This column does not endorse political parties or products, as you know. At the risk of compromising its fierce integrity, however, I found myself this week attending a Green Party table quiz in the Mansion House. I enjoy the odd quiz (and they don't come any odder than this one). But the belief that, with the cyclist-intensive nature of the gathering, there'd be no problem in getting a parking space nearby gave the event an added novelty value in current-day Dublin.
I was wrong about this, as I would later be about most of the questions. Although it was a wet Tuesday night, every legal space in the city had been taken, and the on-street parking consultants - "peaked-cap men" to you and me - had nothing to offer. So I parked in an empty side street (one of those with attractive, matching yellow lines on either side) and rushed off to the quiz, where I'd already missed the first round.
The round had featured such give-aways as: "Who is Istabraq's trainer?" Only half of our team of four was present for it, unfortunately. And I don't want to point the finger at any gender in particular, but the half that was present had no interest in sports. So by round two, when we had a full team, we were already chasing the game.
I knew we wouldn't catch the game when the second round featured a wine-tasting question. Yes, glasses of wine were handed to each team and, even as I was still hoping that the answer to the impending question might be "grapes", we were asked to identify the country, region and grape type involved. After some conferring, we agreed that the wine was red, but we couldn't narrow it down any further.
There was a portrait of Parnell behind the stage, and during the wine section I recalled his famous words about how no man could put a stop to the march of a nation. Somebody should have put a stop to the march of this nation before it lost the run of itself, I was thinking, as our team opted pathetically for: "country - Italy; region - chianti; grape-type - seedless", and handed the answers up.
The nature of general knowledge has changed a lot since the 1980s, when I was a member of Dublin's Cross Country Quiz team. Cross Country Quiz was big in the 1970s, but our era was postglamour, however, and the televised part had been reduced to the semi-finals and final. Tragically, Dublin never made it past the quarters.
We weren't quite good enough, but we trained hard. We learned the US state capitals - not to mention state birds and trees - and the nicknames of the French kings, and which breed of camel has one hump, and so on. There was a time I could recite the 50 US capitals and, without pausing, detail the career highlights of, say, Louis the Fat (1108-37). Glory days. Now, six or seven capitals and I'm short of breath.
I didn't know quite how out of condition I was until Tuesday night, however, or how much the general knowledge business had changed. The wine episode was only the first in a series of tasting questions. There was a real fear at one point that a plate of cheeses would be produced; although in fairness to the Greens, they confined the further rounds to whiskey, stout and cola. And incredibly, we got them all wrong. Our confidence was shot by then, and the fine judgment you need in a pressurised quiz situation had gone with it. By the time we were sipping our brand X cola, all we could identify with certainty was the bitter taste of defeat.
This being a Green quiz, the picture round featured birds and trees, and we were rather unfairly asked to identify them rather than the corresponding US states. There was even a question in which we had to identify a song from sheet music. Luckily we had trained musicians on our team and we instantly worked out that the piece was Scott Joplin's The Entertainer; although the organisers cruelly insisted it was the traditional ballad, Red is the Rose.
There was some consolation in the raffle, when one of our team secured the special prize of - seriously - a medical check-up. Which, let's face it, would have been wasted on a Green-party activist. Our humiliation complete by then, we went off to the pub for a pint (not that we had any idea what we were drinking).
But my humiliation wasn't quite complete, in fact. The night featured a final round of questions, which filled in another gap in my general knowledge. In common with many people, I had always believed that whereas a double-yellow line meant "no parking at any time", the phrase "at any time" could be interpreted as: "except Sundays, and late at night generally, especially if it's raining". I now know differently and I blame the Green Party. The good news is that when the man at the other end of the phone on Tuesday night asked my name, address, credit-card number and expiry date, I got all the answers right. "Well done," the quizmaster said. "The van will be around shortly to declamp your vehicle."
Frank McNally can be contacted at fmcnally@irish-times.ie
