A few years ago, my local pub used to run a fortnightly pub-quiz on Sunday nights. Reallyfatbloke, Blight-of-my-life, Chemical Al and I were regular participants in this, with our team ' "B" Ark '.
When the long serving (and probably long suffering) landlord and lady retired, the pub underwent some radical, and unwelcome changes. The new tenants are perfectly charming, but the arrival of vast plasma screened TV's, wall-to-wall football memorabilia and the tendency for spillages, mashed crisps and other crap left on the tables by the lunch-time crowd still being there in the evening made the place very unappealing.
We stopped going to the quiz.
Finally, we found another local pub which has a quiz each month, so on Sunday evening, we all trekked off to"The Poachers". This is an excellent drinking establishment, with some fine brews on tap, and a decent menu of well cooked and tasty bar food. The folks who run it clearly enjoy what they do and have always made me feel at home. The only down-side is that of the 20 odd pubs in the town, it's the furthest from home. The walk is a good excuse to work up a thirst though.
The place was really busy, which is something of an achievement for a Sunday night at the tail end of January, but we found a table and prepared to demonstrate our ignorance.
Surprisingly, we did pretty well. Considering that there was a 'Sport' round, a 'People' round and a 'pictures-of-celebrities-to-identify' round, we didn't disgrace ourselves.
Our favourite question of the night was; In which sport do the two teams play into different sized goals? We 'ummed and erred' over this for quite a while, until an outbreak of lateral thinking gave us 'water polo', on the basis that there would be a deep end and a shallow end in the swimming pool, so different length goalposts. Result!!
Sadly, however, we didn't know that a carpophagous creature eats fruit, we failed to remember that Marilyn Monroe was the first Playboy centre-fold and we had no idea that the Assistant Commissioner of the United Provinces of India had a son who became better known as 'Biggles'.
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Beer is a terrible thing. As the resident former emptymologist on the team, I was reddened to recall the next morning that Oryzaephilus is the grain weevil - Carpohilus is the Dried Fruit Beetle - bit of a clue in the name.
ReplyDeleteMMMmmmm!... Beer.
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