This is a bit of Flash I wrote 7 or 8 years ago and have just found again in my Google Drive. I expect I entered it for something and that was the last anyone heard of it. I had added a dark ending - a really really dark ending - for some sort of shock value and which I’ve deleted, leaving this sort of anecdote thing behind. Apologies to anyone who recognises themself in this: it isn’t really them! The top & tail quotes are from George Gissing’s “The Private Papers Of Henry Ryecroft”.
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“Nevertheless, my life is over”.
The best bit about quiz night was choosing the team name. "The AS Byatt Rocketry Club For Men '' had been deemed “de trop”: worryingly for the team's prospects it had been demanded of him “who was this Byatt anyhow when he was at home?”. So it actually turned out that thinking of a good team name before you got to the pub was the good bit, the golden pie-crust, but that the reality more resembled the gristled disaster within.
He therefore felt difficulty heart-and-souling it as a representative of "Barbara's Big Beauties", - inevitably spelt "beauty's" - , and strove vainly against such areas of vital human endeavour as TV personalities' activities in a jungle scenario, the novels of Dan Brown, when Crystal Palace had last won the FA Cup*, or France's record in the Triple Crown**.
They came third, which they agreed Wasn't Too Bad, Considering. He had got the one about interest rates, insisting on his correctness in the face of dubiety, and was thus more pleased than otherwise, and walked the wet fag-butted street home with, not a song, a hum, in his heart.
“I am tempted to laugh; I hold myself within the limit of a smile”.
* hoot
** v. funny, this.
