Partridge Bound Hound

The Purley Arms

15th January 2015

 

A trip to Partridge Green on Maundy Thursday now seems a real possibility for the Hound. A virtual tour of one of the pubs there indicated that Espresso and Dark Star Original are available all year around, but was less clear regarding the much vaunted Dark Star Imperial even on a seasonal basis, and downright vague about where the ladies loos are.

 

We were again welcoming the youngest (so far as I know) member of the Sullivan family to our team this week. After her success the last time out we were expecting big things, and were not let down as she demonstrated how to eat wotsits using only her fingernail (and her digestive system obviously). She also broke the previous record for the 4 yard dash to hand in the sweeties question by some margin. Welcome back any time. There was in fact a lot of  potato/maize snacks based banter which seemed to rate Frazzles as the Hound's favourite even ahead of Tyrells chipotle thingies.

 

Quiz went as follows;

 

Rd 1. Routine pictures of chocolate/sweetie wrappers in close-up.   

 

Rd 2. Current Affairs. We went round the houses to get Jaguar as the British car firm from the midlands planning to add an SUV to their range, but get it we did. A near miss involving Peter Pan and Alice In Wonderland was the only error we made.

 

Rd 3. TV/Films. Everything seemed to be from our era or comfort zone  and none too testing.

 

Rd 4. Only 1 team got the connection, I can't remember what it was right now. Not a great round, we couldn't remember the guy who designed the London Underground Routefinder (I'm told it is not a map). Also missed Amy Johnson and Michael Faraday. I remember now it was blue plaques on houses. I guess most people have to live somewhere.

 

We got 2 of the 10 pointers, but failed to identify the Maxila as the Jaw Bone, which may have ultimately been what let L&TT in to win the quiz. 

 

Rd 5. Top 10 UK airports (really must swot up on these). Should be called Rd 7 as that what we inevitably get.

 

Rd 6. We got the eight answers submitted correct, which is better than some recent attempts. Unfortunately we also got the other two correct waving goodbye to 24 points for not writing them down, or more accurately for writing them down but then crossing them out. The number of witches in a coven was the one which felt like a bear trap, we only settled on 13 quite late in the day after Steve made a connection with Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot'. Informed risk taking seems to be the way forward.

 

Music Rd. Our youth culture correspondent pulled Taylor Swift out of the bag. Kev and I were less successful, failing to remember Womack & Womack - 'Teardrops' despite both owning classic vinyl versions of it. Any quiz that includes Bobby Goldsboro's 'Honey' is though, all right by me. I just love the bit where she crashes the car and he just says 'What the heck'.

 

Not good enough on the day, third place I think. 

 

Not all was lost. Ashleigh's aforementioned dash along with Robin's call of nest for the family name of vipers secured the Maltesers for The Hound.

 

Random notes that I took, that don't really remind me of what they were about as follows;

 

No 1. in Nevada (something to do with Quiz App)

Schitzu/Pekinese.

Eye-Eye (some kind of animal reference)

Willie Wacker (German Andy Capp I think).

 

  

G-Force!

Quiz Up The Hound

First one of the year, thanks to Xmas and NYD falling on Thursdays so I for one was straining at the leash. In fact we were generally keen with all five of the regular crowd in place early.

As implied by the blog title, much of the pre-quiz activity was spent playing the rather splendid "quiz up" app. Hence I managed to lose to a fella from the Philippines on chemistry, a geezer from Thailand on the Premier League and most irritatingly, some fool in Purley on spelling. Would this be a sign of things to come?

Today, the usual top ten, connections, jeopardy rounds etc. would be tossed aside and replaced with 12 mini rounds covering events from each month of the year. Calling some of them events might be a bit tenuous, e.g. some woman calling 999 because there weren't enough sprinkles on her ice cream wasn't a make or break of 2014 for me but lets see where we go. First up though, we saw dead people, specifically 12 celebs deceased in 2014 - pictures of them before they died mind. Now obits don't normally feature large in the quiz but we did alright with 10, weirdly managing to get the wrong member of Cream to die. Bit of a break before we kicked things off properly, from which I can reliably report that the Paddington film is marvellous and Temuri Ketsbaia and Faustino Asprilla remain Newcastle legends.

So here were go, January through June in the first half, recorded highlights were the Seahawks winning the superbowl (none of us had a clue), Iceland having more fat people than Ireland and Italy, maybe it's all those whales they eat, and Helena Costa being the first female manager of any football team of note. In fact having just googled her, in the name of research naturally, what were they thinking?

