Eat my brains
It’s me, Ivan, Pete and Pete’s dad tonight. Pete and Ivan are both avoiding doing any work - Pete for his finals, Ivan for his PhD. I don’t have any work to avoid. Pete’s dad has done his work.
Round one starts very promisingly. I know that George Bush Intercontinental Airport in in Houston because I passed through there on the way to Central America. Pete’s Dad knows that the Royal Engineers and Oxford University are former FA cup winners. Pete knows that the Belgrano survived Pearl Harbour before it was bought by the Argentine Navy, and Ivan knows a few things as well. Pete has a flashy pen to write the answers down but sadly he can’t spell. Despite this, when the scores come back we’re in joint 1st place.
Round two is not bad as well - we’re managing not to talk ourselves out of correct answers like we usually do, and although we drop a few marks we’re still joint first.
The beer round consists of five answers linked by a theme. We work out that all the answers are books from the Old Testament, but we only get four out of five, and so we’re forced to buy our own drinks before round three begins.
As we feared, round three sees the onset of a slump in form. It’s a music-themed round, and it’s all about the kinds of music we don’t listen to. One of the answers was David Hasselhoff. We’ve slipped to third, five points off the lead, and we fear we may be flouncing out of the pub in disgust at closing time.
As round four progresses, though, we feel a bit more confident. Pete’s dad supplies several inspired answers, saying ‘that’s the kind of thing you used to learn in the pre-gameboy era’. Ivan insists that Emlyn Hughes used to play for Melchester Rovers - none of us believe him but he looks angry so we put it down. I almost convince myself that Equatorial Guinea is the smallest country in mainland Africa before I see sense and write down Gambia. When the answers are read out, we’re astonished to hear that we’ve scored full marks. Ivan is vindicated and floats about two inches above his chair, radiating smugness.
But the drama’s not over - we’ve caught up but we haven’t overtaken, and we’re in a tie-break situation for first place. We knew in the previous round that Matthew Parris has run the fastest marathon time for an MP - now we have to guess what it is. I know it’s around 2 hours 30 - the others think that’s way too fast. I insist. The other team puts 3 hours 4 minutes. The correct answer is 2h32m57s, and I feel almost as smug as Ivan. We walk away with 25 pounds, and even failing yet again to win the snowball doesn’t matter too much.
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