Robert Macfarlane may have a point

[shewhomust]

One of the pleasures of quizzing is reaching into the bran tub of your memory and coming out with something that might be a piece of random word-association, but turns out to be the right answer. But sometimes you get spectacular results from something that takes no effort at all. This doesn't seem fair, but that's how it goes.

Last week at the pub quiz, the beer round -

- the beer round is a free-standing round: the marks don't contribute to your overall total, but there is a prize of drinks tokens, provided by the management. Its five questions are given at one time, which gives the Quizmaster a chance to breathe, count the takings, whatever. The questions can be verbal, but are more often pictures, and occasionally music. Scores are often very low, and there is usually a tie-breaker -

- and last week the challenge was to identify five flowers from Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies of the Summer. I went straight through it, writing in the names: honeysuckle, poppy, foxglove, harebell, pimpernel. And I thought the Quizmaster had miscalculated here, and there would be a massive tie-breaker for all the teams scoring five out of five. Admittedly, of all the Flower Fairies books, summer is the one I had as a child, but these surely aren't difficult flowers to identify. The scarlet pimpernel might cause some problems, but ...

Which just shows how much I know. There were three teams (out of 20 - it was a busy week) who scored four, but we were alone is scoring full marks. Which was gratifying, if unexpected. What's more, talking to the Quizmaster afterwards I learned that we were the only team who had identified the harebell: he wasn't sure himself how it differed from the bluebell. It's blue, it's bell-shaped... I didn't tell him that it's also called the Scots bluebell, just that it's a completely different flower: bluebell; harebell. You're welcome.

Comments

[sovay]

- and last week the challenge was to identify five flowers from Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies of the Summer. I went straight through it, writing in the names: honeysuckle, poppy, foxglove, harebell, pimpernel.

The Harebell Fairy was one of my favorites! So was the Poppy. I would have cleaned up if anyone had asked to identify Traveller's Joy.

[shewhomust]

I was particularly fond of toadflax!

[hairyears]

The harebell is the preferred food (and bachelor crashpad) of Britain's smallest bee, the small scissor bee!


Chelostoma campanularum, if you fancy looking it up.

[shewhomust]

That's a good quiz fact - thanks!