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Nothing clever about posting other people’s poems, old girl.
Pub Quiz Champion Of the World
Well, I first knew the Dalston Rocket Monday night pub quiz
was getting out of hand
when I was in the Amazon
suspended in rainforest canopy
increasing my knowledge of tropical plant taxonomy
Swinging from tree to tree collecting flora,
I’d got into a nice rhythm in the harness,
muttering to myself
Henry VIII’s litany of wives:
“Divorced, beheaded, died,
Divorced, beheaded, survived”
and so didn’t see him until
our knuckles clashed
both snatching at
the same single blossom.
I looked up
and found myself nose-to-nose
with Clive Datchett,
yes, that Clive Datchett,
I recognised him from Millionaire and 15-1,
And the Dalston Rocket Monday night pub-quiz
he’s a pro
who lives by draining multiple-choice Trivial Pursuit machines
of coins, of options,
and here he was swinging away in harness
clutching the star-shaped pink blossom
of what was almost certainly
Dalberga Fabaceae,
or Brazilian tulip,
but which now I’d never know for sure.
Next Wednesday on the Zambizi River
there was Clive Dachett again
and as our motor-launches passed in opposite directions,
he was trash-talking me:
“Linlithgow,” he said,
“While I’m around you’re Mt Kenya, you’re Lake Victoria.”
Oh, the allusion was not lost on me:
Africa’s second highest mountain,
Its second largest lake.
“Datchett,” I shouted, “You’re Bobo Dioulasso!”
Yeah, he had to go and look that one up.
Second biggest city
in Burkina-Faso,
Africa’s smallest country.
Got him with a left! Got him with a right!“Question number 37”, calls the Quizmaster the following Monday at the Dalston Rocket,
And me, I’ve got more answers than questions…
Canada has the longest coastline.
Japan’s got the fastest train.
Faberge make the eggs.
Paul McCartney’s first name is James.
A billion seconds is thirty-two years long.
The Grand Hotel and the Brighton Bomb.
Everyone else will put Teflon,
But I know it’s Le Creuset.
People look from me to Datchett,
And then from Datchett to me.
Bonus questions: three, five, twenty-seven and forty-two.
Dead-heat
Tie-break.
Guess who?
Myself and Clive Datchett.
Head-to-head.
The rammed pub falls silent.
What, asks the quizmaster,
is the name of the undercover CIA agent in Peshawar,
who has infiltrated furthest into Al Q’aida?
All around the room secret servicemen draw guns from shoulder-holsters
I dive over the bar
amid booming sprays of glass,
as the 15-round Glock 22’s bullets
burst the optics into a glass tsunami,
the floor foaming gin,
I shout out:
“Jawal Al-Ansari!”
Both hands on the kitty I grabbed it and ran.
£135, that’s four pound short,
Team J never dibbed in.
Next week I’ll have a word.
But come next Monday when I get to the Dalston Rocket
Chloe the landlady was waiting outside for me.
She says, “You’re barred.”
“Barred?” I says, “What did I do?”
She says, “The Pub Quiz is getting out of hand,”
I says, “I’m innocent
All I did I set out to know more than anyone ever had,
Is that so wrong?
I mean, what was the Enlightenment
if not the bringing together
of everything anyone ever knew
in hopes we’d then know what to do next?
Voltaire, Napoleon, Robespierre…?
Church and state divided, the people enlightened – “
She said “If I have that sort of trouble then I lose my licence.”
I stood between the dripping petunia baskets
she’d just watered
Wrong side of the black portcullis.
The accumulation of all that knowledge?
How does it help me now?
I mean knowledge – it’s not wisdom is it?
So I stopped going to pub quizzes
and instead I set up a society for the pursuit of wisdom.
We did ayahuasca cermonies,
visited terminal wards,
read Dorothy Rowe
fasted, cultivated our gardens,
all that.
Tuesday nights upstairs at the Betsy Trotwood pub
there’d we’d be –
the swami, the sufi, imam and ex-con,
the rabbi, the shaman, philosphy Don,
the widow who fostered her own grandchild,
the pre-lingual boy brought up in the wild.
In retrospect awarding points for correct answers was where it all went wrong.
Oh, and inviting Clive Datchett along.
It got, you could say, competitive.
First question.
Give one example of how nature
prefers co-operation to competition.
While writing “tropical forests in their climax phase,”
Datchett’s eyes met mine and we both looked away in shame.
Three points for naming
one social
one economic
and one political force
that militates against reflection, thus reducing knowledge
to the acquisition of gobbets of information for use in quizzes.
The serpent is not knowledge but competition.
Had Adam been humiliating Eve in the Eden quiz?
“Sssuppothhh”, said the serpent, “a quesssstion came up about sssssomething other than the naming of plantssss and beassts which Adam doess so well at…?
Hmmm?
What then, my pretty naked one?
Here’ssss how much he knowth about pop muthic, for exsssample” said the serpent,
coiling himself into a big zero.
