Stuff and things

[davidgillon]

I seem to have been lacking in energy the last week or so, which is probably mostly down to travelling back from visiting my folks - a tiring journey, adjusting back to coping for myself, plus being away from family again and all wrapped up in the end of summer seems to leach the agency out of me. I've even been failing to keep up with DW reading, which is most unusual. Hopefully I can get back in gear this week.

I did get out to a quiz with friends on Thursday, which had quite a setting - the crypt at Rochester Cathedral. As crypts go it was very cosy, they've turned the oldest half (c1083) into a display area for the Textus Roffensis (c1122-24, which contains the only known copies of the codes of laws of Aethelberht, Alfred and Cnut, and minor fripperies like the coronation charter of Heny I), while the area we used , a brash newcomer, built in the 1180s, has just been reworked as an event space - I think we may have been one of the first events to use it. A crypt with a bar gets my vote! Fortunately the refurbishment included a wheelchair lift (doubly so as we had another wheelchair user on our team), though my friends who volunteer as cathedral guides tell me it isn't where initially intended,  when they excavated that area they found a completely unexpected Norman staircase and are still trying to figure out where it went to..

A picture of the bit we were in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochester_Cathedral#/media/File:Rochester_cathedral_011.JPG, for scale the capitals on the columns are probably about 5 feet off the ground. They comfortably fitted a table for 8 in each of the bays. We won, of course, though the prizes caused a raised eyebrow or two - 200ml cans of fizzy Hungarian pinot grigio. 'They seemed like fun' according to the organiser. Umm, yeah. At least the fish supper was reasonably good.

I went out yesterday for my usual Saturday lunch, which was a little disappointing. I had the duck confit flatbread and the duck had clearly been overcooked, it was tasty, but very, very dry, where normally it's quite moist. So dry I decided to stay and have another drink, which was actually fortuitous. Just as I was finally about to ask for the bill the friend I used to have lunch with every Saturday appeared.. It's the first time she's been out on a Saturday since spring last year, having spent the year nursing her son through terminal cancer. Hopefully it's a sign she's getting her life back to normal. She had her eldest daughter with her, plus her 7 month old granddaughter, who is a little cutie. So we talked babies and it turned out her daughter had just moved house earlier in the week. 'Where too?' I asked, lazily assuming they must simply have swapped from one London suburb to another, and was puzzled when she started with a street number, but then laughed when she completed the address - she's moved just opposite the end of the street her mum lives on, granny is obviously quite firmly on tap for babysittting!
 

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

when they excavated that area they found a completely unexpected Norman staircase and are still trying to figure out where it went to ... a wrinkle in time?

The scale of the cathedral is impressive, especially considering it was built with hand tools and brute force.

Was it a general-knowledge quiz, or did it have a (ecclesiastical) theme?

This is delightful to read.

[davidgillon]

The cathedral's impressive now, but what it must have been like when first completed, with a much less developed town around it must have been mind-boggling (and when the castle across the road wasn't the semi-ruin it is now). Of course being able to take a few hundred years to complete your building project does help!

It was a general knowledge quiz in general, with a couple of cathedral questions thrown in at the start and finish. One of which I couldn't have answered if I hadn't had a wheel around reading the various displays during the interval, the other answered by the leaflets on joining the Friends of the Cathedral that were scattered across the tables - but with a couple of cathedral guides on the team we didn't need the help.

There were 8 question rounds on things like culture and geography. I correctly remembered that to get from Norway to North Korea you only need to pass through one other country, Russia; and we were all impressed when one of the team managed to remember that the 'artist who had a pug called {whatever}' was Hogarth. One round was a music round with the shortest of clips of film tune intros to identify, some little more than about 10 notes, all cutting off before the vocals began, mostly fairly early stuff, but one of the team, who has a 3yo, correctly identified the main song from Frozen, lamenting he has to listen to it at least 3 times a week. I'm hopeless at those, so always impressed when the rest of the team spot things like From Russia With Love, or Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

There were also three 'table rounds', where you have a sheet of questions to answer collectively through the evening. One was shots from films, mostly of characters but one was the spinning top from Inception. Our film buff got most of those before I ever saw it, but I managed to spot that the snow-covered face wasn't Leonardo di Caprio in The Revenant, but Omar Sharif in Dr Zhivago. The second was match the quotation with images of the person - we had a long debate as to whether one image was Jane Austen or Elizabeth Fry - there was a quote on prison conditions we couldn't match to anyone, but where Fry might have fitted (it was Austen). And the third one was matching cryptic crossword style clues to pictures of food items - 'aged seaman' = 'salt' etc.

[davidgillon]

And I forgot to add, I've now tried that can of fizzy wine, and I won't say that it was bad, but my reaction to accidentally kicking my glass over was "oh, good"!

[jesse_the_k]

What a various and lovely quiz

I wish I could attend something like that -- the wide spectrum is a treat.

[davidgillon]

They're pretty common over here, and the format is fairly standard. I normally get to at least a couple a year, and the core of the team are doing one every couple of weeks at their local pub.