Point of Murphy's (and other matters)

Charlton 1 Fulham 1

As you can see from the strapline, I haven't been too well these past days, and Charlton's home draw with Fulham last night can hardly have said to have aided my recovery, but recovered I have, and I'm off back to the Centre in a few minutes for an evening of Level Nine.

The posting to go with the rather excellent headline, which appeared in the Daily Star this morning (no of course I don't - it was quoted on Football 365, but I thought it too good not to re-use), will appear in the next 24 hours, as well as the quiz news and so on that you've all been gagging for since last Wednesday.

* * * * *

[being written on Saturday night / Sunday morning, 22/23 October]

So, a few days after the Fulham game, what can one say about Charlton's performances this season? The one thing that does strike one is that it is away form, running at 100%, which is providing the points, home form being quite indifferent, so maybe a point at home to Fulham is more of a result than it would appear. Anyway, Fulham are better, I think, than their position would seem to indicate, as they demonstrated this afternoon against Liverpool, and it is much too early in a season to be making assumptions about who will end up in the top six. It might yet be the usual suspects, or maybe Wigan could be there.

Oh, the headline refers to Charlton's Danny Murphy scoring the equaliser and thus securing the point.


Quiz Night on Thursday


Everything has been in turmoil where the quiz is concerned, the much-vaunted change to Thursday causing my team members a fair amount of grief, since on Thursdays there is always something going on, anyway, whereas on Mondays there isn't. So the quiz used to fill a rather quiet and dead night, and as we enjoy it so much, it also helped us to get through those dreary Mondays by giving us something to look forward to. And until the night before last, there had been no more participants under the new arrangements than there had been under the old, and we haven't seen Edu at all.

Regular quizmaster Alex, though, bade us be of good cheer: he would round up some people from the academy where he works, new young teachers; Spanish office staff and so on, and swell the numbers. However we objected that the Spanish office staff where he works would be unlikely to know the county town of Shropshire, which Antony requires us to know about once a year, so wouldn't the quiz have to change into one of those dumbed down Guinness Book of Records type affairs, with boring questions about how many rabbits there are on the South Island of New Zealand ("is it 4 million; 2 million or 350 thousand?")? (Don't ask me; I made the question up as an example of one of those things that no one knows or cares about, nor feels any better for finding out the answer).

Alex assured us that it would not be dumbed down, although obviously he didn't want new people to get so dispirited by low scores that they would give up and never come back. We nodded sagely, but privately had doubts. If it wasn't going to be dumbed down, how was this objective going to be achieved?

This paradoxical situation was in fact resolved by a kind of selective dumbing down. Instead of being asked when the San Francisco earthquake occurred (1906), we were required to state in which decade of the twentieth century it happened. There were a lot more cinema and popular culture questions than usual, but as Alex had assured us there would be a smallish quota of questions more appropriate to our usual levels, we in fact won, and our usual rivals atttained respectable positions too, with the teams of young teachers (one of them complained that the music clips were before his time - they were mainly from the 'eighties) and office girls coming way down the lists. Nonetheless, we felt it was, as a quiz, not as good as it used to be. We found our usual table occupied by newcomers, too - nothing more irritating, in my opinion.

So that is the situation; next week our own Antony is in the quizmaster's chair (a metaphorical fiction as asking the questions at our quiz involves a fair amount of marching about and shouting the odds, and there'd be no room for a chair even so); Alex will be away and it remains to be seen whether his people will come back without him to put the thing into context for them.


Legal Matter


The change in Spanish law I mentioned last week is in fact an anti-smoking law, which comes into effect, apparently (though I have no recollection of seeing it mentioned in any political party's manifesto) in January. Spain is a country where smoking is still the norm and so the promulgators are not going for a blanket ban, as if they did, no one would take any notice of it, any more than they now do of the laws against riding motorbikes on pavements, or using mobile phones while driving cars.

Seemingly it will work this way: large bars and pubs can designate certain areas as smoking (rumoured to be up to 30% of the space). Smaller establishments will be able to choose between being a Smoking or a Non smoking bar or whatever.

Now of our six team members, four of us smoke and one used to until quite recently; and we now hear that our beloved landlady has gone on record as saying that she very much wants the place to be a non smoking pub come January. But I don't think we want to be a non-smoking quiz team. So we might be looking for a totally new environment next year anyway. Of course the Spanish people will probably ignore the laws, and they can't afford to have huge tribes of policemen wandering round arresting people for such a trivial offence, and it would generate a lot of ill feeling, so it might not come to anything, anyway.


HMS Victory yesterday; Charlton victory today


Tremendous news from Fratton Park (I thought Portsmouth had moved, like so many others, to a new stadium with a silly name), which I'm hoping to write about tomorrow.