Ten pointers still happened and two of three was maybe par, with us failing to get the top selling car of 2014, Ford Fiesta apparently. Bernard Jordan and Phillip Seymour Hoffman did us proud though. Onto the break and wotsits plus an embarrassing defeat for Graham on flags at the hands of a Columbian bloke, Rodriguez Hoyez Lopez I think.

Onto July and apparently things other than the world cup happened, who knew? Highlights of this round included bagging a suburb of St Louis, much debate on who won the Community shield and the C of E playing the Vatican at cricket, who naturally don't have a single Italian in their team. Thankfully and thoughts of making the music round 2014 based had been pooh poohed although I think George Ezra qualified. Elvis and Nik Kershaw didn't.

Chox round and we were first up, unfortunately we were wrong but does it matter? With the unusual quiz format, how we'd done was hard to predict but a nine point win resulted!

So a top up for the Hound coffers and much hope for 2015. We have much training to put in with the 5 in 5 being a mere month away.

***** FIVE in FIVE *****

The (actual) Hound has mooted the possibility of the (collective) Hound taking on five quizzes in five consecutive evenings - so the purpose of this post is to outline the idea, advise progress and invite further contributions, feedback, ideas and suggestions...

The basic suggestion is to start on a Sunday in February and do five quizzes in five nights ending with the traditional Purley Arms session on the Thursday.

So far the suggested possibilities look like this;

Sunday

The Little Windsor (Sutton) - http://www.freewebs.com/little-windsor/quiznews.htm - 8.30pm kick off

Venture Inn (Reigate) - no reference to a quiz on their website - called and spoke to them, confirmed no weekly quiz

The (Rail) View (S Croydon) -  http://www.theviewpub.com/index.htm - no reference on site - rang them, confirmed 9pm start

 

 

Monday

The Robin Hood - http://www.robinhoodsutton.com/whats_on.html

 

 

Tuesday

The Sun (Carshalton) - http://www.thesuncarshalton.com/quiz-tuesday-8pm/

The Windsor Castle (Carshalton Beeches) - http://www.windsorcastlepub.com/quiz-nights-carshalton/ - no recent updates to website but rang and confirmed 8.30pm kick off

The Harrow (Cheam) - http://www.theharrowinncheam.co.uk/whats-on/ - 8pm kick off apparently (despite website saying half seven) - £1 each, 'cash first prize', bottle of win for 2nd, packet of Haribo for last place apparently!

 

 

Wednesday

The Dukes Head (Tadworth) - http://www.dukesheadtadworth.co.uk/events.html - kick off sometime after 8pm (apparently gets "very busy")

The Oval (East Croydon) - http://www.theovalcroydon.co.uk/events.html

 

 

Thursday

Purley Arms (natch)

 

  

Resources discovered/used in the search so far...

http://www.pubquizzers.com/

http://www.pubsquiz.co.uk/pubs/pubs-in-Surrey.asp

If anybody has any additional ideas, thoughts and/or suggestions then pop them in the comments below...

Inbetweener Hound...

The Robin Hood, Sutton
29th December 2014

Following lashings of festive largesse a relative soupçon of emailery set up the Hound's traditional 'inbetweener'.  In the final event only three Hounds made it - Robson galloping from Chipstead, D2 splitting his trip 50/50 between sitting and strolling and myself basically falling out of the front door and into the boozer, especially when compared to my traditional 80 minutes each way.

The pub itself was a first for all of us - still festively decorated and rather spacious it felt welcoming enough on arrival despite being virtually empty.  Robson smashed back a burger and by the time the second round was being drained the pub was filling nicely and we swapped our seats for a small table closer to the heart of the quiz action.

At this elapsed distance and with no notes to refer to I can't remember very many specifics of the quiz - other than it was well organised, a fair test and completely my fault as to why we lost...  Interim scores suggested we'd started well and marking a couple of other teams' answers along the way enabled us to gauge our competition.  Our scores were consistent if never outstanding but were sufficient to move us to the head of the pack where we remained till the end.  With the one unfortunate aspect that one other team had equal points to us.  So a quickly improvised tie-breaker was thrust upon proceedings - how many bottles were on the top shelf of the fridge behind the question master behind the bar?  D2 actually supplied the right answer but for no good reason whatsoever I submitted something that was miles off - and the other team were closer, so we didn't win.

The small consolation was that unlike our regular quiz this one paid a cash for second place - an amount which possibly covered 50% of the cab that had been booked to return D2 home and spare Robson the gallop back.

The time taken between my woeful faux-pas and the cab arriving was largely taken up with group discussion as to the possibility and practicalities of a particularly Houndsome, '5 in Five', adventure - more of which to follow in a separate post...

Best wishes for 2015 to all who browse here from the collective Hound.