The paper this week was set by Compulsory Meat Raffle.

A perfectly respectable average aggregate of 71.0 across the grounds disguised a complex paper with quite a few very lengthy questions (133 words in Round 4 Question 1, which I think must be an all-time league record) and a heavy preponderance of pop music fodder.  Having said this I was a mere observer, and my team seemed to flourish, and even have heard of some of the pop acts.  Nevertheless I do think knowing the position and relative extent of a country, or knowing who commanded the Allied Forces in Italy in 1943, ranks slightly higher up the scale than knowing who hit No. 38 in the UK charts in 1958.  Perhaps that's the point - a bit like the News of the World - all human knowledge is there from the utterly banal to the seriously significant.  I'm afraid, however, it just wasn't my sort of banality this evening.

Others took a more enthusiastic view.

James was clearly very pleased....

"A good set of questions.  Close all the way through.  Good themes, some great pairs and questions - and with an aggregate of 77 in our match, I think this is CMR's best quiz paper yet.  We like questions which allow for educated guessing - and that scored us quite a few points with Greece, cicadas etc... and several where we nearly guessed right.

I shall finish by saying that in 25 years of medical training, including a year or two in a hand surgery unit, I have never heard of the term 'saddle joint' (perhaps Tim or Ivor had a more classical education than I did?)."

and Ivor's view....

"It has been mentioned before that Rachael likes Christmas and that was certainly on display in spades tonight.  It is bad enough having window displays and Christmas trees in November but three Xmas themes in a league game on December 3rd….?  But then I have forgotten, of course, that term very soon ends so that our hard working students can retreat to enjoy the festivities.  Oh, and by the way, all the Historymen send Adam and Rachael their very best wishes for their impending nuptials."

...and Damian's feedback from the DD/Charas match....

"Wow...Christmas certainly arrived with a bang with tonight's offering from the Meat Rafflers.  No less than 3 Christmas themes in the second half!  Maybe the Charas are still stuck in an Advent mood but we duly fell flat on two of those themes making a late surge in the final Christmas offering to narrow a steadily increasing gap to just 2 points!  We thought that the Rafflers must have been aiming for the longest questions ever asked in the entire history of Withquiz in Round 4 (please spare a thought for the wretched QMers, guys), but despite this there was an interesting assortment of subjects and the usual liberal Rafflers' sprinkling of contemporary music trivia.  I used to be contemporary once...honestly, I did!"

Finally Anne-Marie sums up what seems to have been the majority view...

"A great quiz from the Meat Raffle.  Good fun predicting the questions in the reindeer round.  So much so that Danny predicted correctly what the Cupid question would be only to realise he didn't know the answer!"

This week Ethel choose Round 3 Question 4 - a satisfyingly short question (only just missing Gerry Laversha's 7 word target - see above) but long on intrigue:

Many of Fr Megson's parishioners were startled to find an unfamiliar priest celebrating early mass last Sunday.  It was Fr Megson.  As befits a priest who finds himself in less than robust sexual health and sober at such an ungodly hour of the morning, he was in a fulminatory mood.

Nobody escaped his fulminations.  The questions from the previous Wednesday night were not questions in any meaningful Catholic sense of the word; small wonder that the Charabancs had not deigned to answer them.  A mere bagatelle of arid and base pettifoggeries, the vapid musings of Roddy and his yuppie ilk who are wont to sit around sipping Prosecco and easing themselves quantitatively in that whited sepulchre of a pub that had caked on the makeup and play-acted at being the White Swan.  Any Christian, even a Protestant, could see that that pub was on a handcart to Hell the minute they started tarting up the urinals with them wee blue blocks.  Idle fripperies!  Pearls before swine!  The Roman Empire had crumbled under decadence and soft living.  Now it was Ladybarn's turn.  We must all remember Sodom and Gemorrah before it was too late, begorrah.

The normally placid pastor then switched his wrath from the Ethel Austin wannabees to the brazen iniquity of gay rent boys.  What really got his dander up were them fcekin' gobshites who hang around the bandstand in a well known South Manchester park of a Tuesday evening.  They look all angelic and innocent as if Stork wouldn't melt in their mouths.  Then, the minute you stop to tie your shoelace and adjust the hem of your chasuble they go all vampish and promise you a dainty treat - "something that will take your breath away, Father".  But as soon as you hand over a goodly portion of your paltry stipend they knee you in the nuggets and run off sniggering and shouting hurtful things like "so long sucker".  In the good old days any mill owner who found his brats offering to tug anything other than their forelock in front of a man of God would tan their backsides with a sally rod from the hedge and fair play to them.  The world would be a better place if we had more tanned backsides.

He then vented his engorged spleen on that other scourge of modern society, women.  That monstrous regiment of strumpets as John Knox called them.  And who could disagree, even if he had been Scottish and rumoured to be a Protestant.  Yessiree, if women weren't giving you a rash they were trying to get their hands on that last wee morsel of your stipend that the gay rentboys hadn't managed to purloin.

Take that Dusty for example: "Strumpet doesn't even begin to describe her. Shyster, Snollygoster par excellence, Whore of Babycham.  The guts of half a crown I'm paying her on a weekly basis to keep my column going and what do I get?  Nichts, nada, rien, fcek all!  Some bullcrap about blobs and roosters.  It's a quiz website for Chrissakes.  The hoi polloi want match reports, post match interviews in the shower, scurrilous invective heaped upon the heads of them hoors in the Griffin, beefcake images of the Pigs.  Our target audience is made up of quiz punters, for fcek's sake, not fcekin' intellectuals.  They want to tootle along in their white vans listening to TalkQuiz, not Mrs Dale's frigging Diary.  Wake up there in the back pew, Dusty and Mr Dusty and pay heed.  You've got until January when the window opens to save your half crown.  Doing columns is a results-based business and I expect results, not bleedin' blobs..........and get that heathen rooster out of my church NOW!"

Fr Megson then said some holy things and collected some money before reminding his congregation that the mass was ended and that they should wake up and go forth in peace pronto or there would be trouble.