Tag: quiz

First home-grown pudding of the year, following a dish of porky vegetables and rice and followed by our worst quiz score of the year: a totally miserable 6.
A2 is rereading Slow Horses by Mick Herron. Always a pleasure.

A pastalicous respast, followed by a fruity trifle hand-sprinkled by the ever-helpful Gez, after which we scored a poor quality 8 on the GSQ.
Despite our hottest May day ever, the month was somewhat cooler and wetter than average, with average solar panel output.
A1 is rereading The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North.

We had brassicas for Africa this week, and Gez is dieting for health, so our food for today was cauliflower cheese with coleslaw and a garden lettuce salad followed by fruit salad, after which we scored 11 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading The Edge of Darkness* by Vaseem Khan. A2 is rereading Death at the Sign of the Rook by the ever-enjoyable Kate Atkinson.

There’s a man with a naan at the head of the table at our curry and crumble dinner at which we scored a contested 10 (some say 11) on the GSQ.
A2 is reading The Bookseller* by Tim Sullivan.

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.

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.

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.