All right on the night

Yesterday night, I popped down to the church St Mary Magdalene for QuizAid, a quiz night organised across the country to raise money through donations to Christian Aid. On my team were the people getting baptised and/or confirmed in a little over eight days time. Altaa stayed at home because she was tired.
Rosemary Hoare was the compere and, with her husband Richard, also dished out helpings of curry during the interval. A bod in Christian Aid had composed the questions and posted it off to Rosemary. Frankly, this anonymous person clearly has no knowledge of how to stage a successful quiz. In each round, the first five questions were reasonably easy, followed by a further five that were obscenely hard. Some of these riduclous questions concerned obscure 13th century Castilian kings (I hazarded a guess at Pedro the Cruel, but it was actually Frederick III), 16th century horticulturalists or the date of the abolition of slavery... in Ethiopia! Some of the maths questions mingled with the probability of picking a diamond suit from a pack of cards, to 150 degree interior angles of a polygon and working out how many sides it has. The prupose of a quiz should be a heady mix of some easy questions (to gift to the weaker teams) with stern, reasonably logical ones. A classic case of this here was the river that runs through Berlin (the Spree). No-one got it, our team put Wannsee, others put the Elbe, but it was a reference that someone could have picked up relatively easily over the course of their life rather than poring over a fifty year old dusty almanac. I joked that as it was a Christian Aid quiz night, maybe some of the answers would only be known by God.
We had fun though. I didn't think we would win, especially with those 'if onlys' (I changed my mind on a flag visual question from my gut instinct of Mali to the Central African Republic, because the colours on the pennant were of the pan-African movement and I felt Mali was too close to the orbit of the Arab world and would have gone for something more Muslim). Suzanne Pattle, our priest-in-charge seemed to know the words of Katy Perry's "I kissed a girl," however, even more scandalously she didn't know the name of the bitter herbs used during Passover. We were shocked. There were teams from all over North Gillingham, including from other churches, in total about a crowd of forty-five divided into six teams. As Rosemary read out the teams names from the bottom up, when she got to the last two, I was really happy that we were in the top two and had a shot at the prize, then she read out the second-placed team, 'compos mentis' - we were 'the non-conformists' - we burst out in celebration. Our prize was a bottle of wine each, rather high-end as a prize in such a quiz but most welcome. Not only that but we had won by a huge margin of five points over second place - out of 100, we had got 58 and a half points. So there was no need for a tie-breaker, but Rosemary used to it to hand out a bar of chocolate. To the nearest hundred thousand, what is the population of Denmark? I knew it was in the five million range and so I guessed, 5,500,000 and was spot on!
So after fearing the worst it turned out far better than we had hoped and all in a good cause too, during whcih much money was raised.