It’s not all fun being a polymath

You get the girls, the money, the honours from a grateful nation. But not the respect where it really counts.

I hate family Zoom quizzes. The source of my ire is that intellectually I am so far out of sight of anybody with a gene pool resembling mine that I should be declared the winner before we start and then we need not bother with the quiz itself. That way we’ll have acres of time to listen to a discourse on something or other from me.

But oh no, we have to plough through forty questions about things they desperately hope are outside my vast remit and then, when they discover nothing is, to cheat me out of what is, I freely concede, a petty triumph but a necessary one if we are to retain any kind of discipline within the ranks. This is the sort of thing they get up to. From last night:

Question 27: What animal can’t look up at the sun?

I put down ‘sloe worm’ on the grounds it didn’t have any eyes. True, I didn’t know whether the sloe worm actually does lack eyes but I figured they wouldn’t know either and I’d win the ensuing argy-bargy. Or at least be given half a point to shut me up. The answer was ‘a pig’ — apparently pigs have necks that allow them to look in every direction but up. When I produced my sloe worm thesis I was told, “Well, they can still look up, can’t they, even if they can’t see anything.”

I argued this is an invalid argument, citing Augustine of Hippo (a nice touch, I thought) but was out-argued by the “The quizmaster’s decision is final, Mick” argument. In the end I was lucky to come fourth. Anyone got a family going spare?