fills up. We pay £1.50 per person for the pleasure of being questioned for the next few hours. It begins. I remember how much I hate the person asking the questions.  We start of b y getting 6/10 on first round. Questions include something like “which millionaire gave schoolchild in Chicago free milk” we answer Howard Hughes as Mr A says he had a thing for milk. The answer is Al Capone. Next round and we are fading fast. I crack open the mini eggs. I can’t remember which Henry Falstaff dies in, but entertain(?) the rest of the team with as much of the St Crispins Day speech as I can remember. We then have to think about dwarfs. Then Mr A & I are amazed that no-one else knows what verdigris is. Frank Says gets the National Park question wrong. Mrs A draws pictures next to our answers, illustrating them. For the answer to the question “who wrote Jerusalem”, next to William Blake she draws an egg. We question the egg and are told its a rugby ball, as its the song they sing. Mr A & I just give up. Mrs A has run out of time to draw the W.I. I keep singing Jerusalem. We don’t get extra points for the drawings. The team marking our questions love Mrs A’s spelling of the artist famous for painting in nightclubs – Latrek. We are then given a map of the world and have to identify the cities marked with black arrows. I pass my Moleskine diary to Mrs A, who peers under the table at it. Mr A thinks the black arrow marked H pointing to a blob under Australia is Hawaii. I confidentially fill in Hobart. I also confidentially fill in Dar es Salaam, Bangkok, Talin, Puerto Rica, San Francisco, Beijing, Laos and Mumbai. Only some of those are right.Mrs A is fed up already. We are then encouraged to buy more beer, we opt for coke. The question master ruins the football for anyone who wanted to find out the results later. Sausages and piles of bread & butter are dished out to each team. We scoff the lot. I check my Twitter feed on my phone & chuckle away at @themanwhofell’s tweets about Masterchef. I show them to Mrs A. She doesn’t laugh. She asks “who is Greg?”. Mrs A & I go to the ladies. All the cubicles are full, so I wait. I then start to knock on the doors, as you can’t really tell if anyone is in them or not, and there is nothing more stupid then wetting yourself when all the toilets are, in fact, free. A voice tells me that someone is using the facilities. I apologies for knocking. The voice answers “is that Sian”. I laugh. It is someone I used to work with. Anyway, back to the quiz. Its a round about March. We get some questions right. But not the one about what flower is the flower of March. Its not daffodil. Frank Says gets the gymnophobia question right. Frank Says is on a sugar high from the mini eggs. It is not a good high. The question master then sings the first line of an Elvis song. This is my main reason for disliking him – he sings at any opportunity. I then get worried about which Batman, but  it was Michael Keaton, so thats OK. He then ruins an AE Houseman poem, just by quoting it. I pull out the Moleskine again & read my favourite AE Houseman quote to the team. We  contemplate leaving whilst Frank Says is in the loos. Mrs A being Frank Say’s daughter stops this from happening. We get the Trivial Pursuit question wrong. Mrs A then throws my safe cosy world into chaos by knowing the correct answer to a topical question – which Lord is in the papers for being a non-dom. Mrs A doesn’t normally know such things. I am rocked. We are going past the “fun” point of the evening. To the question “Why was Spenser Percival unique  in British politics” we answer “because he had no heart, a wooden leg, an owl for a pet. Unsurprisingly we get it wrong. Its all over, shockingly we haven’t won. But the lovely team next to us have. They often do. Am sure they benefit from having a real-live American on their team. I loiter and talk to my other team. Their captain Ms D shows off her Bunny pencil, made from recylced paper. She even has a sharpener to show how it sharpens to reveal curls of paper. Knowing I am a member of #stationeryclub she gives me this pencil.I don’t get the sharpener. I let her eat some of my mini eggs. We all go home. The End.

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Tags: beer, bunny pencil, gymnophobia, quiz, sharpener, Wednesday night, wooden leg