Saturday Night Pub Quiz

To tell the truth, we didn’t actually go to a pub.  Does it count if our Pub Quiz really took place in a school class room during our caravan rally?  Of course not.  And all that thinking certainly gave the old grey cells a bit of a shake-up, I can tell you.

A busy old day

The first quiz had a decided political flavour.  Our team of four had to list the 15 political parties that contested the 2014 General Election.  We started well, National, Labour, NZ First (good old Winston who gave us OAPs the Gold Card), The Greens, and the Maori Party.  Then we ran out of steam a bit.  What’s the name of that fellow who always wears bow ties, we asked each other.  And that awful millionaire Kim Dot Com – the name of his political party escaped us for a while, even though it was in the news night after night.  The minutes kept ticking away, and there was no way that we could remember the names of all the fifteen – so there was no way our team was coming first.

Then we were taken back to our childhood days when we were asked to recall Nursery Rhymes in a two part quiz.  First we had to work out the first line from the clue:  Little MMSOAT.  Easy – Little Miss Muffet sat on a Tuffet.  Then we had to recall the second line of the nursery rhyme.  No trouble in this case – “eating her curds and whey”.  Some were easy, and some not, and if we couldn’t get part one there was no way to work out the second line for part two.  We were asked to repeat this exercise 44 times – goodness, who would even know there were that many nursery rhymes.  Geoff and Eileen won this quiz with a wonderful effort of 39 correct answers.

We were blessed with lovely sunny Autumn weather over the weekend, with just a little rain on Sunday.  The school was surrounded with large trees and we listened to the chortling songs of magpies.  And somewhere up high was a tui hiding in the trees who kept us entertained with his singing.   Tui are endemic to New Zealand and belong to the honeyeater family, which means they feed mainly on nectar from flowers of native plants. Occasionally they will eat insects too.  They are important pollinators of many native trees and will fly large distances, especially during winter for their favourite foods.  We finally spotted the tui up on the topmost branch of a large Macrocarpa tree.  Although they appear black from a distance, tui feathers have a beautiful iridescent blue and green sheen.  In this photo you can just make out the curled white feather tufts on the throat.  Because of these white feathers early settlers called the tui the Parson bird.

Tui on the highest branch of the tree

And to show you the lovely colours – photo from the internet

It was a great weekend with our caravan buddies, with plenty to keep us entertained, from disc bowls to the pub quiz.  And the blokes were very interested in the cricket match of the day when the Black Caps played the West Indies.  They all huddled together in a group – Barry kept everyone informed with updates on his phone.  But there is nothing wrong with listening the old fashioned way – Dave had his radio tuned to the game and they all listened intently.   Sport is well ingrained into the  Kiwi  male psyche, and there is nothing more serious than international sport.

Listening intently to the cricket game