He’s Coming Home

Well, football may not have come home, but I have. Despite the morass of variably mad admin this involves. Despite the fact that the UK seems about to turn into covid’s global HQ[1]. Despite, if that happens, me being able to return to France not being a certainty. Despite here being the UK. Despite all that, I’ve come back for a holiday. This may or may not also have something to do with me really not wanting to find out what possible 40 degree heat in Grenoble feels like, and having an awful lot of holiday that needed using up. Maybe I also actually wanted to see my family and friends for the first time in rather a while.

So, the first step was to work out exactly what I had to do to be allowed out of France and in to the UK. This was not helped by the UK government continually changing its mind on who had to isolate from where for how long with what vaccination status. Ideally, I’d have waited until the day before I was due to leave to book anything, but international travel isn’t generally very congenial to that sort of approach. The main question was whether I had to spend 10 days in quarantine on my arrival, meaning I had to come back 10 days earlier, or not. Ultimately, the government’s parochially petty decision to only recognise vaccinations delivered in the UK, and then last-minute introduction of ‘amber-plus’, specifically aimed at France, and thus not even recognising their own vaccines for arrivals from France, meant my safety-first decision of coming back 10 days early was correct. I would have had to quarantine regardless of when I came back, it turned out, so waiting till the last minute would have left me having to spend half my actual holiday in quarantine. There were, obviously, also a load of forms to fill in: I needed a negative covid test – conveniently free to take in France – a passenger locator form, proof of having booked a Day 2 and Day 8 test for when I was in quarantine – very much not free – and proof of vaccination. As well as my actual train tickets and passport. I was juggling several apps on my phone and back-up bits of paper, let’s put it like that.

After that, the actual travel was pretty straightforward. There was an embarrassment of checks at the Eurostar terminal in Gare du Nord – I had to confirm I had all the necessary documentation on my arrival, then show my negative test and passenger locator form to one Eurostar flunky, then my negative test and proof of vaccination to some sort of French security person, then those two again to the French border guard along with my residence permit[2], and then the negative test to the British border guard. On top of that, there were the usual ticket gates and security scanners. After all that, I was allowed on the train and the rest of the journey passed smoothly.

But, of course, that wasn’t the end of the matter. Because, once I got to my parents’ house, I had to do my ten days of quarantine and take my two follow-up tests. I got rang up my Test and Trace on Day 1 to check I was being a good boy[3]. Day 2 I took my first test. And damn, DIY covid tests are unpleasant. I just stuck the swab up my nose, because sticking it down the back of my throat proved impossible without making me vomit. And I got rung up again. Day 3 I got rung up too. And Day 4. The whole process was more annoying that anything: I was consistently contacted between 10:15 and 11:15 every morning; I had exactly the same script read out at me every time, such that I could probably now count as a trained Track and Trace staff member; and the actual extent of the security checks were: did I know what year I was born, and did I solemnly swear I was definitely doing the quarantine thing? It would have been so pathetically easy to get round that I mostly didn’t out of a sense of pity rather than law-abidingness. Of course, they might send someone round to physically check on you, but that never seemed likely with my parents living in the sticks. But, turns out, having exactly the same phone call at pretty much the same time every day for 4 days becomes maddeningly dull. The temptation to start answering very stupidly was high. I didn’t, because I knew it wasn’t worth it, but I came very close. But, after that, no phone call on Day 5. Then phone calls again on Days 6, 7, 8 and 9, though all of them dropped out because the reception here isn’t great. There was no call on Day 10. Day 8 was enlivened by me having to take my second test, at least, which was still unpleasant. Turns out that I remained uninfected, not entirely unexpectedly.

