Wednesday, December 07, 2016

6th December–Away to the Park Taverners

 

Always a pleasure to meet up with these old friends and this was no exception – moreover thImage result for 2 drunk mene occasion was heightened by it being Pete’s birthday (although it did bring back memories of his birthday five years ago when his team mates splashed out on champagne and left the Lemmings decidedly worse for wear).

The Park Tavern is a very friendly pub, with helpful staff and a wide selection of (mainly Bollington Brewery)  ales ranging from Long Hop at 3.9% to the very desirable (except on quiz night) Eastern Nights IPA at 5.6%.

As usual it was a joyous game- even the fact that the Sports questions round had been left off the pack for the question master was speedily resolved by using up supplementaries from earlier rounds. But then there were sufficient sports questions over the course of the game that more than made up for a dedicated round (at least 9 in the General Knowledge!).

A lot of thought had gone into the Specialist questions, the three “free” rounds being quite different – and they deserved extra points for the very attractive diagram of yoked oxen – but they yacht lionheartdidn’t get any! The General Knowledge let themselves down with too many sport questions but were otherwise OK. There were calls for Q53 (Phillip Green’s superyacht) to be entered into the Armadillo competition but in fact it was all over the papers having cost a modest £100,000,000 built to his wife’s designs.

At the end of the Specialist questions the Lemmings had managed a healthy lead thanks in no small part to Tomo – he always scores well but this week scored a full house in the Specialist; this helped give the Lemmings a lead of 72 to 56. The General Knowledge also played to the Lemmings’ interests as they maintained their lead with 88 to 55 giving a final score of 160 to 111.

Individual scores were Bob 15/9, Matt 12/18, Nick 12/12 and Tomo 24/21; conferred points were 5/8, pass-overs 4/3 while the home team collected 4/4 pass-overs.

The pub then presented us with a splendid selection of cheese and grapes supplemented by a delicious chocolate birthday cake for Pete created by Heather. Thank you Heather, the Park Tavern, Grenville for his easy-going control of the game as question master and as always the Park Taverners for a most enjoyable evening.

3 comments:

Jon Thompson said...

A very good night, especially for me. I was so surprised to get a clear run across the specialist questions, I took a picture of the answer sheet for posterity!

Anonymous said...

Did any of you go home without a brown stripy scarf? If so I have it, if not then the search continues. Pete

Matt R said...

A very enjoyable night at the Park owing to good company, food and drink (the Eastern Nights was rather pleasant when I risked it in the latter stages – but no, it wasn’t responsible for any scarf losing on my part). After so many well-constructed quizzes it was, however, inevitable that the wheels would come off at some point and tonight seemed to be it, although we seemed to get through with scores intact (I suspect that first-second might have been the better place to be). The Plough had done a good job until the disappearance of the sport round (although its absence was popular in some quarters) and if Grenville was thrown into a state of blind panic, he certainly concealed it well in keeping with his affable and benevolent QMing (not only was I lucky to get an 8th specialist question, getting three points for “jam roly poly” as a synonym for jelly roll was definitely in the seasonal spirit – however, I would have deduced Ronnie o’Sullivan correctly, had the sport round materialised). The GKs seemed to get trapped on a fairly small number of recurring themes – often received by the same player. The night was “enhanced” by a generous selection from the Langstaff joke repertoire and this did lead to a lovely piece of inter-team co-operation at the end to improve one of them. Bob was talking about giving speeches and reminisced about one on the subject of sex. “It gives me great pleasure” it began….and ended. Graham chimed in with “I think you forgot to open with “unaccustomed as I am….””