Tie-break
head-to-head at last.
Me and the U’wa shaman.
(Datchett was nowhere.
Couldn’t make the leap to the transcendantal, could he?
Didn’t have it in him.)
The tie-break wasn’t a question so much as a spiritual task:
First to enter the realm of Nothingness
And sit on the eternal lotus leaf
at the centre of the peace which passeth understanding,
Wins.The decision went against me.
“How can you say I lost?” I shouted.
“I didn’t only become the lotus leaf,
I worked out its circumference and diameter, too!”
“He who sits on lotus with slide-rule,”
Said the swami, “sinks into the pond.”
You know that sound of enlightened laughter?
The ironic appreciation of truth?
Well it hurts and it cuts like a bastard
When the butt of the wise joke is you.
And it didn’t help
when Clive Datchett start throwing L-signs at me.
What’s that L-sign about, asked the sufi,
and Datchett said the “L” sign he threw stood for Learning.
” “And the double ‘L'” the imam asks Datchett,
“that you made when he got to the door?”
“A bookcase,” said Datchett, “a bookcase,”
and bent his false eyes to the floor.Then a breakdown.
It hurt to use my brain for anything.
I let my mind go blank
and memory disolve
like chalk teeth in Steradent.*****
You will see me in the Rocket most afternoons,
sitting by the extinct fireplace.
I read Take A Break, OK! or Heat
if there’s one lying around,
sometimes, if I’m feeling brave or foolish,
the sports pages, but usually not,
they’re too near the crossword and the puzzles, aren’t they?
Not just the Rocket,
I like to sit in any pub with no triv or quiz machines
nothing more harmful than vending machines.
Coin-in-the-slot vending machines
first introduced for loose tobacco
in England, 1615.
Careful.
You see what I mean?
But the doctor says I’m so much better
That I can even go to the odd pub quiz now and then.
So for the last few weeks I’ve actually been going to the Dalston Rocket.
Chloe’s not there any more.
I sometimes do quite well on the picture round
if it’s someone who’s been in Heat or Take A Break!
Most people get those, though, don’t they?
Sometimes I pull one out of the locker:
Mill Reef! Edict of Nantes!
When I pull one out like that,
Dalston Rocket pub-quiz first-timers
who only asked me to join their team out of politeness,
look at me strangely
try and high-five me,
but I watch their palm
fade from the air like a firework
before I’ve figured out what’s happening,
what I’m supposed to do in return.
But I enjoy the game so much more now,
a smile in the corners of my mouth,
when in answer to some question
Like how do we know we exist?
Or how do we tell right from wrong?
I say to the team:
“Ooh, I know this…”
And then I say,
“… Oh, no it’s gone.”By Peter Linlithgow, Ex-Pub-Quiz Champion Of the World via Mr Robert Newman
Derby fans best in England.
As I suspected.
No. He took the drugs and the punishment was a two year ban from participating in athletics and a lifetime ban from representing his country at the games. He is the only one attempting to change rules.
I think anyone named Dwayne should be banned from everything.
Also, I think training at all should be outlawed. Under the original Corinthian ethos that spawned such things as the Olympic movement, it was certainly frowned at. There was no need to ban it formally, though, since the competitors themselves could be relied upon not to do anything so crass. Unfortunately, we do not live in such enlightened times.
Indeed, Manners, my old tim chum. I am quite literally agog.
Very drole.
Who got a PM? Who was it from?
I have sinned, dear Father. Father I have sinned
Try and help me Father
Won’t you let me in? Liar!
Nobody believes me! Liar!
Why don’t they leave me alone?
Sire, I have stolen, stolen many times
Raised my voice in anger
When I know I never should
Liar! Oh ev’rybody deceives me
Liar! Why don’t you leave me alone?Liar! I have sailed the seas
Liar! from Mars to Mercury
Liar! I have drunk the wine
Liar! Time after time
Liar! You’re lying to me
Liar! You’re lying to me
Father, please forgive me
You know you’ll never leave me
Please will you direct me in the right way
Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar!
‘Liar!’, that’s what they keep calling me
Liar! Liar! Liar!Listen, are you gonna listen?
Mama, I’m gonna be your slave
All day long
Mama, I’m gonna try behave
All day long
Mama, I’m gonna be your slave
All day long
I’m gonna serve you till your dying day
All day long
I’m gonna keep you till your dying day
All day long
I’m gonna kneel down by your side and pray
All day long and pray
All day long and pray
All day long and pray
All day long all day long all day long
All day long all day long all day longAll day long all day long all day long
Liar! Liar! They never ever let you win
Liar! Liar! Everything you do is sin
Liar! Nobody believes you
Liar! They bring you down before you begin
Now, let me tell you this
Now, you know you could be dead before they let youLiar ~ Queen
Runway is a looker – ancient and modern.
What I want to know is, who sent the messages urging people to join the boycott?
I think The Raconteurs were very chipper.
