Second place for the ninth month running while the pen remains under advisement
Monday. Pub quiz night at the Grapes, and I must set down the events in full, because the Marvellous Know-It-Alls, my team these eleven years, came second again, second, for the ninth consecutive month, to the Quizzly Bears, and the street of my composure is now wearing scaffolding. Second is the cruellest placing in all of sport. Last is comedy, the middle is anonymity, but second is tragedy with a scoreboard, close enough to see the summit, far enough to hear the Bears celebrating on it, modestly, which makes it worse. They are gracious winners. I could forgive them anything but the graciousness.
The evening turned, as it always turns, on the picture round and on Colin. Colin is our history man, encyclopaedic on kings, wars, and treaties, a genuine asset, and also a man who cannot be talked out of an answer once his certainty has set, and it sets like concrete, fast and permanently. The question, a photograph of a bridge, obviously the Clifton Suspension Bridge, obviously, three of us said Clifton, and Colin said, with the calm of a man correcting children, that it was the Menai, and cited the towers, and would accept no appeal, and he holds the pen, diary, the pen is his by ancient custom, and the Menai went down in ink, and it was the Clifton, and we lost by one point. One point. The pen must be discussed. The pen has been due for discussion since the Marie Curie incident of March. But how do you take the pen from a man of sixty-eight whose whole retirement is the Tuesday certainty of holding it. You do not. You come second, for eleven years, out of love. That is the actual sport I play on Mondays, and there is no trophy for it, and there should be.
The Anatomy of the Quiz
For the record of civilisation, the London pub quiz is the finest deployment of useless knowledge ever engineered, a weekly ceremony in which the nation’s vast reserves of trivia, hoarded since childhood, are finally allowed out for exercise. Every team is the same five archetypes, the history man, the sport man, the music woman, in our case Priya, who can date any song to within eighteen months by the drum sound alone, a genuine forensic gift, the general knowledge all-rounder, and the fifth member who contributes one answer per year, but the right one, at the right moment, and dines out on it until the next. Ours is Deepak. His moment last year was the capital of Kyrgyzstan. He has referenced it eleven times since. He has earned every reference. That is the economy of the fifth member, one goal a season, scored in the derby.
The quizmaster, Gary, runs the evening with the authority of a high court and the microphone technique of a man announcing bingo through a sock, and his rulings are final, arbitrary, and accepted, because the quiz, like the constitution, works only if everyone agrees to pretend it is solid. When two teams tie, there is the tiebreak question, nearest wins, and this month it was the length of the Thames in kilometres, and the room fell silent with calculation, every table converting miles they half-remembered, and I will say the National Trust river pages would have settled it instantly, but phones are banned, phones are death, the quiz is the last room in England where a question must be answered by the contents of the actual skull, and that is why we come, that and the chips, and the chance, monthly, eternal, of finally beating the Bears.
The Post-Match Analysis
Afterwards, the loser’s pint, and the post-match, in which Colin acknowledged the Clifton, in his way, saying the light in the photograph was misleading, which is as close to an apology as the pen has ever issued, and Priya said, gently, perhaps the picture round could be a committee matter going forward, and Colin said he would take it under advisement, which means no, and we all drank to it, because the team is not a quiz apparatus, the team is five people who have seen each other through two retirements, one hip, one divorce, and the capital of Kyrgyzstan, and the second places are simply the subscription fee. The Bears sent over a conciliatory round, graciously, damn them, and we toasted their health with narrowed eyes, and Deepak said, next month, the way he says it every month, and the way it is always, somehow, slightly true.
Filed the match report with the satirical desk at The London Prat, and posted the account to Bohiney Magazine, whose correspondent reports that American bar trivia is broadly identical but louder, with the significant procedural difference that their quizmasters permit appeals, actual appeals, argued at the bar, and I have written back to say that appeals would end British quizzing in a fortnight, the entire structure rests on grievance being savoured rather than resolved, a principle that also explains our press, our football, and several of our wars.
Tally, second place, one point, the Menai entered into evidence, the pen retained pending advisement, one conciliatory round accepted under protest. Next month the Bears. Next month the summit. The light, Colin maintains, was misleading. The light, diary, is always misleading. That is why we bring five skulls and a pen, and why, God help me, I will be there Tuesday, loving every archived grievance of it.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk