Last night was the last meeting in 2016 and time for a 'knees up', or so Diana Newnes thought when I offered to bring her.
Instead, she was quizzed, but well fed thanks to Daisy who came loaded with food and drink. Anne helped her put the food out and start heating the punch, whilst our Quiz Masters Liz and Janet set out tables, chairs and Quiz sheets and generally prepared us for our entertainment.
We started with Martin running through the entries for the last PI competition which had to be abandoned thanks to our old enemy Microsoft deciding that Windows 10 on the club laptop needed to be updated. (Our resident brilliant 'Tech-no Crat' Martin has told us how to stop this embarrassing event happening again at an unwanted time). (Martin is a very anti Apple, who make very reliable programmes which would never behave in such a manner [Ed: Martin doesn't dispute that but has issues with Apple's business practices].)
Anyway, he ran through all our entries which Bob de Ruiter had very kindly marked at home and sent back to us. I had had one entry marked before the disaster and knew that I would do even worse with my second entry, because unless your image had a certain amount of ‘speed-blur’ in it, it had no chance of scoring any decent points. We could see what Bob wanted with the winning picture of the evening by Daisy of a blurred, but very colourful, picture of some race horses speeding by, which was very effective. Daisy’s second entry was more static though not blurred and scored badly like the rest of most of us! Martin got the highest mark with a 20 and an 18 (neither of which were blurred). Very well done Martin. A report on the competition will appear elsewhere, if it hasn’t already.
We then had our eats and drinks with Audrey providing the best minced pies in the County, if not the entire universe. Chris also baked us a very good looking cake, which I had to decline due to my girth. We had all sat down at tables of four, except mine which only had three of us (including two octagenerians and onevery bright other person). Anyway (Liz and Janet) had worked very hard on four quizzes. The first was to identify the objects which Liz had photographed in a cunning way and pasted up on a board. I was foully criticised by someone for looking at them too soon; however the bright sparks at the table next to ours started their written papers at the earliest opportunity therefore getting them nearly all right. However the real ''Clever Dicks" were Daisy, Paul, Martin and Anne who won nearly everything. Our old people’s table did very well in our opinion.
Anyway, we all had a very nice evening and our very sincere thanks are due to Daisy, Janet, Liz, Audrey, Chris Anne and everyone else who helped.
A very Happy Christmas to one and all and a healthy New Year.