Gone Big Hound!

4 hounds present, exhaustion of weekly of carousing budget having forced Kevster to a night of confinement chez lui waiting for the results to come in. Not sure if he was more anxious about the quiz result or West Ham's latest 'let's make it as difficult for ourselves as we possibly can' Europa League exploits.

Food/drink dingbats were a welcome change to the usual celebrity mug-shots, especially as I have to confess that all 10 were included in a much larger list that I encountered a few weeks ago in a quiz at the Village Hall. The best/corniest ones that work here were...

h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o = h to o = water
Key & T = Chianti
007 Baltic = Spy Sea = Spicy
Mother may = Ma might = Marmite

I think that you get the picture. All correct.

Full marks for the current affairs round as well, including the bombshell for me that Tesco will no longer stock Capri Suns and Ribena due to their excessive sugar content. I set out on a mission on Saturday morning to clear Purley Tesco of the last few dozen boxes that they have, who doesn't love a bit of panic buying. As Robson sagely pointed out that it seems that they will continue to stock sugar though.

A fairly routine Film & TV round followed, we failed to get the year of launch for Channel 4, and who played Stella Bridger in the remake of 'The Italian Job'. 1982 and Charlize Theron respectively.

An even more routine weather based connections round followed, although we did do well to get full points with a couple of fairly obscure answers. However, we only managed 2 of the 3 10 pointers, being unable to connect the ancient roman festival of 'Hiliario' with the modern day 'April Fool's Day'.

Second half kicked off with 10 H-commencing answers. Great shout by Steve for 'Hamish Macbeth', only setback was not getting Havering as the mostly easterly London borough. I thought that this was something that the Proclaimers did whilst yomping great distances to prove their love.

After an initial Jeopardy round period  of walking the fine line that we usually create between over-prudence and throwing caution to the wind, it gradually became clear that we were indeed 'Going Big' this week. Worth saying that no other teams even contemplated it, quite a few quite difficult questions. We took an age to establish conclusively that Prince Andrew was the royal baby dropped in 1960. It seemed that only Daren knew that the word Vinegar is derived from the French for sour wine, and I solely identified Hansen's disease as leprosy. Not to mention the round the houses way that we got to a Pony is slang for £25. 660 feet in a furlong, Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, 4 players in a polo team, 'My Lovely Horse' as the Father Ted irish Eurovision entry, and a recognition of the real names of Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers, along with one other answer that is frankly scribble gave us one of our better Full Houses.

All except for a Rita Ora song were then correctly identified in the music round. Siobhan then broke one of the golden rules of announcing the scores in reverse order by stating first that one team had aced the jeopardy round. 172 scored for a 42 point winning margin, i.e. we would have won even if we had blown the jpdy round.

Good business was also discussed in the aim of getting the Hound social calendar agreed, see separate communication for details.