5589/18609
Quiz night in my village and with all my many failures on Pointless and Mastermind I am sure the locals were quaking in their boots. I did pretty well, but our team, Hoof Hearted Again (I did not choose the name) came 8th out of 17 teams, which is the kind of mediocrity expected from my quizzing skills.
But how cool to take part in a boozy quiz with the people who happen to live in the same collection of houses as us. It’s great to be part of a community. Although Shepherd’s Bush had a vibe where everything belonged to anyone (or at least whoever could grab it and sell it down the market) we didn’t have anything like this. It was a good quiz with the right amount of silliness and challenge, enough to take seriously, but enough to know that it didn’t matter if you didn’t win. There were fish and chips halfway through and everyone got nicely pickled. A few of us poured into the local pub once it was over, though I was conscious that I had a long day tomorrow, with two gigs in Brighton (and I admit I was slightly regretting the hubris of adding the afternoon gig. Sure, a couple of dozen people who hadn’t managed to get tickets to the evening performance will get to see the show, but it’s a lot more effort for me at a time when I am continually falling asleep in the afternoon.) Plus now I was going to be hungover too. And I hadn’t even won an Easter egg for my frankly astonishing recognition of a blurred picture of a young Winston Churchill and the fact that I knew polyorchid meant having more than two testicles. But was it worth getting that right in return for making my new neighbours wonder how or why I would know? They tried to guide me away from the answer, telling me that orchids and stamen, not testes. And they shook my faith a little - I mean who has more than two testicles? But I stuck to my guns and am thus forever branded a weirdo.
With genital knowledge like this how did we not win this? I won't be brooding on it until next year’s contest. I quickly get over all quiz disappointments. It’s not that important to me.
I don’t know if we just got lucky, but the people in our village are a good group of people. We are mainly meeting the drunks to be fair, but I think that might be everyone. We didn’t know anything about this place before we came to look at the house we would end up buying and we had really been looking for something closer to a train station, but we liked the house (unaware that it wanted to kill us at that point) and we took a punt and we seem to have landed on our feet.
I am not going to do the Edinburgh Fringe this year, so once the tour is over and I have got my other writing work done (that I am totally failing to do), I am going to enjoy our first proper summer in this village and unless something amazing comes in, take a few months off to be with my family. With the podcast, the tour, the sitcom and my other secret project I am comfortably doing six months work in the next three months, so I can afford to take my holidays and my weekends all in a big 12 week lump. And maybe I will enjoy that enough to think about pushing myself a little bit less hard. If I can get through to the end of the month with 10 gigs and four podcast records in the next 13 days. And hundreds of miles of travel, including going to Glasgow and back twice.
So much for getting the first drafts of my sitcom scripts in by the end of the month as promised. Thus far I have zero pages and rough ideas of situation for three of the four episodes.
