abi word test thing (fic contains mild naughtiness)
Trivial Pursuits:
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Ok, ok, practice makes - whatever. Ok, here we go - next question:
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By what other name is the Doppler Effect more commonly known?
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Where to begin… well, there are my shoes, aren't all these things, women's things, supposed to start like that, isn't that the cliché, the stereotype, the trope? And isn't it just so very me? Shoes? Tan shoes, flat, comfy, battered, ugly tan shoes, Librarian shoes.
What is it about Librarians and feet? I suppose we’re on them all day - and I’m not the only one to wear shoes that are purely for comfort. Of course the styles vary, some people like to have their feet snuggled up in a pair of pumps, others, like me, prefer to have their feet bare in some slip-ons or sandals and feel at least a little air on the top of the foot, although I don’t like that part of me, the little veins standing up like knuckles.
But pleasure is a strange thing; at work I have an addiction to drinking chocolate, not so strange you might think but it has to be a particular sort of drinking chocolate, the kind that comes in those little plastic sachets. I have the mixture at two thirds hot water and one third cold, for ease of drinking, and I relish the slight plastic taste and the tickling sensation on the back of the throat from the combination of artificial sweeteners and undissolved cocoa solids. Horrible of course but there you are you see, addiction.
Some people though, they will read everything as - they will find addiction in almost every mode of behaviour. The sorts of people that casually throw around words and phrases like ‘co-dependency’, ‘relationship’, ‘patterned behaviour’, hurling them like confetti.
I mention that as a caveat to my own assessment of my artificial choco-holism and because I know that you see librarians, (and therefore me,) like a lot of people probably do - as being obsessed with neatness, ‘OCD’ as the ridiculous current lingo would have it, or, more distastefully, ‘anal’.
Order versus chaos, harmony through the beautiful organisation of the Dewy decimal system; such is the cliché. I don’t agree, and for many reasons. Books are not merely objects or rather not mere objects, they are, every one of them, Pandora’s boxes. Opening books unleashes wonder, information, knowledge, emotions, they can pull a person out of time and space altogether. Anyone appreciative of reading will realise this.
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Who shot J.R. Ewing?
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Well, I must be drunk, this rambling seem to have started off rather too intimately! Not that I’m admonishing myself, (see how easy it to leap to the wrong conclusion, the incorrect answer...?) Never underestimate the power of positive drinking; a shared love of vodka and spinning around on the spot to The Cardigans is what brought you and me together in the first place. Well, that and the fact that I thought you were Miranda Frost - and you thought I was a boy
The beginning of a beautiful friendship… and yes, all very 90’s, well spotted. Ten points!
What I meant to build up to was the quiz, quizzes plural come to that, and what they mean to me, and how they seem to you, and how you think they seem to me.
And what they were for Colin Churchill.
Colin Churchill, did the name sound familiar to you at all? Ring any bells? I suppose there’s some sort of poetic justice in the fact that he’s become a trivia question himself, finally. Who is - no, questions are almost always damningly past tense, so, question; who was Colin Churchill?
Answer; The youngest national general knowledge champion, registered with the Guinness Book of Records, the reason why the BBC were forced to create a whole new television show Junior Mastermind - after Colin had humiliated his elders by walking away with the trophy at the tender age of 14.
Quite a long answer really, that’s something at least. Not much comfort for him though.
Everybody knows child prodigies end badly but unfortunately nobody ever told Colin he was a child prodigy, so unexpected was his success. And of course it was some time ago now, “Two chins, one spare tyre and far too many grey hairs since,” he answered promptly, when I was pretending that I didn’t already know. Thirty Six years.
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Who was the first man to reach the South Pole?
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If you ask Colin about quizzes, he’ll tell you, “Every question is an exploding star.” If I asked you the reply would be something like, “They’re predictable and if you have the knowledge then you have control. Everything is reduced to that. Everything is orderly, no chaos no mess, nothing unexpected.”
If you ask me I’ll tell you; “You can win a lot of money.”
Surprised? You don’t believe me? You never did - not even after I did start winning, but I suppose your view is more likely to be of quizzes, not of me, right? You’re probably thinking; what quizzes and where, and why don’t I know about them? Hell I could make money that way too!