This all seems very stupid, not least because, despite them not successfully contacting me after Day 4, there was no particular attempt to actually enforce anything or check up on me – they don’t even ring you back if your call drops! More fundamentally, as someone who’s had both doses a good while ago of the Moderna vaccine, the personal risk to me from covid is now essentially zero[4]. The risk to other people is also reduced, though it’s still a bit unclear how far being vaccinated decreases your ability to transmit the virus: it definitely does, but by how much is something we probably won’t know for sure for a bit longer. Now, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be any control, because, although I might be pretty sure I’m likely to be OK, the risk to other people, although low, is clearly not quite so low that we can ignore it. But 10 days of quarantine, a pre-departure test, and two post-arrival tests seems to be a bit over the top. Especially when. increasingly, everyone else I’m coming into contact with is also vaccinated and it’s the UK that’s got all the nasty variants already – I could understand it going back to France[5], but coming here, it just seems silly. What am I going to import that isn’t already here? One test, sure, maybe even two, maybe even a couple of days of quarantine, but the current system just feels more like an expression of British jingoistic xenophobia than anything else. It feels as if everyone’s paying[6] for the government’s awful policy decisions and it’s extremely annoying[7]. Fortunately, I can work from home and stay with my parents, so the extra 10 days isn’t too problematic for me, but that’s clearly not going to be the case for a lot of people with family on the wrong side of the Channel. At least the government is slowly moving towards some recognition of vaccination obviating the need for so much quarantine, but it’s being inexplicably foot-dragging when, domestically, it’s just gone ‘fuck it, we don’t care any more’ and let everyone off the chain. It’s the inconsistency that’s maddening and the fact that they’ve somehow managed to be too liberal domestically AND too restrictive externally. The sensible middle ground doesn’t exist any more: it’s extreme positions or nothing. If you keep getting more wrong, eventually you’re right, yeah? That’s how it works[8]?

Anyway, I don’t think pointing out the government isn’t following any sort of sensible policymaking strategy is the hottest of hot takes. But it is just so so silly. I hope a more sensible set of public-health regulations come into force before I think about trying to come home over Christmas. Now for my actual 3-week holiday doing Things and seeing People….

[1] Because I’m sure that as soon as all restrictions become entirely optional and a matter of personal choice, the British public are going to be overwhelmingly sensible. It’s virtually certain. For a given value of ‘virtually’. Though, so far, things seem to be OK….

[2] I think this was the bit where they were checking I had a reasonable chance of being let back in to France at some point.

[3] Quite how they would have known I wasn’t if I hadn’t been, I’m not sure. As long as you’re not standing next to some sort of obvious noise source that you clearly couldn’t be next to at a residential address, I don’t know how they’d tell you weren’t where you said you were. My assumption is they’re not allowed to actually track your phone.

[4] If we take the 0.007% chance of death I worked out for my age group in footnote 7 here, and assume that the data on the Moderna vaccine’s efficacy is accurate – there’s no reason to think it’s not – which suggests that my risk of hospitalisation as a serious case is now 90-100% lower, my actual chance of death is no higher than 0.0007% (assuming all hospitalised cases die, which is clearly not true), which is considerably lower than the general ambient risk of me getting run over. I think I can live with this risk. The chance of me being symptomatic or even being infected in the first place is also something like 90% lower. So, from a strictly selfish point of view, I’m getting worryingly blasé.

[5] As things stand, all I actually have to do to go back to France is to take a pre-departure test. Otherwise, as a vaccinated person, there are no quarantine or testing requirements on arrival. This seems a lot more proportionate.

[6] Literally. All these tests aren’t cheap, and if I had to actually stay in a hotel for 10 days or something….

[7] That may have come across.

[8] I was genuinely surprised when Matt Hancock resigned. I thought anything short of actual blatant murder was deemed insufficient grounds for resignation these days.

Watch Your Step

I have, in the interests of pursuing my nerdiness to its logical conclusion, been watching The Watch, the new TV series based on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld universe, and more specifically, the books focusing on the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. If you have no interest in Discworld or care about spoilers for at least some of it, this post is probably not going to be of great interest to you[1]. Unless you also appreciate overly specific rants and the concept of dying on a hill so small a mole would look at it and turn up its nose[2]. So, you have been warned.

