February 18th 2010

It was a tense finish.  90 minutes of stubborn resistance and
occasional flashes of brilliance had passed and 'The Year of The Hound'
were deadlocked with, well just about everybody else in fact.  How on
earth it can be that around a dozen teams can enter a quiz, answer 90
odd questions and find themselves all on the same final score I shall
never know, but that is what happened - and The Hound prides itself on
its collective ability to be able to deal with any situation.  Theo set
the tie-breaker question in motion and a dozen team representatives
scrambled from all quarters of the pub to submit their various
guestimates within the 30 permitted seconds - The Hound bated its
breath and drained its glasses...

It hadn't started spectacularly well - El Barnetto of Brum was still
'ooop north' being literally snowed into a second floor flat.  Our
recent tradition of enjoying a 'special guest' to supplement the core
team was not observed this week, although there was the threat of being
joined around the halfway mark by one of the all-time sporting greats -
none other than cricketing legend Lord Tony of Bunghole, who was in the
area having the first net of the season (in February?!) and thought he
might as well pop in on his way home.  Which was nice.  The first round
had yielded a return of 26 (?) points from 30 questions and left us in
joint second.  We had Robin to thank for the chemical symbol for
Methane (CH4 apparently) and the processes of elimination which led us
to deduce that the 'hypocentre' of an earthquake is below it and not
above it and the earth's human population in 1900 was 1.3 billion not
3.1 billion.

To borrow a legendary commentating Colemanball, the second round saw
The Hound 'open its legs and show its class' as we answered all 21
musical questions completely correctly and gained maximum pointage -
our knowledge variously covering all colours of the musical spectrum,
from Jedward and Helen Shapiro to Bizet.  Joint leaders, by a point,
with one other team going into the last round.

Glasses were refreshed with Numbers and Pride and numbers were swollen
with the arrival of His Holiness the Bung.  I can't remember any of the
questions we were asked (not even the anagram I'm afraid although, once
again, Robson Hound got it with alarming speed) nor how many of them we
may have got correct (although we went T.F.F.F.T in the True/False
round and we should have gone T.T.T.T.T) but given that we led going
into the round and it ended with a mass tie-break it is fair to
conclude that pretty much everyone else had a better final round than
we did.

Some readers, i.e. Danny, might be intrigued at this stage to know that
two pairs of white trainers were in evidence, along with a pair of
black shoes and a literally enormous pair of sliver trainers.  Pre
match meals for the starting trio had variously included toast, bacon &
lentil soup and a plate of gammon, rice and peas.  Make of that
whatever the hell you will.

... Theo announced the tie-breaker answers in no particular order - the
question had been fairly straightforward, 'how many legs does the
world's largest millipede have?', but the range of answers was quite
spectacular.  The literally hilariously (?!) named team of 'Ashley Cole
has joined John Terry sleeping on the sofa' went with 1.4 million legs
(I kid you not) whilst some other bunch of soft in the heads had gone
with '80 legs'!  Daren had immediately said, '272', I said it was lower
but couldn't quite get it together to come up with an actual lower
number and Robson, well I can't actually remember what Robson said to
be honest.  But 'two hundred and seventy two legs' was our answer.
Theo's answer, the answer that actually mattters in such circumstances,
was '256' and nobody could get closer to that than us and so it was
that The Year of the Hound collected another crate of lager and cocked
its metaphorical leg over the competition once more.

The Year of the Hound is over - long live The Hound.