Equine misadventures continue. Julie was still tending the wounds from where Shadow fell off the bridge, when she got a phone call from one of the neighbours.
I'm going away for a couple of days, he said, but I thought I'd better let you know that your horse's eye is all swollen up. Aaaaagh.
We went over and examined him. He must have run into a branch or something, we thought. Julie had a bottle of saline solution that she thought might be useful for washing out the eye.
The horse didn't think much of this and it took us a while to work out that he was much happier if we took some warm salty water and bathed his eye. It makes sense -- would you like it if somebody sneaked up on you and squirted cold water into your eye?
After a few days the eye looked a lot better. Julie sent a text message to her neighbour to let him know that things were going OK.
I hope it's not true that things come in threes. Two mishaps like this are enough.
Meanwhile we were out at the monthly quiz night run by the Irish Association. The content of the quiz depends on who is setting the questions, and we've found in the past that the younger the quizmaster the worse for us old codgers.
You can imagine our feelings when we saw the two girls who were in charge of the questions. One of them looked about 12 years old (though I guess she must have been older than she looked). The second of the eight categories was The Wiggles!
After the first couple of rounds we were trailing the field. I think we were next to last.
You get to choose what you think will be your best category and play your Joker, meaning you get double points for that round. We looked at the list and went for Capitals And Cities, figuring that good old-fashioned geography might be safest. And in fact the Amnesiacs (our team name) didn't do too badly.
The night went on and one of our team went up to examine the scores on the blackboard. She came back and said we were equal second.
"What??" I said in disbelief.
"We're equal second," she repeated and everybody's jaw dropped. Had we really gone from second-last to second place? It seemed impossible.
After the last round, the figures were added up and we were tied for first place with a team of young women who called themselves The Beach Girls.
The organizers went for the tie-break questions. These turned out to be all sports related, which would have scuttled my chances but we did have one sports expert on the team.
One question. Both teams got it right. A second question. Both teams scored again. A third question. Both teams had the right answer, but our expert Caroline gave such a detailed answer that they declared us the winners.
Incredible. Somehow we had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. The Beach Girls took their defeat in good part, declaring "Next time you're going down for sure!"
I couldn't believe it.
It just goes to show the truth of Winston Churchill's speech which said "There are three things to remember. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up."
No comments:
Post a Comment