Tough competition
Jeremy Clarke
‘Whatever happens,’ said a bloke onthe team at the next table rancour ously, ‘we mustn’t let the students win.’ I’d not taken part in a pub quiz before and I’d always imagined them to be polite, melancholy affairs. This one, when we arrived ten minutes before the start, was noisy, chaotic and overcrowded. The students were staying at the field-study centre on the outskirts of the village and were out celebrating the end of a project. The locals were annoyed with the students for monopolising most of the tables. Also, perhaps, for being younger, better-looking and better-educated. Well, an education is one thing, and general knowledge another, and the man spoke for many in his determination to prove to these young students that the accumulated fund of useless information stored in his head was greater than that in theirs.
Our quiz team had driven over from the next village, a distance of about three miles as the crow flies. You’d think we’d come overland from China via the Silk Route, such was the team at the next table’s surprise at our presence there. We were four: Brian and Rose from next door, me and my Mum. On paper, it was a promising team. Rose knows everything. Anything she doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing. Why she isn’t running the country, I don’t know. Her partner Brian is a keen sailor and knows about the sea. I’m not bad on capital cities and dogs, and my Mum knows a fair bit about God. If all else fails, she can pray for us.
We got off to the worst possible start. The first round was called ‘Doors and Entrances’. The quizmaster came around distributing a sheet of paper to each team. On each sheet were photographs of 16 village front doors. We had to write down, she said, to whom each of the front doors belonged. Of course we hadn’t a damn clue about any of them, not living in their village, and nor had the students. Brian very much resented the selfsatisfied looks we were getting from the team of locals on the next table, he said. He had a good mind, he said, to go over and ‘kick some ass’.
So we were 16 points down before we’d started. We were further handicapped because we couldn’t hear the quizmaster properly. We were far away and his voice was sometimes drowned by the conversation of those around the bar. Also my Mum didn’t have her hearing aid in, and Rose couldn’t hear much even though both her hearing aids were turned right up. So I stood up and cupped my ear towards the quizmaster and relayed each question to Brian, who passed it on to them.
The first question was: Where would you find a Eustachian tube? ‘What?’ said Brian. ‘Eustachian tube,’ I said. ‘Where would you find it?’ Brian leaned low over the table. ‘Where would you find a Eustachian tube?’ ‘What!’ they said in unison. ‘Eustachian tube!’ shouted Brian. The quizmaster considerately made his way over to our table to repeat his question. Ignoring Brian, Rose and my Mum craned forward to get the question straight from the horse’s mouth. ‘Where would you find a Eustachian tube?’ said the quizmaster, raising his voice to make himself heard above the background chatter. ‘What!’ chorused my Mum and Rose. ‘Eustachian tube!’ he shouted. By now the team on the next table and one or two besides were also shouting, ‘Eustachian tube! Eustachian tube!’ at us, as if we were all mentally deficient in our village, as well as cloth-eared.
None of us could hazard a guess where we might find a Eustachian tube. We didn’t know either which number was most likely to show up, according to the law of probability, on two thrown dice. Nor did we know the names of David Beckham’s children, nor of any of the three islands off Venice. Brian said he used to know the name of the famous English admiral whose fleet was wrecked off the Scilly Isles, but for the present it escaped him.
After the scores had been totted up, the quiz was won by the team at the table next to ours. We were second to last. All the student teams had done badly. The man who’d urged his team not to let the students win was aggressively jubilant.
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