Two thirds of the team is operating on Bolivarian time
Oli has managed to get to the pub long before I turn up, which is no surprise but he seems angrier than usual this week. Stu turns up quite some time after even me, and I join Oli in slating his slack attitude to punctuality. Oli names our team in homage to Hugo Chávez moving Venezuela into a new time zone half an hour later than the previous one, and we get under way.
The most memorable question of the night is one which asks what words like wizard, bevy, hovels and vole have in common, and which US president’s surname also shares this property. We struggle to think of anything likely, and it looks like we’re going to struggle in vain. But while Stu and I work on the rest of the round, Oli goes into a kind of trance, writing down alphabets and scribbling furiously in his notepad. Just after question ten is read out, he emerges from his trance to tell us he has the answer. If A=1, B=2 etc, then the sum of the first and last letters and all the other letter pairs working inwards is 27.
The only problem then is to work out how to write this down sensibly in a box four inches wide and half an inch high. This takes us the rest of the time allowed. And the US president? James K. Polk, of course. We’re massively pleased with ourselves, Stu and I in spite of our minimal contribution to the answer, but we’re very disappointed to find that two other teams also managed to get the answer. We decide they were probably the two teams either side of us.
At the end of the quiz we’re yet again in the worst position, just outside the money in fourth position. Maybe we’ll do better next week when Patrick will be setting a quiz on a Christmas theme. He does this every year, and last year we won it. I tell him this and say we’ll be hoping to do the same next week. He tells me we might have a chance because the Christmas quiz is always dumbed down a bit for the occasion.