Tag: quiz

Ice

Faye with their pre-birthday cake of ice cream, biscuits and chocolate after a dinner of spag bol and before we managed to score 10 on the GSQ.
A1 is rereading Joe Country by Mick Herron.
After 17 days, A2 has finally reached the end of ICE, an alternate history set in the 1920s, in which the Tunguska impact delivered new materials to the world, bringing new elements and glaciers at absolute zero, setting in motion cryotechnologies and black physics and freezing history so the Russian revolution and World War 1 never happened. Reading it was akin to reading War and Peace as a teenager; an unlikeable protagonist, a mix of historical and fictional figures, long philosophical, theological and mathematical disquisitions and an enormous cast of characters. Like W&P it was a struggle to read but the feeling of genius was strong. A2 is now going to relax with The Burning Grounds by Abir Mukherjee.

Another Family Meal

The last family gathering of this quarter-century at which we ate chicken bacon broccoli and a tiny banana blueberry white chocolate cake and scored 12 on the last quiz of the year for a fairly neat average of 10.225, a step down from last year’s 10.2268518518519, and another step down from 2023’s 10.2756346153846. Onwards and upwards everyone!
Prompted by watching series 5 of Slow Horses, A1 is rereading London Rules by Mick Herron (on which it’s based), to remind himself how much better the books are.

Boxing Day Dinner

Our family dinner. Same as yesterday but with added peas and a successfully flambé Christmas pudding.

There were many more presents to unwrap and a quiz to do at which we scored 11.5 against all odds.

And here’s Dave being very childish with one of his presents, and causing much amusement:

Chicken Dinner

For our family meal tonight we had tomato chicken, baked potatoes and creamy cheesy leeks, followed by A1’s magnificent marble cake with cream, custard and chocolate sauce, and generously scored ourselves 9.5 on the GSQ.
A2 is reading We Solve Murders by Richard Osman,in which a different bunch of (mostly) agreeable (mostly) old buffers turn their backs on village life to form an international crime-fighting syndicate. Thanks Gemma’s!

Roasted

Roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes, sprouts, broccoli, stuffing balls, gravy … but A1 forgot to serve the carrots. But never mind, Gez scoffed the lot anyway. Plus A2’s delicious afters of Squidgy Chocolate Pear Pudding and cream, after which we scored 13 on the GSQ with Bob as quizmaster.
A1 is rereading The Stand by Stephen King. A2 is reading Desolation Road by Ian McDonald.

Spag Bol

Another family lunch of leftover pasta and trifle at which we scored 10 on the GSQ in the absence of Dave who was ill.
November was cooler and cloudier than average but was our rainiest month this year and our fifth wettest of all time: 145.2mm.
A2 is reading Hearts, Hands and Voices by Ian McDonald, a magical science-fictional take on 20th-century Irish history.

Jet-propelled Macaron

Yet another (very short) rainbow with a spoke.
We had an unscheduled family dinner of spag bol on Friday so today we just had coffee, mince pies and a disintegrated apple cake and scored an encouraging 11 on the GSQ.
A1 is rereading IT by Stephen King. A2 is reading The Lamplighters* by Emma Stonex; a confusing story of the disappearance of a lighthouse crew seen from 20 years later with flashbacks to hidden secrets, marital disharmony, a ghost and a Chekhov’s pistol that never goes off.

Coffee Morning

A2 is now descending/ascending the stairs! Huzzah! But we were still not ready for a family meal today so we had one flat white, one long black, one macchiato, one cappuccino and two espressos, served with stollen, croissants and biscuits (and a ton of sweets, mistakenly bought in expectation of Helloween visitations). We did this week’s and last week’s quiz, scoring 10.5 on one and 11 on the other.
A1 is rereading ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. A2 is reading Rosy & John* by Pierre Lemaitre.

Coq au Vin

The family meal on this very rainy day (19.8mm) was A2’s amazingly delicious Coq au Vin, served with mash, green beans and garlic puff pastry pinwheels. Yum!

And for pudding, here’s Dave cutting A1’s Orange Sponge, served with custard, cream and chocolate sauce.

After all that, we scored a reasonable 9 on the quiz.

A1 is reading Ice Queen by Nele Neuhaus, a fearsomely complicated story of a squabbling German family with secret Nazi pasts. An exhausting read.

Dish of the Day: Stew

Our family meal today was beef stew with thyme dumplings followed by garden apple frangipane tart. We strained our brains mightily but still only scored 9 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading The Plague Letters by VL Valentine — bought, appropriately, on our way back from getting COVID/flu jabs. London in lockdown, meetings banned, thousands dead, hospitals overwhelmed, quack cures and conspiracy theories abound, and while the poor keep dying, the rich party. Yes, it’s 2020 1665, the Great Plague. In this superbly well-written novel, someone is hastening the deaths of plague victims with bizarre apparent attempts at cures, amounting to torture. Can a kind but ineffectual rector and a very effectual but mysterious girl uncover the culprit? The characters (mostly real, with Dickensian names like Mincy, Greatrakes and Boghurst) are written with great relish, and there’s a lot of very dark humour underlying the tragedy. A quite wonderful book, one of the best I’ve read this year. Highly recommended.
A2 is rereading The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman.

