A Chairde,

Bigger portions of jelly, and lashings of ginger ale, at the Withquiz party last week when it was announced that The Opsimaths had made it to the coveted number 2 position in the league table.  Only Fr. Megson and Ivor refused to wear party hats.  Team captain and the very model of an Opsimath (see dictionary definition), Mike Bath, was so buoyant that he became entangled with the helium balloons on the ceiling and had to be held down by Jitka and four burly security guards hired by the Bowling Club from KKLS (Kirby Kiss Logistical Solutions) to supervise the party.

"Absolutely brilliant, 'triffic feeling", Mike told our reporter when he had regained the use of his windpipe.  "We're all absolutely supralunatic. 'Triffic. Who would have believed it?  One moment we are just another mediocre quiz team and then less than 25 years later we are a second best team.  Who says that fairy tales don't come true?...Oscar Wilde probably...it's always bloody Oscar Wilde.

"You know, it's an even more amazing achievement when you consider that not all of us are old codgers.  I mean look at Howell.  Seems like only yesterday that he was running around the club in short trousers licking the froth off your pint when you went to the loo... he still does that, come to think of it and I, for one, find it a very unappealing habit.  Looking back, an awful lot of people thought I was crazy when I adopted a youth policy and gave him a run in the first team a few years ago.  Just goes to prove that you CAN be second best with kids on the team.  So ya boo sucks to that Scottish ponce on the tele who nicked the pound coin out of my trolley in Morrisons last week.

"You know, you need a lot of self belief to be a manager in this game.  I still remember all the flak I took when I signed Howell.  People said that 4 pints was a crazy price to pay for an untried youngster.  They said his English wouldn't be good enough and that he was far too flash to settle down and start coming second best at quizzes.  All those fancy hand movements and step-overs are fine and dandy, they said, but they won't win you no points.  But I continued to believe in him and look at him now.  He's still a flash git, I grant you.  Still far too much Brylcreem for my liking and I absolutely loathe those tangerine boots of his, they just make him look silly, if you want my honest opinion.  But you've got to admit that he can play a bit.  The way he can bend a blurt in mid-air has to be seen to be believed.  People like Ivor can pack a lot of power into their blurts but they can't bend 'em like Howell.  'Triffic.

"He still has his detractors, of course.  A lot of people think he goes down far too easily when he gets within sniffing distance of the box.  Maybe so but I can only speak from experience and say that whenever I have taken him out for the odd candle-lit dinner he has always behaved like a perfect gentleman.  Just a quick coffee afterwards and maybe a chaste peck on the cheek and then he sprints off home to practice his hand movements and step-overs.  I wish I could run that fast.  I've tried chasing him a few times but I always collapse with a stitch and a loud gushing sound in my ears.  Maybe it's God's way of telling me not to be a sentimental old fool.

"It's not all candle-lit dinners, mind you.  Nobody works their team harder at evening training sessions than me.  They don't call me The Dominatrix for nothing.  But that's another story.  No, I work on the principle that you can't get blood out of a stone so it's my job to drum some knowledge into their thick skulls.  I've just started a punishing schedule where I give each of the team a specialist subject every evening and they then have ten minutes to research it and become an expert on it.  Hopefully we can avoid injuries and by the end of March - at the latest - we should know everything that is to be known.  Then we can really blow that monstrous regiment of Napier Girls out of the water.

"As we speak, Alice is in Stockport revising the brickwork of the local viaduct. Yes I know it sounds a bit obscure but it has come up before so it's bound to crop up again.  And Brian is over in the library boning up on his irregular Serbo-Croatian verbs.  A bit of an awkward one this.  Serbo-Croatian is one of those pesky languages that has more irregular verbs than regular ones.  In fact there are only five regular verbs in the whole Serbo-Croatian vocabulary, each one denoting, naturally enough, an action that is performed on a regular basis. They are - write this down please, I won't be repeating it - the verbs 'to be', 'to do', 'to spit noisily', 'to cleanse ethnically' and 'to score more goals than England'.

"Incidentally, has anyone seen Colinski lately?  I sent him out over a month ago to do some research on Manchester city centre pubs and lap-dancing clubs.  I wonder what's keeping him?"