Fairly odd
1. What had for 50 years been the name for Fanta Pineapple & Grapefruit before it was changed this year?
2. Why did the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Revd Justin Welby, have to pay £510 in fines and costs?
3. Which country overtook France as the biggest buyer of Scotch whisky, despite imposing an 150 per cent import tariff?
4. For whose visit did Papua New Guinea declare a public holiday, only to find he decided instead to fly straight home from the G7 summit in Japan?
5. Which parents named their new son Frank Alfred Odysseus?
6. In which country were six children and two adults rescued by helicopter and zipwire after hours stuck in a cable car dangling 900ft in the air?
7. Opposition leader Patrick Herminie was charged with witchcraft in which country?
8. Name the founder of the Inkatha Freedom party, who died this year aged 95 and had played the role of his great-grandfather Cetshwayo in the film Zulu.
9. A factory in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, was fined $14,500 after two workers had to be rescued from a vat of what?
10. President Luis Lacalle Pou of Uruguay changed his mind about recasting as a dove of peace the seven hundredweight bronze eagle figurehead from which ship?
You don’t say
In 2023 who said:
1. ‘I am not alone in thinking that there is a witch hunt under way, to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result.’
2. ‘The documents, the whole thing is a witch hunt. It’s a disgrace.’
3. ‘Rachel Reeves is a serious economist.’
4. On the death of Silvio Berlusconi: ‘I have always sincerely admired his wisdom, his ability to make balanced, far-sighted decisions.’
5. ‘I had known Prigozhin for a very long time, since the start of the 1990s. He was a man with a difficult fate, and he made serious mistakes in life.’
6. ‘The bonfire of EU legislation, swerved. The Windsor framework agreement, a dead duck, brought into existence by shady promises.’
7. ‘I suspect that the new member for Mid Beds may actually support me a little more than the last one.’
8. ‘There is no good reason why we can’t train up enough HGV drivers, butchers or fruit pickers.’
9. ‘And I know she’s up there, fondly keeping an eye on us. She would be a proud mother.’
10. ‘I’d like to apologise for my choice language. That was unnecessary.’
Royal icing
1. At what outdoor event did the King wear a kilt of a new tartan, registered with the Scottish Register of Tartans?
2. Name the book published in 2023 in which the Duke of Sussex said that his brother ‘grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me’.
3. Who was made Duke of Edinburgh?
4. The crown with which Queen Camilla was crowned had been used for the coronation of which previous queen consort?
5. At the coronation procession from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace, which member of the royal family rode in the capacity of Gold Stick in Waiting in the uniform of a colonel of the Blues and Royals, with the Garter sash and a bicorn hat with red plume?
6. Bees feature on the new £1 coin of Charles III. What fish is depicted on the 50p?
7. In the white drawing room at Windsor Castle in July, to whom did the King show a letter from Queen Elizabeth II in 1960 to President Eisenhower, including a recipe for the drop scones he had enjoyed at Balmoral?
8. The Prince and Princes of Wales visited Moray and Inverness in November under what ducal titles?
9. During a state visit to which country did the King say: ‘Ni furaha yangu kuwa na nyinyi jioni ya leo’ (‘It is my great privilege to be with you this evening’)?
10. To which country was the state visit of the King and Queen postponed because of violent protests against the raising of the pension age from 62 to 64?
Call me al
Translate these abbreviations and give the full Latin versions:
1. Et al
2. e.g.
3. i.e.
4. AD
5. p.m.
6. Viz
7. Ibid
8. Op cit
9. Q.E.D.
10. q.v.
Farewells
1. What name did Ronald Blythe, who died in 2023 aged 100, give to the Suffolk village of which he published a portrait in 1969?
2. Who died aged 93, having served from 1992 to 2000 as the only woman Speaker of the House of Commons so far?
3. Name the Downing Street press secretary, 1979-90, under Margaret Thatcher’s administrations, who died aged 90.
4. What was the name of the jazz clarinettist and cartoonist ‘Trog’, creator of the Flook strip, who died aged 98?
5. Who was known for the Private Eye comic strip Barry McKenzie (with Nicholas Garland) and for his stage character Dame Edna Everage, and died aged 89?
6. Which cartoonist produced the strips called The Cloggies and The Fosdyke Saga and died aged 89?
7. Which Harlem-born singer won fame with ‘The Banana Boat Song’ in 1956 and died aged 96?
8. Name the singer who had a hit with ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ and died aged 96.
9. Who died in 2023 aged 94, after editing the New Statesman from 1965 to 1970 and writing a column in The Spectator from 1981 to 2009?
10. Name the Low Life columnist of The Spectator since 2001, who died aged 66, and wrote in 2005: ‘My friends told me thathalfway through the ball they’d gone to look for me and found me unconscious outside, flat on my face on the lawn, next to the naked girl. Someone had taken off my shoes, arranged them neatly side by side and set fire to them.’
’Tis the season
Match the writers to the passages below: Jane Austen, Henry James, E.F. Benson, Anthony Trollope, Evelyn Waugh, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, E.Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross, Saki, Thomas Love Peacock.
1. Christmas Day dawned, a stormy morning with a strong gale from the south-west, and on Elizabeth’s breakfast-table was a pile of letters, which she tore open. Most of them were threepenny Christmas cards, a sixpenny from Susan, smelling of musk, and none from Lucia or Georgie. She had anticipated that, and it was pleasant to think that she had put back into the threepenny tray the one she had selected for him.
2. ‘At Christmas every body invites their friends about them, and people think little of even the worst weather. I was snowed up at a friend’s house once for a week. Nothing could be pleasanter.’
3. ‘Mummy, do look at Rex’s Christmas present.’ It was a small tortoise with Julia’s initials set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of those needle-hooks of experience which catch the attention when larger matters are at stake.
4. ‘You can’t have the carriage to go about here. Indeed, I never have a pair of horses till after Christmas. I hope you know that I’m as poor as Job.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘I am, then. You’ll get nothing beyond wholesome food with me. And I’m not sure it is wholesome always. The butchers are scoundrels, and the bakers are worse.’
5. Mrs Knox’s donkey-chair had been placed in a commanding position at the top of the room, and she made her way slowly to it, shaking hands with all varieties of tenants and saying right things without showing any symptom of that flustered boredom that I have myself exhibited when I went round the men’s messes on Christmas Day.
6. He had no natural avidity and even no special wrath; he had none that had not been taught him, and it was doing his best to learn the lesson that had made him so sick. He had his delicacies, but he hid them away like presents before Christmas.
7. Four of the chosen guests had, from different parts of the metropolis, ensconced themselves in the four corners of the Holyhead mail. These four persons were, Mr Foster, the perfectibilian; Mr Escot, the deteriorationist; Mr Jenkison, the statu-quo-ite; and the Reverend Doctor Gaster, who, though of course neither a philosopher nor a man of taste, had so won on the Squire’s fancy, by a learned dissertation on the art of stuffing a turkey, that he concluded no Christmas party would be complete without him.
8. The turkey in the poultry-yard, always troubled with a class-grievance (probably Christmas), may be reminiscent of that summer morning wrongfully taken from him when he got into the lane among the felled trees, where there was a barn and barley.
9. He might so easily have married some pretty helpless little woman, and lived at Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale, clever useless children, who would have had birthdays and the sort of illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and who would have painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as Christmas offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for lumber was limited.
10. The distance from the station was considerable; the messenger had been ‘keeping Christmas’ in more than one beer-shop on his way to the house; and the delivery of the telegram had been delayed for some hours. It was addressed to Natalie. She opened it – looked at it – dropped it – and stood speechless; her lips parted in horror.
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