Parkin Space

A cold-weather cake after our warming lunch of pasta bakes at which we scored another substandard 9 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths, featuring a time-travelling detective. EG has no idea how to write skiffy (which she sort of admits), so she keeps the science and wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff off-page, sensibly. A more worrying feature is the similarity of her protagonists — here Ali is indistinguishable from her previous archaeologist protagonist Ruth Galloway, and is pretty unbelievable in her reactions for a DS. Still, readable and entertaining enough.
A2 is rereading Buried by Jussi Adler Olsen.

After the Birthday

Transit of Bob. It was A2’s birthday yesterday so she got a lot of lovely presents of things to drink, read and wear to the gym. Our family dinner was chicken, bacon and broccoli with A1’s cherry cake and perfect garden apple charlotte for afters. We scored 9 on the GSQ. Could have been worse. And we could have seen the lunar eclipse if it hadn’t been cloudy, and then raining. But it was clear in Lusaka (see right) — thanks, Guida!
A1 is reading The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith, the latest biceps-straining volume in the Strike/Ellacott saga. Expensive, too — probably the first £30 mass-market novel (although it’s been heavily discounted).
It’s nominally a fiendishly complicated crime novel (and it is complicated — you may want to take notes), but RG is having great fun with the on-off relationship between the protagonists, which fortunately errs on the right side of soapiness; you can imagine her smirking at the readers’ reactions. The targets this time include Freemasonry and another stab at an evil Boris Johnson analogue, who really seems to appeal to writers (cf Mick Herron, MW Craven etc). Can’t imagine why… Criticism? There’s a bit too much phonetic transcription of accents, and the subplot about human trafficking gets somewhat lost in all the fol-de-rol. But a thoroughly enjoyable read nonetheless.
A2 is reading The Predicament by William Boyd, which was absolutely delightful. Thank you A1.

Feeding Time

Today’s family dinner was spag bol with stuffed mushrooms for the kids and trifle for pudding, after which we scored a miserable 8 on the GSQ. Can’t win them all.
But we did win on the solar panels, which passed last year’s total with four months left to go. August itself was averagely sunny and warm, but very dry (and nearly half of the total came down yesterday — 10.5mm out of 22.5). Only 2022 had less August rainfall, and 2025 is looking like it will be our driest ever year by some way, even allowing for the weather station’s downtime in May/June.

Dish of the Day: Pasta Bake

We intended to feed the family with leftover spag bol but it was mouldy so A2 rustled up some emergency pasta bakes with and without tuna and A1 made a delicious blackberry crumble with custard. Thus fortified, and with the irrepressible Bob as quizmaster, we scored 13 on the GSQ, our equal best this year and bringing us back above 10 again.
A2 is reading Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky; anarchists exiled to a prison planet investigate the strange and ultimately liberating ecology.

Yet Another Celebration

A family dinner to round off a week of festivities. A1 received a Shipping Forecast T-shirt and we both got coffee beans and beer. Toad-in-the-hole (veggie and carnivore versions) and the remains of the delicious cherry cake were served and we scored 12 on the GSQ, bringing our average back above 10 at long last.

<<<< And here’s Dad Dancing!

A1 is rereading Sympathy for the Devil by William Shaw.A2 is rereading Redemption by Jussi Adler-Olsen

National Beer Day

It is also Father’s Day, so we had a delicious chicken, leek and mushroom pie for the dads to enjoy with their beer, followed by Fried Alaska (with raspberry Swiss roll and minty chocolate ice cream), and scored a creditable 11 on the GSQ.
A1 is rereading Born in a Burial Gown by MW Craven. A2 is reading The Man Made of Smoke* by Alex North. Many years ago, various people ignored an unhappy child in a service station, and now they are being bumped off one by one.

After the Feast

We were so busy enjoying our family dinner of roast pork, potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, broccoli, peas, carrots, stuffing and gravy, followed by home-grown rhubarb crumble with custard and cream, at which we scored a solid 12 on the GSQ, that we forgot to photograph it, so here is a picture of some of the washing-up.
Our weather station has been hors de memory crash for the past week so does not know that we have had ample rain recently, so according to our figures, May 2025 was averagely warm and exceedingly dry (a mere 0.6mm). The solar panels are working though; May 2025 was the third sunniest May and the eighth sunniest month ever.
A2 is rereading When the Devil Drives by Christopher Brookmyre.