The Trip To Thorpe Park

It is a Thursday morning and I wake up worse for wear. You see, the previous night my friend and I organised a secondary school reunion event down our local pub. The turnout was surprisingly decent and as is the case with meeting people that you haven't seen in a long time, you drink a lot to avoid the awkward sober chat.

It is 8:45AM and I am due to go to Thorpe Park in about fifteen minutes. The last thing that I want to do in my hungover state is sit on roller-coasters all day.

I manage to drag myself out of bed, have a shower and then meet my friend, Alex, where we travel to Phil's house.

We arrive to see that no-one is ready to go. Phil is still trying to print out vouchers whilst his university friend, Sara, is still drinking a cup of tea. I will later learn that Sara is an avid tea fan which is so quintessentially English.

Alex and I try to help Phil print out his vouchers only to be distracted by the oh-so-brilliantly titled book The Rape of Tutankhamun. Phil has always said that this is his dad's book, but I am still convinced that it is his. I've always suspected him of having a fetish for Egyptian Pharaohs.

Whilst Phil and Alex continued to try and print out the vouchers, I joined Sara downstairs with Phil's mum where she regaled us with tales of her former career in the aviation industry. Here's a fun fact that I learnt, there used to be a helicopter service between Heathrow and Gatwick Airport. Don't let people tell you this blog isn't full of interesting facts to share down the pub.

We eventually got ready and set off to Thorpe Park. Midway through the car journey, I decided to check my e-mails.

"Oh my God! Bloc Party have just announced a new tour and tickets are on sale now!" I announced to the entire car.

I set about buying the tickets on my phone and luckily I managed to purchase them. It has been two and a half years since the last Bloc Party gig, so I was allowed to be a bit excited.

We reached Thorpe Park and met up with Phil's other friend from university, the brilliantly named James Brown. Before you start wondering, no it isn't the dead soul singer. He's dead as I just said so it'd be weird if he came back to life and befriended a twenty year old from Kingston-upon-Thames.

We went on as many rides as possible and it turns out that going on roller-coasters is very tiring. It reached 6PM and with Phil's mum due to pick us up at 6:30, we decided that there probably wasn't time to go on the new ride The Swarm due to time constraints.

We vacated the park and waited for the pick up only for Phil's mum to call at 6:30 and say that there had been a crash on the A3 and that she'd be a while.

We waited patiently and entertained ourselves. We played hop-scotch, rock-paper-scissors and had a hopping race and then finally Phil's mum called at 7:30 to say that she hadn't moved any further due to the traffic and that we should make our own way home.

Now any avid reader of this blog will know that Thursday night is quiz night and we only had an hour to make it. We decided that a taxi was the best mode of transport and luckily one drove straight towards us. We asked him the price to Berrylands and he didn't know where the place was. It was hardly like we were asking to be dropped off at the Kuiper Belt. He informed us that he could only drive locally due to the fact he was attending a wedding reception yet he decided to tease us by keeping the car right next to us by jolting forward by an inch every minute. It was quite odd.

We finally found a cab that could take us home and after a £30 journey we made it to the pub in time for the quiz. A heated moment occurred where I made a bet of a kick in the balls over a question which myself and Alex disagreed on.

Overall, I spent around £100 during the day and was as tired as an old lady but I still have yet to receive the kick in the balls so I guess the day was a resounding success.

The Quiz: Part Three

I write this post in anger. Despair. Frustration. Hate. Well, not hate, that's going a bit far.

As it is the winter break from university, my group of friends are all back home and our pub quiz team is re-united once again. Last week saw us perform in an admirable fashion but fall short once again.

This week was different though. For a start, it was a quiz that was going to comprise of questions reviewing 2011, a year in which all of our team lived. So one would expect that we'd be pretty knowledgeable about the year. Also, it was Michael's birthday. Naturally, we would hope for some birthday luck.

We decided to call ourselves Happy Birthday Michael. A witty name, I think you will find. Under this new guise we performed at the top of our game, knocking up scores that we don't usually knock up.

After the sports round, we were still in with a chance. This was a first for our team. We were just one point off the top and we could smell victory as we were confident of getting a near perfect score on the music round.

We did. We got 14 and a half out of 15. We also scored 17 out of 20 on the picture round. I was sure of victory. So sure, I could envisage spending the prize money. Heck, even the Bar Team were playing poorly and they always win.

Did we win?

No. We bloody didn't. We were beaten by a team of twenty including someone that we all knew. Disaster. We lost out by just 2 points.

I am gutted. I thought this was our week. I thought this would be the time that we would finally triumph.

On the plus side, we finally broke the 60 point barrier, a first for the team. Small crumbs of comfort, I guess.

What can be guarenteed is that we will be back there next week. We will no doubt fail to win, yet again. Wish us luck.

The Quiz: Part Two

If you can recall from an earlier blog, my friends and I have our own little quiz team that we enter into the weekly quiz on a Thursday down our local pub, The Berrylands.

I realise that in the last blog on this matter that I neglected to fill you in with a key detail. Our team name. It is brilliant. It is genius. It is certified genius by the man who runs the quiz. We are called Let’s Get Quizzical.

If you don’t understand then I will explain for you. It is a play on the lyrics of that famous song ‘Physical’ with the main, repeated lyric being “Let’s get phyiscal…physical”. We have simply replaced the word physical with quizzical. See, I told you it was genius.

Anywho, since the last blog post about the pub quiz, I am dissapointed to say that we have still failed to win the pub quiz. Quite frankly we are all suprised at this as we are all certified geniuses. I did just have to check that geniuses is the plural of genius there.

So, for this week’s edition of the pub quiz we brought in reinforcements. I say we, when I mean Becky brought her dad. However, we were convinced this would be a winning move. A strategy that would be copied in the future by pub quiz team’s consisting of 20 year olds failing in their quest to win. I say we were convinced, well I was convinced.

It turns out I was wrong. Despite the many points that were brought in this week by our new recruit, we still didn’t win. In fact, we weren’t even close. The bloody Bar Team wont again. How dare they!
The quiz master though did lead a chant against this cheating mob though. After the count of three, most people in the pub joined in with a rousing cry of “Cheating Bastards!”

So there we are. I’m still that immature that I can’t resist a good communal chant of “Cheating Bastards!” against a team of people who cheat at the pub quiz. Maybe I’m not maturing as fast as I thought…

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The Quiz

Every Thursday, a few friends and I compete in our local pub quiz. Pub quizzes are the ultimate manly activity. Beer and facts. A pub quiz seperates the men from the boys. Unfortunately, we are probably all still boys as we have yet to win despite the fact we all think we are clever. Our A-Team consists of people who go to University at Edinburgh, Essex, Leeds and myself at Reading. Oh, and someone who’s been to University twice.

However, disaster struck in our most recent outing. The majority of our A-Team were busy and were unable to come. So, we drafted in the B-Team. We knew we were doomed to yet another winless week.
One of the B-Team members is, let’s just say, very confident in his answers so usually we go along with his answers and they turn out to be wrong. So, in the best way possible, we ignored his answers. However, that turned out to be terrible. He was right in all his answers and we were doing awfully. Terrible scores like 5/15 were notched up in the opening rounds.

Only the picture round and the music round could save us from humiliation of last place. We performed terribly yet again. When the final scores were announced, we had somehow finished last. Against a room full of drunkards and some people so old they probably didn’t know what their name was, we somehow came last. This was awful.

The second it was announced we had come last we quickly left, embarrased and shamed. What idiots we are.