QuizList

Some new one-off quizzes listed in the relevant section, in aid of St Joseph’s Hospice so I think the area is vaguely Harrow/Pinner.  More information available by emailing the address I have included.

And I am informed of a quiz in The Mug House, 1-3 Tooley street, SE1 2PF, on Tuesday 10 January.  I have not been able to ascertain whether this is a one-off or a regular quiz.  There is a bottle of champagne for the winning team and for reservations and further information, contact Agnese on 020 7403 8343.

I did promise something on the various ‘tribes’ of pub quizzing.   There are certain recurring types that one tends to run into, and the more pub quizzes one does, the more one recognises them.  Well, the first has got to be Serious Quizzers.

Serious Quizzers are generally male and tend to keep in the same teams.  They either drink a lot or virtually nothing;  there seems to be no middle ground.  They are frequently missing from your bog standard pub quiz for things like Quiz Leagues which some of them regard as being vastly superior to pub quizzes.  Insofar as I can conjecture what their motivation is for attending quizzes, I would have to say that the competitive aspect seems to be the most appealing one, as league wins carry little or no monetary value.  However, you can recognise some of them from occasional TV appearances on quiz shows which is consistent with money and/or notoriety being a reinforcement of some kind.

Serious Quizzers may even expand their horizons and play in leagues (which produce arcane and impenetrable orders of merit and masonic type names like ‘Sage’, ‘Grandmaster’, ‘Imperial Wizard’, ’Lord High Pooh Bah’ etc) not just in the UK but involving countries including Transylvania, Ruritania and even Narnia.  They come back refreshed from victories against teams of centaurs and may be so pumped up that they will have another half of shandy at the local pub quiz.

Do they always win at pub quizzes?  No, thank god.  But if they do win, you may be assured of the following:  a) they will tell you, and b) the victory will be recorded somewhere in a library of scrawled statistics, vaguely reminiscent of the killer’s journals in Se7en…

More next week.