Tough competition

‘Whatever happens,’ said a bloke on the team at the next table rancourously, ‘we mustn’t let the students win.’ I’d not taken part in a pub quiz before and I’d always imagined them to be polite, melancholy affairs. This one, when we arrived ten minutes before the start, was noisy, chaotic and overcrowded. The students were staying at the field-study centre on the outskirts of the village and were out celebrating the end of a project. The locals were annoyed with the students for monopolising most of the tables. Also, perhaps, for being younger, better-looking and better-educated. Well, an education is one thing, and general knowledge another, and the man spoke for many in his determination to prove to these young students that the accumulated fund of useless information stored in his head was greater than that in theirs.