The first thing to say is that it’s not a bad TV series. Taken in its own right, it’s quite a fun fantasy caper of a production. It’s certainly not perfect, but I quite enjoyed it. It also, to be fair, doesn’t claim to be an adaptation of any specific bit of Discworld; rather it is merely ‘inspired’ by the works of Sir Terry.

This is a good thing, because, as adaptations go, it is utterly pants. So pants that it wouldn’t look out of place in the menswear section of M&S. So pants Americans would confusingly think it was a pair of trousers. It’s just awful. The overall plot is somewhat based on Guards! Guards!, with elements lifted from the other Watch books, as well as some completely non-Watch bits of Discworld, and at least most of the characters have names that appear in Discworld somewhere, though the show may or may not attach them to someone with a completely different role, sex or species. This is about where the similarities with the books end.

If I had to sum up the general problem, it would be that the creators of the TV show have ended up at Discworld by Terry Gilliam. The general vibe is very Twelve Monkeys or Brazil – Ankh-Morpork is a dystopian scuzzy hellscape ruled by fear, and seems to be inhabited almost entirely by Goths or emos. There is a lot of eyeliner, strange hair and general grunginess. I genuinely think someone may have got Terry Gilliam and Terry Pratchett confused when doing their research, then read the combined works of China Miéville, and managed to impose their creative vision on the people who actually knew what was going on. I feel the TV show is trying too hard to be edgy and cool, which is, fundamentally, not what Discworld is. It’s a satirical humorous fantasy universe, not Judge Dredd, as adapted by BBC3[3]. Discworld is, at base, funny. The show has funny moments, but the overall tone is bleak, which is just missing the point so so hard.

This comes out almost immediately, because the blurb for the show majors on how crime is legal in Ankh-Morpork, and how this is a sign of how depraved and awful the whole place is. Strictly speaking, ‘crime is legal’ is an accurate description of the book version of the city, but it would be fairer to say that, lacking an adequate police force until the Watch get their act together about halfway through the books, Lord Vetinari, the city’s ruler, allows the Thieves’ Guild to have a self-regulating monopoly on crime. Yes, crime happens, but it’s carried out (mostly) painlessly by consummate professionals, you can pay for membership tiers to reduce your potential exposure to any guild crime, and any non-guild criminals who try something usually end up very quickly scattered around the city in several pieces. Criminals are provided with a safe and legal outlet for their activities, and the inconvenience and peril to the average citizen is kept at acceptable levels. The show defenestrates all this nuance, and just goes straight to ‘crime-ridden anarchic garbage fire AND IT’S ALL LEGAL!!!’. The Thieves’ Guild just become a bunch of toughs and ne’er-do-wells who prey on the helpless citizenry, rather than being a useful and respected part of society.

Something similar happens to the Assassins’ Guild. The book version of the Guild is essentially an English public school, where the staff and some of the alumni happen to kill people for very large amounts of money, because they have a great respect for life. But it’s also the place where any self-respecting upper-crust member of society sends their children for a good all-round education; said children can then graduate and pursue any number of appropriate careers, with only a minority actually becoming professional assassins. The point is, assassins are therefore, in Discworld, all upper class, unfailingly polite, well-dressed, and regard killing anyone apart from their designated target as unsportsmanlike and rather a failing. In the show, the Guild seems to be the haunt of a large number of berserk psychopaths with a leather fetish, who just really enjoy killing people all of the time, because they can. It’s sort of the equivalent of adapting a Jeeves and Wooster novel by casting Ray Winstone and Dave Bautista, and letting E.L. James write the screenplay. I mean, sure the characters end up with the same names, but they’re not in Kansas anymore, as it were.

