Glorious victory…and why I haven’t written anything

I’ve had a busy week and haven’t had the time to sit down and write anything with the plumber coming in to change radiators, a spa evening on Wednesday and a trip to London yesterday for a matinee show of ‘The Thirty Nine Steps’ and dinner out.

Highlight of the week was victory in the Lightwater Village Quiz for my team on Friday night. This is a very well put together quiz which for the last 26 years has raised funds for the village church. We’ve previously won it and last year lost in the final. This year we won the 10 round table quiz by some distance and then had a very narrow victory by one point over the team who beat us last year in the buzzer round semi-final up on stage. The final was a longer contest of similar format which we pulled away to win comfortably. Everyone contributed answers; great team performance.  

            I will write next week…yes really.

Workshop

I went to the monthly meeting of my writing group, the T-Party, yesterday. We meet once a month in a pub in London to critique work and talk about writing. We had 2 novel openings to critique yesterday, and I was impressed by the degree of consensus between the 15 people present. It doesn’t always happen that way, and then the writer can be left not knowing which way to go with their work. I don’t think either author was left in any doubt yesterday – good work T-Party.

Most unexpected

I went down to St Mary’s yesterday to watch Southampton play Manchester City with a mate from work who is a City supporter. I must confess I didn’t give Southampton much chance. I’ve watched the highlights of plenty of City games this season and they are capable of some outstanding football. Southampton had been playing well but not winning games – last week’s draw with Wigan a prime example. I thought we would most likely get beaten by 2 or 3, and at 5.25 I would have taken a draw.

That’s not how it worked out. Southampton were excellent, City were poor. We played them off the park, winning 3-1 with one of the strangest own goals I’ve ever seen, scored by Gareth Barry. It should have been more; there was a shout for a penalty which looked pretty good from 70 yards away and even better on TV.

If Southampton continue to play like that they will stay in the Premier League and deservedly so.

Good night !

Last night was a good night!

In addition to running quizzes, I enjoy doing them. I am part of a small but elite team who go out once a week or so to compete in local pub quizzes and last night we triumphed. By that I mean, not only did we win the quiz but, as winners, we picked the correct envelope and came away with the jackpot that had been rolling over for the last few weeks. It almost made up for all the other times we’d won and picked the wrong envelope and finished up with a bottle of wine or 10 free quiz entries.

Quiz night

Sunday night and I’m just back from running my monthly pub quiz at The Inn@West End. Only a few teams competing, but going into the final round there were 3 teams that could have won. What I love about this quiz is that I regularly have some very able teams competing so I can ask demanding questions. Tonight’s toughest question – name elements named after Nobel prize winners, one point for each. Hint – there are 8.