Meeting: An Evening of Un-Festive Fun
Having been postponed from December due to the snow, WROCC’s annual “festive fun night” took place in February. After a series of fun and amusing video clips that members had spotted during the year, those present were able to tuck into the food before pitting their wits against Peter Richmond’s fiendish “Acorn and RISC OS Quiz”.
Report by Rick Sterry
The February meeting was a night of (un-festive) fun, postponed from December because of snow forcing the closure of the sports centre.
When I arrived, I was met with rather sheepish looks from the setting-up crew. It seems that while the equipment was being extracted from our metal storage cupboard downstairs, one of the old Celestion loudspeakers that we use for our modest sound system was subjected to sudden deceleration as it came into contact with the floor. The wooden cabinet had completely burst open, exposing the entrails. Thankfully, the working parts were undamaged, so the cabinet was (very) loosely re-assembled and the unit pressed into service for the evening. Since then, generous amounts of PVA wood glue have been applied, and the unit is now none the worse for its freefall adventure except for the odd scar on the cabinet. In fact, it is probably considerably stronger now than it was originally!
We started off the evening with a few amusing video clips, one of which was spoiled by the media player inexplicably terminating the clip just as the punchline came – Murphy’s Law. Following that, we paused for some sweet nibbles such as Stollen and mince pies (the latter purchased after Christmas at an advantageous price). To the member who later emailed me about the Stollen: yes, by all means do feel free to bring some butter with you next year!
We then settled down for Peter Richmond’s Acorn/RISC OS themed quiz, which had 27 questions with a total possible score of 30. The winning score of 28 points came from the “Table 4” team of Steve Potts and Ian Stanley, with the “Fry-Mac” team of Steve Fryatt and Ian Macfarlane coming second with 27 points, and third was the “Egg Heads” (myself, Chris Hughes and Steve Bass) with 26 points – a close run thing. The appropriately named “Backmarkers” scored 9 points, but the spread of points seems to indicate that once again Peter managed to pitch the level of difficulty just about right.
Time was getting on by the time the quiz was over, so we watched a few more video clips, and finished with one showing the astonishing skills of Scottish stunt cyclist Danny MacAskill. It turned out not to be the specific clip that I was expecting, which is a bit of a shame, but it was very good all the same. The one I really wanted to show is called “Way Back Home” and can be seen here – this beautifully shot video is strongly recommended even if you have no interest whatever in cycles or cycling.
Afterwards, I was invited by certain other committee members to emulate Danny in the sports centre carpark, using my little Dahon folding bike. This I duly did, but unfortunately it was far too dark for them to see what I was doing, and thus they failed to appreciate my amazing abilities. They will just have to take my word for it.
