15th January – Away to the British Flag

It seemed ages since the Lemmings last visited  the Flag as the hosts had enjoyed something of a sabbatical in the A League before returning to the B League and giving the Lemmings a drubbing of nearly 30 points in the first game of the season.

The pub is a cosy local that despite being a free house is still selling Robinsons Unicorn and others from the former owner and a guest that for our visit was Marston’s Pedigree all well kept.

The evening started with black clouds on the horizon as Becky was not at the Waters Green Tavern the  customary gathering point (she had made her own way to the Flag setting the alarm bells ringing) and the question master was stuck in traffic following a serious accident between Hazel Grove and Macclesfield. Sighs of relief when both Becky and the question master arrived but the Lemmings were obviously a bit jumpy.

The Specialist rounds set by the Nags Head were interesting and clearly a lot of thought had gone into them – one round on trains in film and another on various aspects of magic were different and enjoyable. It was a keenly matched game and at the end of the Specialist the Lemmings were trailing by just 8 points with 47 to the Flag’s 55. We’ve made up bigger deficits in the past.

The General Knowledge questions had been set by the Robin Hood and were rather patchy with too much effort on pairing the questions. They did however manage to score this season’s first nomination for the coveted Nine Banded Armadillo trophy for which the answer was kenning described in Wikipedia as “a type of circumlocution, in the form of a compound that employs figurative language in place of a more concrete single-word noun. Kennings are strongly associated with Old Norse and later Icelandic and Old English poetry.” No-one in the room had ever heard of this!

Again these rounds were closely fought but the Lemmings could not break the Flag’s lead and the teams ended with equal points, 77 each with the Flag victorious with 132 to the Lemmings 124.

Individual scores were Bob 6/15, Becky 3/12, Nick 6/15 and Tomo 15/12; conferred points were 12/10 with 5/12 pass-overs – the Flag picked up 5/18pass-overs.

It was a pleasant game rounded off with a selection of sandwiches – many thanks to the landlord, to the question master and the home team.