Tag: quiz

Pie Day II and Mother’s Day Too

Dave was unable to join us due to an overdose of beer but the other mothers and children enjoyed this hearty vegetarian pie followed by a chocolate orange cake. Sadly without the Davester we only managed to scrape 10 on the GSQ.
Meanwhile, A1 has been on a Galaxy Quest…
…and found Bode’s galaxy in the Great Bear constellation. More images here, on our other blog.
A2 is reading The Four by Ellie Keel which was unmitigated tripe.

Happy International Women’s Day, Ladies!

Here’s a delicious cherry bakewell cake to celebrate, after the main dish of pork in cider and before we scored 12 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading Quantum of Menace* by Vaseem Khan, who should stick with Indian detectives rather than pseudo-American thrillers and (as here) feeble James Bond tie-ins.
A2 is reading The Bells of Westminster* by Leonora Nattrass.

Fly Me to the Moon

Our last post was about dinner at the ivy and tonight a boy called Ivy joined us for our family dinner but nobody thought to take a picture. Instead here are a couple of shots from A1’s Dwarf Mini telescope: some iridescent starlings and the crescent moon.

The menu for tonight was spag bol followed by nectarine cake and the GSQ at which we scored 10.5.

Happy Pancake Day, Ramadan, Chinese New Year and Birthday Bob!

So much to celebrate! We had more food than you can shake a chopstick at, followed by A1’s sublime chocolate cake with 10 candles and 10 Lego minifigures sunk knee-deep in ganache.
A1 is reading HHhH by Laurent Binet. A2 is rereading Valis by Philip K Dick. We scored a most excellent 11 on the GSQ.

Chicken Tonight

Another family dinner. A1 roasted a delicious chicken with roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, carrots and broccoli and A2 made a wobbly trifle. We did this week’s and last week’s GSQs and scored 10 on the first and 10.5 on the second.
A1 is reading It’s Not a Cult by Joey Batey, a debut horror/fantasy novel about an alt-folk band in northern England who manage to conjure up a legion of Solkats — small gods of trivial things like empty glasses and bruises. JB (day job: actor) claims to have been writing for years without getting published, and you can perhaps see why: it’s horribly over-written. Some interesting ideas and touches of humour, but he’s clearly been paying obeisance to the Solkat of purple prose.
A2 is reading Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds.

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.