Charity Hound - SHHiRT night

Saturday 7th March
Purley Bury Tennis Club, Purley

A colleague of several of the Hounds had invited The Hound to attend a benefit evening for a cause close to her heart and given that all it takes to arouse The Hound's interest is a cheap bar and a few questions there were three of us happy to commit and attend.  The colleague, Wendy, was made an honourable Hound for the evening and our team of four was complete.

The venue was the club-house and bar of the Purley Bury Tennis Club and it is genuinely impossible to envisage how better use could've been made of the space available - to say we were 'snug' would be a mild understatement and ventures out of one's seat to the bar and/or toilet required some planning and the goodwill of all who blocked your route.  Logistics aside a couple of rounds of drinks were safely navigated from the bar to the table, introductions were made, the evening's cause was explained* and applauded and we cracked on with the quiz...

Round 1 - pictures of celebrities - never a Hound strength, 6/10
Round 2 - Back To School - one question per school subject, maths, geography, chemistry, etc 7/10
Round 3 - Sport - tame showing from the Hound on some obscure questions, 6/10
Round 4 - Art & Literature - we hummed and hahhed about playing our Joker, decided against it and to no great surprise regretted that decision.  It will be of specific interest to regular readers that "iRobot" written by Isaac Asimov in 1950 has been read by G-Force but that he didn't like it, and I quote, "AT ALL". 9/10
Round 5 - Music - usually a collective Hound strength but we struggled with a couple - I took responsibility for naming the band who recorded the album, "Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water", I knew it was one of those American 'skater-metal' type outfits - Blink 182, Linkin Park or Limp Bizkit - but I plumped for the wrong one**...  16/20

Half-time interval saw the precarious delivery and consumption of the evening's food - two fish and chips and two sausage, one battered, and chips and more manoeuvrings to empty bladders and start the process of refilling them.  We settled down again and the half-way scores were announced - we sat in joint second on 42, five points behind the interim leaders.

Round 6 - Film posters - we were initially full of dread, this being just about as bad as it gets for The Hound, but then began chipping away at them until we had ten answers which we were mildly happy with.  Such confidence as it was though was massively misplaced and we were right to have dreaded it. 3/10
Round 7 - Pub Quiz - we played our joker here expecting/hoping for a kind of general knowledge round - it transpired to be a round about alcohol which on the surface should've suited us but cocktails and the like aren't our normal quaff so we struggled a bit... I've failed to note our specific score but it wasn't great.
Round 8 - Movies - hopeless, that's all I've got written down, "Hopeless"
Round 9 - True or False - this round has long been the scourge of The Hound thanks to the dim and distant 'Theo', but that's another story - suffice to say we would've done better to pick either 'True' or 'False' and answer that for all the questions rather than trying to earnestly come up with the correct answer... 3/10

Thus we ended proceedings with 71 points which was good enough for 5th but a fair way off the winning total of 83.

The evening's most amusing team name was apparently, "We Killed Lucy Beale", and between the four of us it was only the evening's honourary Hound who won anything on the raffle.  None of which was the point of the evening though and it was a pleasure to have participated and, if only in a tiny way, contributed to a very worthwhile cause.



*
SHHiRT is the official Harlequin Ichthyosis Charity.
Harlequin Ichthyosis is a very rare genetic disease that causes an infant's skin to grow abnormally fast both before and after birth.  The skin thickens into armour-like plates over the baby's face and body and many sufferers don't survive beyond a few hours.

**
Limp Bizkit is the correct answer