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To St Mary’s! …on Saturday evening for the annual St Mary’s Church quiz. It wasn’t quite a water into wine scenario, but what the occasion lacked in brainpower, it certainly made up for in booze. But purely in a social sense, you understand.

It is to the great credit of the Reverend Erwin that this magnificent religious space is opened up to the wider community when not used for worship. A very polite invitation was extended to accompany the quiz with a light tipple of your choice. The backroom of The Greyhound this most certainly wasn’t, but the evening was warmed with a small red wine refreshment.

Chin chin.

Quizmaster supreme Peter Kerr kept this a sober exercise with a series of quiz rounds that required deep concentration. Team Unworthy (it’s not a Biblical thing) was tipped off that a round might be slipped in involving our knowledge of Church and Chapel. When in Rome, etc. We’re all singing from the same hymn sheet in here.

A copy of The Book was located down by my feet in the front row pews. By day it is an instruction in how to live your life; by night it becomes something that enables your hit and miss quiz team to deliver divine answers. It wasn’t much use in the highly specialist Doris Day round, I’m afraid. Calamity Jane, Calamity Jase.

Whoops.

Peter Kerr cut a fine figure delivering the questions from the pulpit. The Wivenhoe version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire may not boast the hard cash as the reward for the intellectual toil, but a rather fine selection of chocolates and biscuits made up for it with the half time raffle.

Cake is the brainpower that can solve any international conflict. It was also the inspiration for Team Unworthy to go on a run of eureka answers as we headed for the final hymn in the quizmaster song sheet. Victoria sponge should be the starting point for understanding life’s great philosophical questions.

I ran into a spot of confusion with my Horatio Nelson and Rab C Nesbitt character misunderstandings. It’s an easy mistake to make, Comrades. I maintain that the great man was married to Amy – that’s Rab, not Horatio.

If we had carried on until Midnight Mass then I am of the opinion that Team Unworthy would have been singing Hallelujah’s up the High Street at kicking out time in the Curry House. But soon it was time to stand by your pews, and clock up the winners for the St Mary’s Annual Quiz.

Close, but no cigar. Or even a box of chocolates from the raffle.

The army of quizzers then became an army of late night removal men and women. It’s amazing how a building can be transformed from a quiz scene to something that the Sunday morning worshippers would have been more familiar with some twelve hours later.

Many, many thanks to Marika, the Reverend Erwin and of course Quizmaster Supreme Peter Kerr for such a fine and testing evening. I’ve spent more time in a place of worship over the past twelve months than I have in the past two decades. Religion as the social cohesive?

Yer man Rab would have something to say about that.