Maybe so, but then again - and please don’t take it personally - no, No, sorry, wrong answer and we’ll offer it out now to the opposing team, with a bonus if they can give us the reason why.
*buzzer*
Yes Clare?
Because, you have to know which quizzes pay out - and you have to be able to win.
Is the correct answer! Well done!
Now, I don’t know if you have ever entered a pub quiz. Common enough - and casual, you might think.
And again, wrong. The average pub quiz is actually a fierce affair. The prize is a token, normally a bottle of something or a book voucher, that sort of thing. What is at stake is therefore either a team placing in some sort of local league or simply just one-upmanship, normally with people who are, or have become, rivals, often quite belligerently so. That’s one reason why new teams or individual enthusiasts are uniformly frowned upon and cold shouldered.
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Which part of the brain is effected by rare forms Epilepsy that can cause visions and hallucinations?
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And back to the Library, the grindstone, the routine. I really have hated it you know. I can hardy bear to bring the place into the focus of my mind’s eye. I never intended to be a Librarian, not fulltime and not as a career. But life is about living; if you have to live then you have to live, right?
I always tried not to show it. I think, now, that I did too good a job since nobody, not even you, seems to believe that I could actually not have loved every single clock watched brain draining soul destroying bastard boring moment.
I didn’t want feel that way either, for a long time I was just grateful to have a job and I really tried to be satisfied with it, for us. And there was Jane. Jane loves being a librarian and it’s hard not to love Jane. Even you said so, remember that time when it had snowed really and nobody could get in the building and I was almost crying with the cold and the car had seized up and you had flu but you’d given me a lift anyway? Out of nowhere comes Jane with a flask of tea and a smile. Universal Mother in a slim body; if she’d been a teacher at school I’d have had a crush on her. Your words, not mine. Even her kids are nice. Her husband though, I met him, a creep - looking sort of hot faced and hunched because the teenage girls were there at 4.30, a real car keys in the pocket type, ugh.
But anyway Jane loved the library, every morning gazing at the shelves like they were fresh clean sheets warm straight from the airing cupboard. Nothing stuffy or constricted about her, stereotypes smashed again. She loved the orderliness of the Library, the stock just-so and in its place - but with such a natural pleasure. For a while I could get by vicariously living on her enthusiasm. But it wasn’t enough in the end.
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Which Island, claimed by Great Britain, was home to the writer Robert Louis Stephenson in his later years?
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You’ve been having one of those evenings; curled up around a hot water bottle and hugging the pile duvet, watching some comfort tv show on dvd for the millionth time and in Spanish, you don’t speak Spanish, with glistening eyes, those same big eyes that you look at me with as you hold up the dvd case like a shield, or a book of spells, for protection. “Are you - are you having an affair?”
Sex
Gets
In
The
Way.
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Which Shakespearean poem is often considered the forerunner of the later Metaphysical works by writers such as John Donne and Matthew Arnold?
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As for sex… Actually it was me that broached the indelicate subject first.
Colin had been pacing around as usual, like someone suffering from a chronic serotonin imbalance and I was crouched on a lily pad of carpet in the middle of the carnage that passed for his living room. There was an unexpected moment as he looked down at me and I thought that maybe he was… anyway I offered to help him out.
“Oh no, that’s alright,” he mumbled, blushing like a schoolboy, “I’d feel like a bishop or something.”
I made a half hearted genuflection and Colin he just roared with laughter. His laughter was deep and convulsive seizing him completely. And that was that, moment passed.
“Besides,” he said, “you like girls don’t you?”
Oh dear. Caught red handed. “What on earth makes you think that?” Prim, I was trying to be prim.
“I saw you with your girlfriend when the library was closing. She has blonde hair. She wears black shoes, very different from yours, and drives a second hand Vauxhall Astra.”
God I hate that car, but then again so do you.
“I realise now that knowing someone with a super powered memory can be a double edged sword.”
“Sorry,” he said, and meant it, “I - I wasn’t, you know, spying or - or anything.”
Oh bless him!.
“That’s ok Colin, let’s move on shall we?”
And he nodded only too eager to change the subject, to pick another category.
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Name all three Astronauts that were aboard the Apollo 11 for the Luna mission in 1969.
