A Birthday & The World Quizzing Championships

So, on Saturday, I ran the English chapter of the World Quizzing Championships and co-ordinated the scores coming in from 123 venues across 42 countries. The WQC was sat by nearly 2,000 people, so it was quite a day!

Not one to do things by halves though, it was also my son's 9th birthday that day.

Epic scheduling fail. As I believe the 'kids' would say. In my defence, the WQC used to be held in July, but got moved to the first Saturday of June.

I got up early that morning, leapt into the shower, got dressed, packed the car up and then woke Thomas and gave him some of his presents, bundled him into the car and headed to my mum's house so she could take the birthday boy out for the day, while his mum belted down to Frimley for the World Quizzing Championships.

I have never felt more guilty than I did as I had to leave Thomas on his big day.

The WQC itself went very well. We had almost 100 people out in England with a further 40+ in Edinburgh. Excellent. Defending champion, Pat Gibson (BBC Egghead), scored 157 in Edinburgh, but he was beaten by fellow Egghead, Kevin Ashman who scored a whopping 171. I thought the Brits had won the event again, but no! An American called Steve Perry scored 174 and a guy in India scored 176. So, for the first time in the event's 12-year history, a non-Brit won. Congratulations to Vikram Joshi on his incredible performance!

Right!

Now to get home... 

I drove down to Kingston to pick up Thomas's present from John Lewis. They didn't have it there! Argh!!! I ran over to Bentalls. They did have the Lego Millennium Falcon. Phew! But, it was £25 more than John Lewis and Amazon. Fuming! Cursing JL for not having reserved it for me and cursing Bentalls for being such a rip-off. Note to self: don't go to Bentalls again and order more online.

So now to wrap the presents (I bought him more than one thing) using a shopping trolley as a table in the JL car park. Somehow, despite this, the presents looked quite nicely wrapped.

Off to mum's now to celebrate Thomas's birthday with him.

He loved his presents, especially the foam Minecraft diamond sword. Why did I bother with the Lego when I could have just bought him foam? Hey ho!

After dinner, presents and cake, we headed home. Thomas went to bed and I got on with inputting all the scores that were starting to come in. I continued with this when I got up at 5am the next morning to get the house ready for our friends coming to celebrate Thomas's birthday some more.

To be continued...