Carrying on the institutional theme, Unseen University is also almost unrecognisable. The entire population of the university appears to be the Archchancellor, the Librarian and a cleaner. And the university’s main purpose seems to be the production of technomantic inventions that make life easier, but often behave erratically. In essence, it feels the show is collapsing UU, Bloody Stupid Johnson and the Street of Cunning Artificers into one thing, which means it fundamentally misunderstands what the university is for. A strong theme in the books is that magic is inherently unreliable. You can use it to solve almost any problem, but it will probably blow up in your face in some unforeseeable manner and is certainly not something to be used at a large scale or regularly unless you want to seriously test the integrity of reality. The purpose of UU, really, is therefore to scoop up all the people who might be tempted to use magic willy-nilly and safely neutralise them by focusing their energies on climbing the academic hierarchy, doing admin, and eating extremely large dinners. The wizards do sometimes provide solutions in the books, but only when they really have to. They’re not some sort of casual one-stop shop for solving all the city’s problems. And the fact that Wonse in the TV series is effectively a female wizard is not entirely uncanonical – Esk exists after all – but it is certainly stretching the bounds of Discworld credibility.

Moving down a scale, the individual character that is most unjustly treated, I think, is Lord Vetinari, the ruler of the city. Book Vetinari is technically an absolute despot, but only very rarely acts like one, mostly because he’s essentially the perfect embodiment of Machiavelli’s ideal ruler in The Prince. He is certainly feared, but he’s clever enough to know that that is insufficient for a stable regime, and mostly remains in power by masterful use of the committee system, such that everyone feels involved without actually realising that all the meaningful decisions are taken by one man. He’s extremely good at playing off different interest groups against each other, and he usually rules firmly but fairly, rather than in an arbitrary manner. And, importantly, he cares very much about the city. The Vetinari of the show, however, pretty much just seems to be a classic fear-mongering despot of no great intelligence. He’s not exactly the baddy, but he’s certainly callous and clearly just in it for himself. He lightens up a bit in the final episode, but he’s just nowhere near the complexity of his literary alter ego[4]. It’s very disappointing.

More generally, all the characters just feel off, though. Vimes seems to be some combination of Vimes and an otherwise-absent Nobby Nobbs. Cheery is a tall Dwarf, which then makes Carrot seem less exceptional as a human-sized dwarf[5]. The Librarian is some sort of atavistic human that’s slowly regressing, rather than actually just an orangutan. Sybil becomes an all-action badass hero. Dibbler becomes ‘Throat’, the city’s premier demi-mondaine snitch. Detritus is surprisingly intelligent, and then gets killed by normal arrow fire, despite being made of rock. And goblins seem to have been retrojected into the plot as some sort of comic relief. Angua becomes some sort of Transylvanian peasant refugee, rather than the scion of a noble house. Death is overly chatty and functions as a sort of deus ex machina that turns up whenever required, rather than only being visible to wizards, witches, cats, and people undergoing a near-death (or actual-death) experience. The Auditors (or Observers as the show calls them) are able to intervene at will in time and the affairs of humanity, which they’re very explicitly not allowed to do in the books, and seem to have a concerning amount of personality. The only character that does feel about right in comparison to their book selves is, I think, Carrot, though I reckon the show doesn’t really capture the point that his outward honesty and simplicity is concealing a much deeper and more intelligent mind than most people realise.

There are also some larger-scale background problems. The city seems to be inhabited almost entirely by humans and goblins. We don’t see any Dwarfs that aren’t Cheery or Carrot until the episode in the Dwarf mines[6], and I don’t think any trolls apart from Detritus are ever visible, except his great-great-great grandmother who appears as a building foundation in one episode[7]. Angua is the only werewolf, we meet one vampire, and there certainly aren’t any other undead of any kind. For some reason, the writers also added in a massive dollop of Arthuriana – there’s a magical talking sword called Gawain, a Lady of the Lake appears and I was half-expecting the Green Knight to ride into view at a couple of points. I’m not saying Discworld doesn’t use elements of Arthuriana, but it does it a lot more cleverly; in the show, it just feels like an intrusion of discordant elements, which is what it is.

