Marked in Green Biro: Thursdays, Rivers and the Back-Room Arithmetic

The quiz begins at half eight, which in village terms means anywhere between twenty-five past and nine, depending on whether Dennis has found the good microphone and whether the radiator has stopped clanking. I get there at ten past, because my job is not to answer questions. My job is to anchor.

I have a notebook, a pencil, a spare pencil, and a folding chair that lives in the boot of the car. The chair is not strictly necessary. Table four has six chairs and we are five. But anchoring is about ritual, and the chair is part of the ritual.

Team name: The Folding Chairs. It started as a joke about the panto, and now it is on a laminated sheet in Dennis's folder, third from the back. Susan is on the team. Dev is on the team, and Dev knows every river in the country, which is useful and also slightly unnerving. Margaret is on the team and answers before the question is finished, which is a different kind of useful. And then there is me, holding the pencil.

A Thursday in November

The back room of The Barley Mow smells of chips, damp coats and the lemon-scented polish Dennis's mother insists on. There is a tea urn that has been going since 2019 and a plate of biscuits that is technically for the raffle. The quiz starts with a picture round, which is Margaret's territory, and then the music round, which nobody admits to being good at but everybody shouts through anyway.

By question twelve, the running joke has already happened. It always happens at question twelve. Dennis reads out something about a European capital and Susan says, 'It is not the river question, is it?' and everyone laughs because it is never the river question at question twelve. That is the whole point. The river question comes later, in the geography round, and it is always the same river, and we always get it wrong.

The Geography Problem

Dev is our geography ringer. He has a system. He writes the answers in block capitals and underlines the ones he is sure about, and he gets very quiet when he is not sure, which is how we know to leave him alone. The problem is not Dev. The problem is the rest of us, who hear 'Which river flows through Shrewsbury?' and immediately say 'the Severn' in unison, as if volume makes it true. It is the Severn. It is always the Severn. But Dennis marks it in green biro and puts a small asterisk next to it, and the asterisk means he is thinking about it.

Dennis's asterisks are a whole language. A tick means yes. A cross means no. An asterisk means he will allow it but he wants you to know he is allowing it. A wobbly circle means he has had a complaint. A question mark means he has had a complaint and he agrees with the complaint but he is not going to say so out loud. The green biro is the only pen that works on the laminated answer sheets, apparently. I have offered him a nice black biro. He looked at me as if I had offered him a haircut.

Green Biro Justice

The marking is creative. I say this with affection. Dennis is not a cheat, and he is not careless. He is a man with a system that only he fully understands, and the system has room in it for mercy. If you write 'the Severn' and he wanted 'the Severn, sometimes called the Severn Estuary' you get the point. If you write 'the river that goes past the swimming pool' you also get the point, because he knows the swimming pool and he knows you know the swimming pool. If you write 'the Avon' you get half a point and a look.

Half points are the currency of the back room. They are not worth anything. They are worth everything. A half point is Dennis saying: I see what you did there. A half point is a conversation that will be replayed on the walk home. By March, we had forty-one and a half points on the season, which is not a real total, because Dennis does not do totals. He does a column of numbers with a green biro and a small drawing of a pint at the bottom.

The River Clause

The tie-breaker is always the river. I do not know when this started. I suspect it started because Dennis once ran out of questions and looked out of the window at the dark and thought about water. But now it is in the rules, or at least in the folder, and the folder is the rules.

The tie-breaker works like this: if two teams are level, Dennis asks a river question. Not a famous river. A local river. A river you have to have walked past, or driven over, or heard someone complain about. Last week it was: 'Which river runs under the bridge by the old corn exchange?' The answer is the one we always forget, the little one that is not on the big maps. We got it wrong. The team by the radiator got it right. They always get it right, because they have a man on their team who used to be a postman, and postmen know rivers the way the rest of us know bus routes.

We lost by one and a half points. Susan said it was a fix. Margaret said it was a fix and also the biscuits were stale. Dev said nothing, because Dev was already looking up the river on his phone under the table. And I wrote the score in pencil in my notebook, because the pencil is for the true record and the green biro is for the official one.

What the Back Room Knows

The thing about a Thursday quiz is that it is not really about the questions. It is about the half hour before, when the chairs come off the tables and someone says 'you are in my seat' and someone else says 'I have been in that seat since 2004'. It is about the raffle that nobody wins and the tea that is too hot and the coat rack that is held together with a cable tie. It is about knowing that the river question is coming, and knowing you will get it wrong, and knowing that Dennis will mark it in green biro and put a small asterisk next to it, and that on Monday someone will bring it up in the post office queue.

We will be back next Thursday. Table four. Five of us and a folding chair. Bring a pencil.