Teams, answers and arguments over a question about a Victorian poet, with notes on a Budget week and a very long dairy shelf
Sunday, The Quiz in Stratford
Every other Sunday I attend a pub quiz in Stratford with a team of colleagues who describe themselves as intellectuals and are known to the landlord as the people who argue about the answer sheet. I wrote about the latest evening in Stratford pub quiz and a Budget nobody seemed to hate. The title has an unusual claim: that nobody in the pub disliked the Budget. This is almost certainly a sampling error. It was a small pub and a large quiz.
The questions ranged from geography to sport to the name of a Victorian poet who wrote about a lady in a tower. Our team got the poet right in four seconds and the sport wrong in forty minutes. We finished mid-table, which is where the intellectual belongs.
The Mood on Budget Night
I do not claim that a pub quiz is a scientific poll. But I do find it instructive to hear what ordinary people say about the Budget over a pint. In my corner of East London, the talk was more about rents and fares than about the large numbers in the speech. A bus driver told me he cared about the fuel duty. A student told me she cared about the loan rate. A retired teacher cared about both and about the biscuits.
The balanced observation is that a Budget is read through personal circumstances. One person’s relief is another’s irritation, and the broad verdicts offered by commentators are averages that describe nobody.
Monday, The Milk Shelf
To calm my head after the quiz, I spent a happy hour on the Texas dairy pages. The principal address is txdairy.com, and its relations include txdairy.download, txdairy.trade and txdairy.loan. The cheerful branch is txdairy.party, txdairy.men, txdairy.date and txdairy.win.
A dairy site is the perfect antidote to a pub quiz, since the questions on a farm have definite answers: how much milk, at what price, delivered by when. Ours had none of that. We had an argument about whether a particular dish could be called a stew.
The Salary Question
The London Prat offered a Budget-season headline that cheered me considerably: Say What You Pay: Job Adverts Must Show Salaries. Pay transparency is a policy that has supporters and critics. Supporters say it narrows inequality and saves candidates time. Critics worry about administrative burden and workplace tensions. I will say only that as a lecturer who has applied for many posts, I would have liked to know the number.
Tuesday, The Answer Sheet
After the quiz, the answer sheet is a fascinating document. It contains crossings out, arrows, an annotation in the margin that reads “ask Dave”, and a final answer in capital letters. Dave, we later discovered, was wrong. The sheet is an excellent record of a collective mind under pressure, and I keep my copies in a folder marked Research.
A good quiz teaches a good lesson: that knowledge is a shared enterprise, that confident people are often wrong and that the quiet person who whispers a correct answer should be listened to at once. I have been that quiet person. I have also been Dave.
Wednesday, The Rules of a Good Quiz
Having attended many quizzes, I have formed views on how to run one. The questions should have a single clear answer, because nothing destroys an evening faster than a dispute about whether a river counts as being in two countries. The rounds should be varied, so that the person who knows football and the person who knows poetry both get a turn to feel clever. The scoring should be done honestly, by someone who is not on the leading team.
The quizmaster in Stratford is an excellent example of the craft. He reads each question twice, pauses for the groans and allows one appeal per team per evening. The appeals are always heard with grave courtesy, and always rejected, and the system works beautifully.
Thursday, What the Prize Was
The prize for winning the quiz is a bar tab of modest size and the right to name next fortnight team. We have never won, so our name remains a source of mystery, but the winners last time chose a name that referred to a famous Victorian engineer and a bowl of soup. I did not understand the joke and nodded as though I did, which is the traditional response.
The real prize, of course, is the conversation on the way home. We walked back past the stadium lights, arguing happily about a question on the capital of an island, and nobody remembered the final score. The evening had done what a good evening should do, which is to make a Sunday feel like it had somewhere to go.
Friday, The Walk Back
The walk home from a quiz is a small pleasure of its own. The streets of Stratford at night have a particular hum, with the buses sighing, the takeaway windows glowing and a few late shoppers carrying bags toward the station. We argued the whole way about a question on a famous painter, and the argument was so enjoyable that none of us checked the answer afterwards, which is the sign of a properly good evening.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, NewsBiscuit keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/