Table for Four

I’m sixty-one, going on sixty-two, and last Thursday evening I had a brief sensual experience that I never had before. I’d seen it done multiple times and, until I did it, I had no idea that I’d never done it before.

We’ll come to that. But, not wishing to keep you waiting unnecessarily, I will say that it’s an extremely low-key thing and you will be disappointed and not very interested in it.

Last Thursday evening we went to a Table Quiz. You might know the format better as a Pub Quiz. Four team members at a table who write their answers on a sheet of paper and submit them for scoring. Ten questions per round, ten rounds. Highest scoring table wins something. It’s all for a very good cause so you buy more raffle tickets than you might actually wish for. You get it, right?

The evening had a sort of a ‘throwback’ quality to it. A throwback to Pre-Covid days. Table quizzes were more usual then, less so since. Perhaps that’s one reason why there was such a big crowd at this one. Lots and lots of people, out on a school night, looking to answer some questions. Go figure.

Our team was comprised of me, Patricia, Bertha, and Majella. You don’t know them but one of them is my wife (again, go figure). We represented a good variety of knowledge and a fine quota of low confidence. Both important attributes for a table quiz team. Bertha was assigned to write the answers on the answer sheet because her writing is legible. Mine is very much not.

(I should mention that this post isn’t going anywhere in particular. Just setting down some memories.)

The raffle ticket sellers all employ the same shtick. They are our friends and will sell us the very best tickets and even give us a few more than we should realistically expect to get because we are special. We all know it’s a time-worn performance and we all embrace it equally.

We fall back into our old table-quiz habits. I have my own little sheets of paper upon which I draw a matrix for each round and scribble in our answers and note our scores per round so that we can challenge it if someone adds up our score wrong. Of course, we never challenge anything.

We fall back into old table-quiz etiquette too. If Bertha-the-Scribe knows the answer and we all know it too, we just nod sagely as she writes it down. No need for consultation. Of course, sometime Bertha knows it and writes it down and we don’t know it at all. We still nod sagely though. I’ve got through a lot of table quiz questions by nodding sagely without having a clue what I’m nodding about.

Some of the questions are designed to spark debate. Some are just plain knowledge. You either have it or you don’t. In the former category, a) what is the most dangerous animal in the world, i.e. killed most humans? In the latter category, b) in what year did Shane Lowry last win a major. a) Is it a cow? A dog? A crocodile. No, it’s a mosquito, apparently. b) Not a clue, put a random year down and fingers crossed. It was actually 2019.

At the half time interval, drinks and cocktail sausages and chips, we are floundering in the bottom half of the score board. There is a ‘plate’ competition for us poor souls who are not in contention and we focus our minds on that. For the second half, though, we rally impressively with rounds on books and movies and music. Strong suits all. We max the rounds out and suddenly we’re up there with the leaders. Never really in with any chance of winning but the plate is nailed. We get a bottle of wine each and our photo took. Patricia has already seized a bottle of white in the raffle, so we are bailing home three bottles to the good.

And what of this sensual experience that never happened before in all of sixty-one and a half years?

The quiz was over and suddenly a large cardboard box was at my shoulder. A lady was holding it. She nodded at me, and I did the needful automatically, without really having to be asked or without really thinking about it at all.

I drew the next raffle ticket. That was my sensual experience.

Oh, Ken, you kept us here for that? Drawing a raffle ticket out of a box?

I know, I know but bear with me. Of all the experiences I had this week, I think this was the only one that I had for the very first time. And it was strange. It was really quite strange. Firstly, the tickets in the box were deep and they were all crumpled. Somebody had gone to the trouble of crumpling them up. Secondly, it was a bit hard to just get one strip of tickets. The crumpling had bound them all together. One had to do a chef’s ‘pinch of salt gesture with finger and thumb to separate one out. Then, you don’t look at the box, you look away from it and also, by default, away from the person who is holding it. This is probably on account of some wish to not pick out a ticket from someone you know by looking in the box and identifying it in there. A stupid notion if ever there was one. I drew the ticket and handed it to the lady and when I looked, she was gone. A fleeting, furtive transaction in the middle of a large room.

And, although it was a great night out and I wouldn’t want to reduce the niceness of it in any way, the drawing of that ticket, for some unexplainable reason, reminded me of another individual sensual experience from some years before.

And that, alas, was the carrying of a coffin.

Strange, I know, and not very easy making. But that’s life, isn’t it? Taking the rough with the smooth. Finding the best in things whilst acknowledging the worst.

Now… where’s all that wine?