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.