pub quiz report

Is it still an achievement to win Brighton's best pub quiz when there are arguably more people on your team than in the rest of the pub combined? Hmm, perhaps not. Well, we didn't win, this week, but then there were only five of us, unlike the week before when we romped home with about twelve. I attribute this week's distasterous performance to our positioning; a surprisingly busy The George had us crammed around the side into the elbow of the pub, where we were disorientated, asked to desist from smoking, and from where we could watch, fuming, as our rivals, Arse Pizza - who are normally out of sight - kept getting ten out of ten.

We are alarmingly good at some subjects and alarmingly useless at others. We are good at questions about

Geography (specifically flags and capital cities)
Record cover art
Politics
Football (if I'm playing)
Athletics and Cricket (if Andrew is playing)
and French, Spanish, German or Italian stuff (if Anne-So, Nat, Jess or Michi are playing)
Dingbats

We are ludicrously bad at:

Films
Children's TV characters
Titles of Pink Floyd albums
Picking the odd one out
Inventing amusing team names,

Although the latter has been made easier by our electing Natalia as our team leader, and the new rule that our team name has to start with 'Captain Natalia'. Last week we were 'Captain Natalia and the Zooniverse', which is a geeky half-reference to the Mighty Boosh. This week we were, in fact, 'Captain Miss Nat and the Lifting of the Burkha', which we liked at first because we thought it sounded like the title of a Harry Potter book. Then we got worried that people - especially any Islamic Fundamentalists in the pub (unlikely I know) - might think that we were racists or Danish, so Dave drew a helpful caricature of a nasty academic, and we hoped it would be clear that it was he, rather than any modest schoolgirls, that was the object of our derision. Yeah, we worry too much.

Once the quiz was over, and Morgan had unsuccessfully looked into the possibility of changing teams for next week, we were asked to come up with suggestions for future rounds. As you might imagine from our rubbish team name, we went completely blank and suggested a load of daft ones like 'Tottenham full backs from 1987-1992', 'Composting Methods' and 'Guess the final weight of Bulimic Pop Stars'. We were particularly pleased with 'Major Disasters: Estimated cost to human life', but our normally genial host demurred. So I think in the end our most realistic suggestion was 'guess the number of jelly babies in the jar'.

So if anyone has any clever ideas for a pub quiz round, please put your suggestions in the comments box below. We'll suggest them on Sunday so if you turn up the week later you might just find yourself able to take Captain Natalia and Arse Pizza out in a single blow.