Woodbridge and District pub quiz league, division two
Twenty-two weeks, eleven pubs, and a tiebreak question about tram networks that I have not fully recovered from.
A pub quiz league is not a pub quiz. A pub quiz is a Tuesday. A league is a season: twenty-two weeks, home and away, eleven pubs between Woodbridge and Framlingham, with a written constitution and a man called Barry who maintains the table in a spreadsheet he will not share.
Teams are four. Ours was me, my flatmate, my flatmate’s dad, and a man we had met at the first fixture and never established the surname of. You cover specialisms and you cover them honestly, which meant I had geography, spelling and anything involving a monarch, and had to hand over sport entirely, having once confidently answered “Wimbledon” to a question about the Grand National.
We went into the last fixture level on points with the Cherry Tree.
The tiebreak
Tiebreaks are nearest-the-number, one guess, no conferring, written down and folded over. Ours was: how many stops are there on the Croydon tramlink?
I want to be clear that I did not know. I have never known. I have been to Croydon perhaps four times and I was not counting on any of them. What I had was a rough sense of how long the journey takes, an assumption about average stop spacing, and thirty seconds.
I wrote 39. The answer is 39.
The Cherry Tree wrote 24, which is not a serious attempt, and Barry updated the spreadsheet on his phone at the table while everybody watched.