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In the July/August
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O
ne of the big village events in May was the May Fayre at the First School which was held on a
beautiful sunny day.
This always has a very good reputation and this year I was most impressed with the wide variety of
activities and events which had been arranged, ranging from plate breaking to dancing round the May pole.
Loads of the children particularly seemed to enjoy the tractor rides. It was very good to see so many people
there and we all had the opportunity to see the new buildings. It is clearly a very exciting time for the school,
and although it has been a long wait and staff and pupils have had to put up with a great deal of disruption, it
really looks as though it will be worth it and the physical environment of the school will be transformed.
I have also been busy attending a number of quizzes in the village over the last month. Now I always enjoy
a good quiz and there are plenty of opportunities here for testing general and not-so-general knowledge.
The First School has an annual quiz in February which is always great fun. St. Mary’s also has an annual
quiz in May which I attended this year with a lot of people from the village.
Although these quizzes are good fun, and are meant to be enjoyed, there reaches a point in every one where
things suddenly become much more serious. Unfortunately, that is usually the point where I have drunk
slightly too much so that my recall of knowledge is even slower than normal. So my team didn’t win the St
Mary’s quiz, although we did make our presence felt in other ways. Part of the problem with that quiz, very
well compiled and compered by Chris and Valerie Miller as it was, was that there were a lot of Maths
questions, including a long division sum. It was at that point when this ‘fun quiz’ reminded me of painful
Maths lessons where we had loads of sums to do without any obvious point. If only my Maths teacher had
told me that understanding these sums might help me to win a quiz, I might have listened a bit more
attentively. It is a shame that there are hardly ever any Law questions. I could cope with questions on
charities, tax avoidance or sado-masochism, but they do not tend to be the subject-matter of these quizzes.
I also attended a ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ party recently, where all the guests took part in a
computer version of the quiz, complete with graphics and Chris Tarrant’s voice. I was pretty hopeless at that
as well. I mean, a question on who lost to Arsenal in the 1987 cup final surely is worth more than £16,000.
Towards the end of the party everybody decided to play as a team and see how far we could get. Without
wishing to blow my own trumpet (as my Grandmother used to say ‘why bother blowing your own trumpet
when you can get somebody else to do it for you’) we actually got to the million pound question: what is the
name of the first Sunday in Lent? I always thought that it was the first Sunday in Lent but, apparently, it is
quinquagesima. With a bit of guess work we got it right. We didn’t get any money, but there was a real sense
of triumph, especially because I realized that the Latin I had crammed at school did have some relevance
after all. So a question to finish: ‘who wrote "Principles of the Law of Restitution"?’ Now that’s general
knowledge.
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