Lucky, lucky, LUCKY Hound...

- apologies all round for my late posting of this -

Thursday 16th October 2014
Purley Arms

Sometimes when a team is struggling for form and results it'll take anything it can get and grasp it as a totem of changed 'luck' - a football team will readily take a penalty wrongly awarded that enable them to scramble a one nil win - an out of form batsman will happily stay put in his crease knowing he's nicked an edge but not been given and then greedily go on to maximise that fortune with a match-winning, and season changing, knock.

And so it was that the miserably out of form Hound were gifted one small answer in last week's quiz that had a disproportionate impact - but first the background...

We were gathered as a team of five Hounds - without a win in over a month and frankly quizzing like a team of stumbling newly born puppies as opposed to the trained, sleek, *ahem* winning Hounds we had become used to being.  We warmed up in the usual manner - certainly if there was to be a change in our performance and result this week it wasn't going to come as a consequence of us changing our routines...

We despatched a strangely easy opening picture round for a full ten points (famous buildings and/or landmarks - Alcatraz, Sydney Opera House, Mount Rushmore, etc) but had to settle for seven out of ten in the current affairs (not knowing the $ price per barrel that oil had fallen to, the name of the then incoming hurricane and the name of a film banned at the Cannes film festival).

Round 3 was Food & Drink - another solid but unspectacular set of answers - two wrong (apparently it's grape skins that give the purple colouration used in meat stamps and the name of a paella cooking pan is, somewhat disappointingly, a paella...).

Predictions across the team as to what the connection would be in the traditional fourth round were; Dad's Army (Robin), Belgium (Graham), Parts of a castle (Daren), Steven Spielberg films (Steve) and Walkers Crisps flavours (my bad self).  Thankfully no points are actually at stake for this daft predictions as, somewhat unsurprisingly we got nowhere close - the actual connection was 'record labels' which we successfully identified along with all nine of the clues.

And so we rounded out the first half of the quiz with two of the ten pointers correct - we didn't know the name of Linda Blair's character in The Exorcist (Regan).

The general feeling over the half-time refreshment was that we, again, hadn't covered ourselves in glory in the first half and needed something BIG in the second half to secure the much desired win - and so to the pivotal Jeopardy round...

The questions passed quickly and we were increasingly confident in our answers - so we bit the bullet and went with all ten of our first answers, knowing that just one of them being wrong would ruin us for another week - and sure enough, we got one wrong...  In answer to the question, 'Which Shakespeare play featured the line, 'A horse, a horse my kingdom for a horse...'?' we had supplied the answer Henry V - it is actually, of course Richard III.  Hey-ho...  Another week another loss.

The Top Ten round was Supermarkets - we got our traditional 'most of them but not all of them'.  And we got a couple of artists and one song title wrong across the musical round.

And so to the marking - we didn't come last, or second last - in fact we didn't feature at all as the list of entered teams was read out.  Until the end.  Right at the end.  '... and winning the quiz this week with a score of 166 - the only team to get all ten of the Jeopardy round right - it's The Hound...'

Cue some very embarrassed looks at our totally undeserved fortune and some very rapid and sheepish drinking up and departing with 50 totally undeserved £s clutched tightly in sweating palms.

Did we deserve it?  Nope.
Did we own up?  Nope.
Did we hang around debating the morals of the situation?  Nope.
Are we all going to hell?  Tune in next week to find out...