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Now to burst a few more bubbles, possibly. I am not a great reader, in fact less than ever since working at the library. But I do love books and reading has always been a pleasure for me. I like to wallow in a book, or roam around inside, yes that’s more like it. Escapism, I can understand why people might think that, but honestly, for me it’s more like exploration. And if the book is very good, really very good, then, like every great expedition, there is the chance to come back laden with souvenirs and trophies and to be changed profoundly by the experience. That probably sounds very high minded and pretentious and of course some books are for pure entertainment, I’m not snobbish about the merits of light literature, that sort of reading is like a day out to the picture, a relaxing picnic in comfortable surroundings.
I’m the same way with films and music, well, actually music doesn’t mean a great deal to me but I love films, especially those where, again, I feel able to breathe the world in, see and feel the sights and drift among the characters. I never remember them very well though, so I suppose they are a little like dreams for me.
You though, you are very different. You devour books like food and watch film after film with a sharp eye, you even take notes sometimes, you are far more disciplined as a spectator, as a viewer and reader than I am but then you’ve always had an academic streak. I’m very lazy compared to you.
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Which Swedish film director is famous for his stark investigations into the silence of God?
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Coming out of The Angel Islington is always disconcerting; the semi circular edge of the road runs so close to the exit, just that bit of metal railing to separate a person from the roaring traffic. At night the effect is startling, there’s no time to adjust your eyes after the underground’s blazing strip-light and the curve around and the subtle slope beyond - it’s like being thrust into space headlamps and indicator lights and the top deck of busses careening about like comets and satellites. I still haven’t managed to get used to it.
One evening, a few weeks ago, I noticed a beautiful but vacant-eyed arty sort of girl pressed up against the railing near to me by the momentum of the hurrying commuters. She was wearing a child’s transparent plastic jacket with a hood and against the dazzle of the traffic she looked like a credit card hologram, but I caught flashes of her pale face with its darkly recessed and widely dilated eyes. “Oh… wow”, I heard her say as she sucked in her breath like someone about to dive into the deep end of a pool. Drugs, clearly, but I thought why bother? In that dizzy place, who needs to have their senses artificially heightened? It’s beautiful and horrible and energized enough surely? Well, I never have understood that sort of thing and you’re probably laughing at me right now, as you read this.
Anyway, it was Islington, some sort of Pub circuit apparently, although I was never did find out all the names of the places or see a diagram of their geography, previously dedicated to music but which were mostly drawing regulars at quiz nights, comedy and small scale televised sports events. Colin put the change down to the smoking ban but I wouldn’t know about that. I was though glad about the ban in a more direct way than usual. Colin didn’t smoke and whatever odd or alcoholic scents I might find myself carrying after meeting him or going to a pub could be explained away by claustrophobic public transport. A regular and alien smell of cigarettes would have been much harder.
Yes, I know how that sounds, as if part of me was already being furtive, clandestine. That’s just me, I mean secrecy and privacy always has meant two completely different things to me. I don’t have secrets, I never have been secretive but I have always, always, been a private person and guarded that privacy well.
And I know your answer to that as well. Secrecy, Privacy - what does it matter, semantics, you were doing something without me; you were separating yourself from me, from us. That’s what you would say.
Which brings us back to the shoes; scurrying up the steps of the London Underground and piling on and off those horrible, horrible trains, you need the right sort of footwear. My loose tan slip-ons were never going to be up to the task. I bought some new shoes, low key, durable, dark grey. I don’t know why I didn’t get them with you, or just mention that I’d bought them, or...
But no, some irrational mix-up in my neurons had me convinced that the best thing was to just keep them at the library and change when I needed them. So that is what I did, until I didn’t, until I forgot and wore them home and the hot smear of embarrassment on my face made my murmurings about buying them on a whim on the way home sound even more lame and unconvincing. And that was the thorn in the lion’s paw, the straw that broke the camel or whichever strained metaphor my librarian mind might reach for, it doesn’t matter, the point is - from then on things were never the same inside us and between us. I realise that now. And I’m sorry, really sorry, I’m really sorry that I bought those shoes. If it’s any consolation I wrapped them back in the box just yesterday and donated them to a charity shop during my lunch break.
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Who shot J.R. Ewing?
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- Oh wait, we’ve done that one already, sorry, I’ll ask another -