Though, as a geographer, the thing that bothered me most was: where was Ankh-Morpork? In the books, the city sits on the lower course of the river Ankh, as it meanders its way leisurely across the broad and fertile, and therefore very agricultural, Sto plains. It’s not coastal, but the river is easily navigable and it’s close enough to the sea that it’s got a large port. In the show, the city seems to mostly be surrounded by sand dunes[8], with some woodland a bit farther off in some direction. There isn’t much evidence of a river or of plains filled with brassicas. It seems, in fact, to be a terrible place to have built a large city, because there seems to be no reason for people to have settled there. The city made no sense from a geographical point of view.

And, finally, the dragons: the overall plot being mostly Guards! Guards!, the whole dragon-summoning thing is still there[9]. The noble dragon mostly checks out, but Errol is all over the place. For a start, he’s called Goodboy[10], he’s Sybil’s personal pet-cum-flamethrower, and he’s about the size of a gecko, as well as being the only other dragon ever seen. Swamp dragons aren’t meant to be large, but we’re talking about cat/dog-size, not gecko-sized. He’s also not a swamp dragon. In fact, it’s unclear what type of dragon he is or, indeed, why Sybil has a pet one, where he came from or how he relates in any way to the classic noble dragon. Sybil just has an unexplained pet winged gecko in the show. What this means is that, even more in the books, the size mismatch between the noble dragon and Goodboy is ridiculous. In the final episode, when the day is saved by uniting the two dragons, I was primarily reminded of angler fish. The female is a big, angry-looking thing, the male is basically a small peripatetic penis that, once he finds a female, is pretty much absorbed into her body where he ensures her eggs are fertilised in return for food. It just didn’t make much sense.

Anyway, I could go on. But those were the headline discontinuities with the books that bothered me and, given I’ve passed 2500 words already, I think I can leave all the other details alone. As I said, I don’t think it’s a bad TV show in its own right, but it’s certainly not a TV show meaningfully set in or on Discworld. In many ways, it reminds me of the Hobbit movies. They’re perfectly acceptable fantasy action films taken on their own merits, but their quality as adaptations of the book, which is explicitly what they are in this case, is rather more debatable. Does it mean I don’t enjoy them? No, but I do have to pretend that they’re only very loosely Tolkien. The Watch is in the same boat: I enjoyed it, but I had to forget it was actually meant to be Discworld.

[1] I also clearly haven’t talked to you enough if you’re in this situation.

[2] I’m even spoiling my own post now.

[3] I should say, at this point, that I like the works of Terry Gilliam and China Miéville (as well as the Dredd films). I’m just making the point that they’re very tonally different to Discworld.

[4] Also, his henchmen in the TV series have the weirdest uniforms. It’s as if someone thought the Sontarans looked good and set out to create the same sort of effect on a baseline human through the medium of dress.

[5] And the whole Dwarf gender thing the books explore is completely misrepresented. In the TV series, Cheery expresses her femininity by shaving off her beard. To a book dwarf that would be incomprehensible – beards are entirely gender-neutral as far as Discworld Dwarfs are concerned, and are a key element of being a Dwarf. Shaving your beard off would be some sort of species apostasy, not about coming out as female. I can’t think of a good real-world analogy, but it would be something like coming out as a trans woman and cutting off your nipples to mark this. Everyone’s got them and they’re not really a gendered characteristic (I’m talking about nipples specifically here, as opposed to breasts/not breasts, which are gendered), but you’ve done it anyway?

[6] I could write an entire post on just that episode. The Summoning Dark starts off as some sort of misogynist mine monster and then turns into I’m-still-not-quite-sure-what; some sort of interdimensional mine ally. All of dwarfdom seems to live in this one mine that’s basically the deep-downer mine from Thud!, but it makes no sense, because none of the context around that is explained at any point. The impression I got was that all Dwarfs live in some sort of repressive cult that denies them basic human rights, which is just an odd creative decision.

