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PTA quiz tonight at the kids’ school. Last year we were in a team where about a third of the members turned up off their faces drunk - making the most of a night away from the kids and why fucking not- and the team gradually depleted as the booze flowed leaving me and one other guy trying to get us through. We ended up about 7th. This time, although everyone but me was making the most of the bar, there was a lot more focus (until maybe the last couple of rounds) and we seemed to be making a decent fist of it. I was feeling pretty tired and this was my first non-working night out for a while, but as I was driving four of us back to our village I couldn’t slope off early. It was good to test my staying power, and though I was flagging by the end and keen to get back and eschewed the offer of one more drink in the pub, I made it to the end.
We’d made a decent fist of it and only had a couple of questions where we’d debated an answer and then chosen the wrong one, but the only time the score had been read out, after round 2, when we’d already played our joker, we’d been trailing by 6 points and we didn’t think we’d done well enough to win. We should have played our joker on the last round when we got 9 out of 10, only failing to give Barbie’s full name and had been asked who the only British PM to be assassinated was (Spencer Perceval dudes - I even knew the year and place it happened (1812 - lobby of the House of Commons - I even used to know the assassin’s name - John Bellingham, but I had to look that up).
We’d done pretty well with the picture rounds, I thought, failing only on the one where you had to identify different pizzas from Dominos and Papa Johns (but it turned out that no one could do that) and we’d nearly got full marks on the music rounds where we had to name the title and artists of various records AND spot the link (which I did after two songs, and more or less one - they were all Comic Relief singles). So maybe we had a shot, but three teams had tied for second place and we would have been very happy to be one of them
Somehow though we won the whole thing. What a triumph. This trumps Taskmaster Champion of Champions.
We got home to find that our baby sitter had been sat in the dark for fifteen minutes as the fuse for the downstairs lights had been tripped. It tripped the next two times I tried to turn it back on, but held the third time - not sure why. Always nice to have an electrical mystery to worry about as you’re heading to sleep.
I was glad to have got through a relatively normal day - I’d had a bit more time in bed in the morning, but then recorded some podcast links in the afternoon and was feeling basically OK. Had I overexerted myself with general knowledge? I maybe should have had an early night.
