Split Lets In Edu's Team, Allegedly

(This is NOT a crossword clue!)

The quizmaster two nights ago (and it is a change to be writing about the quiz so soon after the event, but the football season is virtually at an end, and I have the plumber in doing major repairs, for which I have taken a day's holiday from the Centre, so I have to be here, so there we are) was the main man - Alex, who is rightly regarded as one of the best question setters we have, and he is a very charismatic questionmaster, too. For us, however, he is that little bit too keen on the cinema, as on the whole we aren't - I for one rarely watch anything, not even TV and videos, now that I have all-day Internet access, and I never go out to the cinema - I simply cannot sit still and watch something for as long as that. (I have this idea of announcing a Cinema (a name I find rather pretentious) round one day when I am acting as q.m., and then I'll start by asking "What colour were the seats in the one-and-nines at the Regal, Arnos Grove, in 1948?" - that would slow 'em down a bit).

But at the beginning of the current quiz season (they run from September to mid-July) our Irish friend Rory left the Centre to work freelance. He reckoned he'd do better for himself, and on the whole I think he has, but it has meant his working in the mornings, and that isn't really conducive to attending the quiz, although there are a few hardy souls who do. So we needed a replacement, who in fact appeared quite swiftly in the person of Mush - a young colleague from London who at one time worked in the film industry and who has an extensive knowledge of matters cinematographic, as well as being quite good at things like comic book characters. To cap this, he has a degree in English Lit. as well, even though that area of life is mainly my province, when it comes to the quiz.

When I arrived at the Centre on Monday afternoon to begin my (slightly reduced) working week, Mush told me that he had mates over, and that they were coming to the quiz, so he would join them in a separate team. Fair enough; this kind of thing happens to all of us, but it was going to be Alex's quiz, meaning a fair bit of cinema, and we would thus be at a disadvantage.

My fears proved to be justified. The remaining five of us, supplemented by the unexpected last-minute appearance of a Scottish lady, an old friend of mine whom I hadn't seen for at least three years, did well enough, but Mush and his friends achieved 116 points to our 104, and neither of our teams won, as the splitting-up of our team let in Eduardo's side, always dangerous, who won with 128. Maybe they'd have won anyway, but Mush reckons we would have managed almost all the 40 points available for the Cinema round if the team had lined up as per usual.

Our eternal rivals, the Old Farts (their chosen name - we are called Table Five, whether this be topographically accurate or not), supplemented by an English lady translator who drops in when her workload permits, and two first-timers in the shape of a couple of Spanish ladies, one of whom spoke good English in a very loud voice, and the other of whom appeared to say absolutely nothing at all, finished behind us, rather to our surprise, but it makes a nice change.

Counter Pains

Regular visitors will have noticed that the three counters running on the page are very much out of synch, despite my setting the original two to be the same number, a matter of six or seven weeks ago. I added the third when the original one, the one now showing the lowest number, but the one I like best, suddenly went berserk and added about nine leading zeroes, which I definitely didn't like. They stopped doing that, but having added the third counter I never got round to taking it off again. The original one reached 3035 on Monday but has not moved on since, though I know there have been visitors - I visited it myself from another machine twice, and anyway the other counters have been rolling merrily upwards throughout.

So I feel that maintenance work and repairs are in the air. As Pedro (he really is called that, but obviously doesn't have to suffer 'Bob the Builder'-type jokes from his mates as the Spanish word for plumber does not begin with the letter 'p') the plumber is assiduously repairing leaky taps and non-flushing loos a few feet away as I type, I decide that the page could do with a revamp, with regular links posted on the right, the potted biography moved to another place, and just one counter, no matter whether it accurately reflects what has been going on. Also, perhaps the picture-posting technology, which I found increasingly tiresome and finally stopped bothering with, has improved since I last used it. And Charlton won't be in serious action for three months or so, and the summer holidays are round the corner, so there might be time to get further into all this. We'll see.