The Hound's T.Q.S.R. Blog: 5 in Five - Chapter Four

Wednesday 11th February 2015

And so, the end is near. The Hound has travelled the length and breadth of the Surrey/South London border, taking on all comers. We’ve faced joy and elation and tasted glorious victories and also plumbed the depths of despair and that Duncan idiot. In years to come, men will talk of the journey made by the Hound in 2015 in hushed tones and wonderment.

Chapter IV took us to the Oval Tavern and East Croydon where no doubt new challenges would be faced by the Hounds in attendance being Graham, Kevster and myself. Our opposition included a team who ejected Kevster from his seat claiming it was “their regular table and couldn’t win otherwise”, a young staffie accompanying one team and three foxy types on the table next to us, the least attractive of whom was a vast improvement on anyone else we’ve seen all week.

Kevster – a picture here would work well.

The Oval Tavern dartboard...

The quiz mistress would be Wendy, known by us from when she was out of her tree once at the Farmers and running the Green Dragon quiz. The theme for the night, factoring in the date would be love and Valentines. More love frankly than we would ever need. Would this play to our strengths? Right.

The first round was tenuously valentine themed, who designed Liz Hurley’s safety pin dress*, what was Kate Winslet’s character name in Titanic etc*. Curiously we got both of those, though I was required to undertake an exercise in self-flagellation for knowing the latter. Next up connections, not a desperately opaque connection (flowers, ah!) but it meant lots of head scratching on which writer was both played by Dame Judy and Kate Winslet (Winslet again!) in a film*. Finally for the first half, Valentines trivia. My main memory from this and indeed the whole quiz was it featured lots of Greeks – Aphrodite, Eros, Adonis, Narcissus, Stavros, Aristotle. Fortunately Graham had some distant memory of a classical education and frankly having had some of it in Cyprus, he ought to and helped steer us through.

Wendy was fair rattling through the quiz and the half time round was loads of celebrity couples. We did ok here, failing to distinguish Abbey Clancy from Patsy Kensit and not getting Bieber’s and Affleck’s other halves being failures*. Kevster came up with a cracking comment of “Adrian Chiles is punching above his weight there” which did make me think what that would mean for those two characters in the Woolpack.

Love themed Wipeout would follow, we hesitated on two more Greek fellas before our failure to have a clue on who played Spiderman’s love interest* put the entire kibosh on the round. Still picked up eight though, including a bonus for who had the hit with the title song of the blog, including featured vocals*.

Last up – love based music and love was truly all around – although that wasn’t included. Why Can’t This Be Love, Easy Lover, When I Fall In Love certainly were. How much love can a man take in one night? Results – well, it won’t surprise anyone that love didn’t really do it and we limped in third. Annoyingly though, it was the team who ejected Kevster that won, the advantage clearly being in the table.

Wendy clearly doesn’t get paid by the hour and we were all done by about 9.30 so naturally an early night and recover our strength for the last night? Er no, Kevster suggested getting into the love thing by sharing a bottle of wine and one led to another and another. A game of darts was a slightly more macho pursuit, won by me naturally, plus a fair bit of Quiz Up and exacting our revenge on various unsuspecting souls around the world.

One to go.