[7] Incidentally, this seems to be what the TV show thinks trolls are for: holding up buildings. I think this sort of thing is referenced in the books as something that occasionally happened to trolls, but it’s certainly not the main thing trolls are associated with.

[8] The dwarf mine seems to not be that far from the city, which begs the question of: what are they mining? Sand? There certainly don’t seem to be any mountains around where it might make sense to site a mine.

[9] Except it’s being done by Carcer from Night Watch who’s actually an old friend of Vimes from their gang days when young and who travelled forward in time thanks to the Observers to mess up Vimes’s life and destroy the city. Carcer is being helped by Wonse, who is the female cleaner at UU and has a massive chip on her shoulder about wizards, rather than the Patrician’s male private secretary who’s got a massive chip on his shoulder about not being Patrician. And there are no secret societies, just the two of them, which is a real shame. And they have to collect three magical Arthuriana-style artefacts to control the noble dragon, which is just a bit odd.

[10] Yes, I know that’s part of Errol’s pedigree name in the books.

An Englishman Abroad

It didn’t come home. The train football was on got refused entry at the border because it hadn’t taken a PCR[1] test and couldn’t prove it had a compelling reason to enter the UK, secure and well-paid employment in the UK, existing family in the UK, or that it was a British citizen. It was therefore diverted to Rome via Turin. But anyway, this is what we were all expecting, right? I’ve got to say I was much happier once Italy equalised and the uncomfortably novel situation of England actually being competent at football was banished to the parallel dimension it had accidentally intruded from. A gritty 1-1 draw followed by dogged defence in extra time followed by an ultimately disappointing penalty shootout is much more reassuringly normal for England fans. Besides, the Gareth Southgate redemption arc would have been too perfect if he’d led the team to its first major tournament win in over 50 years on the back of a successful shootout. Reality might have crumpled in the face of such an overload of Hollywoodian schmaltz, so, for all our sakes, maybe it was best it ended how it did.

However, what I actually wanted to talk about was what the Euros were like for me as an Englishman abroad. It’s the first major championship I’ve not been in the UK for since I consciously paid attention to sport, so it was interestingly different to the usual English situation. Which, to recap, is: every time there’s a major football tournament, everyone in England suddenly sprouts a red cross on their face and becomes convinced, in the face of any and all available evidence to the contrary[2], that this time, it’s coming home. A situation egged on by the media, who will ignore all other events in favour of endless speculation about the team’s chances of winning. Meanwhile, everyone in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland just hopes England lose quickly so that their neighbours can stop being even more idiotic in usual.

The situation in France is quite different. I think there were one or two French flags knocking around before the French got embarrassingly knocked out on penalties by the goal machines that are the Swiss, but I certainly didn’t see anyone with a tricolour visage or hairdo, or even any French football jerseys being worn by men whose idea of activity is clearly raising hand to mouth accompanied by a pint glass. My bread from the boulangerie did come wrapped in an ‘Allez les Bleus!’ paper bag one week, but this was about the only overt piece of jingoism I experienced. I did, however, not tune in to the French news at any point, so it might be that they were as obsessive about the whole thing as their English colleagues. But, generally, there was very little chat about it at work, and the matches were relegated to some subscription channel on the TV[3]. It was quite nice in some ways to be able to choose my level of exposure to the football, rather than having it rammed down my throat from every direction.

