Bonce feel like it’s been squashed between the buttocks of a rampant rhino?

Eyeballs reduced to the size of a wasp’s nipple?

Tongue feel like the aforementioned rhino has done a whoopsie in your mouth?

Yep?

That’ll be a hangover then.

This is exactly how I awoke last Sunday after a particularly boozy Saturday night.

Not good.

I decided that unless I wanted to waste the whole day sitting around in my undercrackers watching Columbo (tempting) I needed to get out of the house. So I sweet chatted my chum Daisy into some Sunday afternoon pub quiz action – not to continue drinking, by crikey no, but to reassure myself I hadn’t actually killed every last little brain cell in my noggin with naughty Mr. Al Keehol.

At the pub we fully loaded up with orange juice and pickled onion Monster Munch and sat down to give our collective grey matter a jolly good work out….

Question after question entered our ears.

Yet not one single answer exited our brains.

“Who penned War and Peace?” asked the quizmaster with buns so delicious by rights they should have been topped with a cherry….

Errrrrr ‘Andy McNabb’ we wrote.

“What does an acrophobic fear”? He asked.

Hmmmmm ‘Acrobats’?

And so it continued.

Now, with our brains in fully functioning order I’m sure we would have nailed this quiz, but nailing it was so far from the reality the nail had become nothing but a tiny dot in the distance and spotting it had made us somewhat squinty. So I decided to use the part of my brain that never lets me down. The Frontal Flirto lobe.

Clocking that our quizmaster liked to use the breaks between categories to engage in a bit of cancer sticking, I too decided to pop out and do some fake smoking combined with some very real flirting.

Sideling up to him on the premise of needing a light I engaged him in a bit of my usual banter – flattering his microphone technique, praising his authoritative tone, and of course complimenting his choice of questions – well once I had that wee chap under my charms he was all but forcing the goods upon me. A simple admiring comment about his decision to include a question on literature led him to inadvertently mention ‘Tolstoy’ and yahoo that was the War and Peace answer sorted. Dropping in talk of a ‘friend’ who happened to suffer from ‘that phobia’ and sure enough ‘heights’ slipped seamlessly from his mouth. On and on it went until I had the answer to each and every question. Smashing.

Ok, so some of you might suggest that this errs quite heavily on the side of ‘cheating’ well, maybe, or perhaps you see it as I do – simply engaging the most skilled, if not the most appropriate, part of your brain in order to get the information you require. Who says you need a University degree to succeed in this world? All you need are a few flirting skills and the savvy to use them in every available situation.

Be Sociable, Share!

•