Our food from last week still hasn’t arrived
The pub is heaving this week, and I want to call our team “Who the hell over-publicized this place anyway?”, seeing as Marcus, who over-publicized the place with a book about it, is setting the quiz. Stu over-rules me, saying it “won’t do us any favours”, and so we have a dig at the landlord instead. With 17 teams in, Marcus becomes headmasterly in his efforts to control the proceedings. “Will you all…. please…. shut…. UP!”, he shouts. The rabble calms, and the quiz gets underway.
Our first two rounds are marked by some astonishing guesses. What product’s logo features Major General Sir Hector MacDonald, being served tea by an Indian servant? Sir Hector was apparently a Victorian military legend, serving with the Gordon Highlanders in Afghanistan, Sudan and South Africa to widespread acclaim. This isn’t any sort of clue, but Oli has some vague recollection that Camp Coffee has someone in a kilt on the front of it, so we put that and it’s right. Rather poignantly, it turns out that Sir Hector shot himself in 1903 when facing a court-martial for homosexuality.
We also manage to guess that the Mountain Chicken of Montserrat is actually a frog, and when faced with a profusion of questions about Poet Laureates, we score two out of three by putting whichever seems most plausible out of Betjeman and Tennyson, these being the only two Poet Laureates we know. But I earn aggressive disapproval from my team-mates when I insist, for reasons I can’t entirely recall now, that Cardinal Wolsey was Archbishop of Canterbury rather than York as they believe.
The beer round involves naming films, given the title of the short story they were based on, and the year the film was released. Stu is on blazing form with this, and quickly gets six of the seven, including 2001: A Space Odyssey being based on The Sentinel and not, as Oli and I had thought, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The tricky seventh is the 1946 film based on The Greatest Gift. I think it must be It’s A Wonderful Life - more than that, I know it must be that. Stu says that was released earlier than 1946. I protest, but he and Oli invite me to remember Cardinal Wolsey, and they put down Miracle on 34th Street. We buy our own drinks before the start of round three.
We’re looking to make up about five points to get into the money, and we think we might have a chance after a good third round, in which Stu recalls after several minutes of gripping his forehead fiercely that Cal Trask, Jim Stark and Jett Rink were the three major roles of James Dean. But we slip up, when asked what happened when Ashley Revell sold every single thing he owned, and bet it all on one spin of a roulette wheel, changing his mind on what colour he called after the ball had been released. We think the ball must have landed on zero, or at the very least that his change of mind was a terrible, terrible error, but somewhat prosaically it turns out that he actually doubled his money. We finish in the worst position of all, just outside the money.
The snowball is worth 180 pounds this week and Evil Patrick is looking strangely confident. We are very relieved when someone else’s number is drawn. Which band released albums called Second Coming and Garage Flower? The person who is on the spot doesn’t know, so as usual Chris asks if anyone else knows. Everybody else knows, and people elsewhere in Highgate must be wondering why they just heard a hundred people shouting “The Stone Roses!”. I am now reconciled to the fact that never will an insanely easy question coincide with my number being drawn.
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