The upshot was that I watched England’s first match and then mostly forgot about the whole thing until the final. I have an Italian colleague at work, so it seemed appropriate that we should go to a bar to watch the thing. So that’s what we did. A hot bar full of people. It was very normal, and quite good fun. I think I thought briefly about this being a bit silly what with the God-virus still lurking round every corner, then I decided that, being vaccinated, the personal risk to me of anything really bad happening was sufficiently low that I didn’t really care, and so I did it anyway. Obviously, I kept my mask on when I wasn’t sat at the table, because it’s a well-known fact that you can’t be infected if you’re sitting down and holding a drink[4]. What I learned that evening was that, in Grenoble, I was very much in a minority. There was some cheering when England scored. When Italy equalised, I think I went briefly deaf. And once the game was over, it turned out there were suddenly a lot of Italians in Grenoble, if the number of people driving around beeping their horns and waving Italy flags was anything to go by. It was very energetic, despite it being midnight. One imagines any English town centre would have looked similar had things gone the other way. Though I think Grenoble would have been a lot quieter. I suppose my conclusion is that, as a nation, the English are maybe overly obsessed with their team’s performance compared to the rest of Europe, who seem to be a bit less dogmatic about this sort of thing. Until they actually win.

[1] Penalty Challenge Reliability

[2] Such as, usually, the fact that the team is mediocre and only qualified after a series of dull draws against countries that you’re not entirely sure are real or in Europe.

[3] I did check. Upon finding this out, I decided I’d abuse the fact that I still have access to my old university VPN to hook up to iPlayer should I want to watch any of the matches.

[4] You sometimes wonder whether the various restrictions around the world were worked out by an actual thinking human, or by a poorly trained AI that had been fed something that didn’t agree with it.

Growing the Qult 2

The second and third quizzes at work have now taken place. The second one didn’t get its own post, because it was essentially the same as the first, except I made it a bit too hard, with the winning team only just scraping past the 50% mark. But, otherwise, same old Zoom extravaganza. The third one, which happened last Thursday, however, was in person. Yes, that’s right. IN. PERSON. An actual large group of actual people in the same actual place at the same actual time. Who knew that was a thing you could do?[1]

To explain: the French government lifted group-size restrictions for outdoor meetings on June 30th. Before that, it was a maximum of 10 people[2]. So, I proposed to organise the quiz between the 1st and 13th July, before Bastille Day on the 14th and the official start of the French holiday season, when practically the entire country throws in the towel and stops even pretending to work for a month or so. Clearly, the eagerness of my colleagues was such that we ended up doing it on the first available day[3]. So, we set up a load of picnic tables and chairs stored in one of the departmental buildings on a convenient piece of nearby grass[4] and got going. Given the result of the second quiz, I’d consciously tried to dial down the difficulty on this one a bit, and had made an effort to write more French questions. I ran it as much like a pub quiz as I could, minus the pub, and it was just so much better in-person. You could have banter. People could discuss properly. It was wonderful.

The eventual winners hit the 2/3 mark in terms of score, which was back at the level of the first one, so my efforts to make it easier had clearly been partially successful. I was surprised it wasn’t slightly higher – I’d been aiming for more like 75% for the winners – but it may be that my judgement of what French people actually know about France is not as good as I hoped. Still, I’d at least moved back in the right direction and, more importantly, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. Even after being subject to my occasional mangling of the French questions, as I was reading everything out in both English and French. And then, wonder of wonders, we were able to go to a nearby bar for some impromptu post-quiz socialising. Utter madness, I know. I think it’s safe to say this is the first evening where I felt as if normal socialising had pretty much returned. I don’t think I’d realised quite how much I’d been missing it.

With a bit of luck, the fourth quiz, which will be September at some point, might actually even happen in a pub, if the indoor capacity limits get lifted between now and then. And then normality will well and truly be de retour.

[1] I have a feeling it could catch on.

[2] A rule more honoured in the breaking than the observance, but, still, we couldn’t flagrantly break it for a semi-official event.

[3] What can I say? I write a good quiz. Or maybe everyone’s so starved of social contact that they’re up for anything that gets them out the house and interacting with people, even if it’s humouring the weird British guy. It’s probably that, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s definitely that.

[4] Avoiding the big pile of dog poo. Because France. That bit’s not a stereotype: it’s genuinely so much worse than the UK for random bits of dog crap just lying everywhere.