On a cold wet night in January in the soft glow of the New Years lanterns of China Town we headed into O’Neill’s bar, to do our best in the annual SLA Winter Warmer Quiz.    

After catching up with some old faces we took the all-important time to decide our team name. Finally agreeing on Skill’d (an anagram of our initials), and yes we were super chuffed with this play. We took our table, keen to sample the food on offer awaiting the start of the quiz with a resolve to NOT TO COME LAST! 

We were pleasantly surprised at The General Knowledge Quiz as there were questions, we could actually answer including: name the musical this song is from, the answer starts with this letter and countries in the EU that have the same letter twice.

Many of the questions we are proud to say were educated guesses and we started to feel enthused when we got them correct. Although there were somewhere we did have to question “what we were thinking?” when we got them very, very wrong and swearing that “We really don’t watch that much TV!” when we could easily name the John Lewis Advert!

After 7 rounds and all the 12 team scores where collated, it came time to announce the top five and ultimately the winners and the room filled with excitement.

Remember our team agreed that our primary objective was to not come last so how did we do??? The quiz master named the teams one by one and we were all looking at each other thinking “Have they forgotten about us?” as we waited to hear our team name called.

Realising we had made it into the top 5 we started to celebrate, and our pride had gone through the roof. Pride turned into confusion when our team still wasn’t called as they named 5th and 4th place. Confusion became shock when we thought we are actually in the top 3 and then in the top 2! Surely not but we were excited to think we had even got second place.

On being announced as the winners there were exclaims of “Really??!” within the team and some of us held back from asking “Are you sure?” But yes we had come first!

Walking up to the stage with our faces brimming with a mixture of pride and slight disbelief we took our Book Token prizes and smiled for the camera.

As we always say at TFPL and Sue Hill – teamwork makes the dream work!

We had a great night with colleagues and all those that attended so thank you to SLA. We know just how important knowledge is to influencing lives and therefore we decided to donate our prize, National Book Tokens to the value of £90 to Book Aid International who provides valuable books and learning aids to children all around the world who are eager to learn and read.

Thank you to SLA for a great Quiz Night!