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Tonight I went to my third quiz night in support of the excellent charity PEAS, a charity dedicated to providing secondary education in Africa. It's a great cause, but I also love doing quizzes and eating dinner which is a great incentive to help out. When I arrived the man I met from the charity said he was a big fan of RHLSTP and that when they'd booked the guests they had taken their lead from people I'd interviewed. This seemed to be the case as Harry Shearer, John Lloyd, Victoria Coren Mitchell, Alexei Sayle and Stephen Merchant were all in attendance. It was the first time I'd seen Stephen since our slightly awkward podcast chat, but he doesn't seem to bear a grudge and chatted happily, which is a relief. Although I have made some comic mileage out of my failings in that interview I am a massive fan of Stephen and would be mortified if he was anything more than briefly annoyed with me.
Jeremy Paxman was, as always at these PEAS events, the quizmaster. He said hello to me as I came in. I've come a long way since touching his briefcase with one of my hands in a lift in 1994.
We were dining and quizzing in the impressive environs of Vintner's Hall near Mansion House, a wood panelled room, filled with history. On the wall was an impressively carved lion and unicorn, which was a bit distracting because the unicorn was proudly standing on its hind legs and displaying its penis. The penis seemed to follow you round the room. Was it necessary to include the penis (the lion didn't seem to have one, but then maybe it was a female lion and maybe the unicorn was excited because it fancies lions and was about to try and screw it)? The unicorn is a mythical beast and it seems somehow inappropriate to think of it having regular mammalian genitalia. Don't unicorns reproduce by sneezing glitter over each other? Or by entering a big soap bubble and flying over the magical rainbow land? The idea of noble unicorns rutting away like common horses quite put me off my salmon starter. I should maybe have been thinking more about education in Africa or at least the answers to the quiz, but I was thinking about unicorn reproduction for most of the night.
There were a lot of geography, sport and music questions, which are my worst trivia subjects, but I did manage to get a few answers right, guiding our team to an impressive 5th place out of 14. I also risked drinking more than one glass of alcohol for the first time in a while and it didn't have any immediate negative effects, apart from making me look at unicorn genitalia a bit more than I should.
It was fun to get out and let my hair down and chat with some friends and worth the risk of a hangover.
