Washing the worm
Tuesday, December 19th, 2006It’s the last quiz of the year. Ivan is back from Paris, and has been looking forward to nothing so much as a good quiz. He says living abroad is making him feel more English than ever, which is strange because he’s half-Spanish and half-Croat. Judging by the evening, living abroad is actually making him quite a lot louder and slightly more bitter than usual. Pete turns up unexpectedly, looking a bit traumatised after a journey from Luton. Stu and I have just come up from central London and we’re not traumatised at all.
Evil Patrick is setting the quiz this week, which ought to mean he won’t win the snowball. We agree before the quiz starts that we’ve got a good feeling about it, but by the end of round one this feeling has entirely evaporated. We only know three answers, and we have a horrible feeling that the answer to a question about an actor might be OJ Simpson. But we have gathered that this round’s answers have some kind of biblical theme that we don’t quite understand, so we write down ‘John’, ‘Luke’ and ‘Isaiah’ in various boxes and hope for the best. We are astonished, when the answers are read out, to find that we are in joint first place - our guessing must be inspired tonight.
Round two’s answers are all connected with Christmas food. For a question about a house by the River with well-preserved 17th century gardens, I think the answer can only be Ham House. My team-mates ridicule me. We also work out that the bark of the Ceiba tree must be used for stuffing, and that the Italian for ‘with onions’ is cipollata. Ivan inexplicably starts shouting and swearing in Italian on hearing this question. When the answers are read out, I’m vindicated about Ham House, but we’ve slipped into second place.
The beer round involves filling in the blanks in quotes about marriage. We only get one right, but Patrick has said he’ll give points for any particularly witty wrong answers. Presumably we’re on some kind of comedy form because he gives us five points, which to our great astonishment is the joint top score. It’s all down to the tiebreaker: when was ‘The Night Before Christmas’ written? We say 1848. Everyone else in the pub gives 20th century dates, but the actual answer is 1823 and so the beer money is ours.
Round three is about more food. I had no idea that Canadians call nice spring days ’sugar days’, but luckily Pete did. And we all know that Dr. Seuss’s book which only uses 50 words is ‘Green Eggs and Ham’, although we’re no longer sure that there’s a Christmas connection going on here. The biggest challenge is working out what links Agulhas, Azores, Antarctic, Alaska, Antilles and Angola. The minutes tick by, and an intense silence hangs over our table. I know that Agulhas means ‘needles’ in Portuguese, but at the moment this knowledge is useless. Patrick is demanding our answers in tones of increasing irritation. We’ve almost given up when Stu suddenly says ‘currents’. They’re all ocean currents of course, and against the normal form we’ve moved back up into the lead.
We feel sure we’re about to crack under the intense pressure, and there’s sudden chaos when Ivan manages to collide with someone while buying drinks. As the bar staff sweep up shards of glass, we get our heads down for the fourth round. After intense scribbling we work out that a seasonal anagram of ‘Australian’ is ‘Saturnalia’, and we also know that Mikhail Gorbachev was the world leader who resigned on Christmas Day 1991 and that David Healy is the footballer to whom fans sing ‘Away in a Manger’. We don’t know why they do that, but it doesn’t matter - almost every team in the house has scored 16 points and so we preserve a narrow lead to win for the first time in ages. Of course none of us win the snowball, lack of Evil Patrick notwithstanding, but we head out happily into the cold foggy night, wondering just what to blow £5.25 each on.