I started competing in a pub quiz at the King George pub in Hale on a Sunday evening in 2022. It started as a social event with fellow Andys Man Club users.
The pub was just a short walk from where our meetings were held, and it gave me something positive to focus on.
I had become quite socially isolated. My social life used to revolve around work. I used to organise poker evenings in our office, but covid tipped all our lives upside down. I was spending far too much time inside the same four walls, and that wasn’t good for my mental health.
Andy’s Man Club was helping. It gave me somewhere I could talk freely about my anxiety and fears, but I knew I needed to make an effort to do something else.
The quiz was good fun, I wasn’t the best at it, but between the 6-8 of us that regularly turned up from AMC, we did quite well. It was just a nice night out and we had a good laugh.
The pub started getting a bit more rowdy on occasions, and that put off some of our guys but I still enjoyed it and persuaded one of my friends to join me. He was in a similar boat, trying to find ways to meet people and socialise.
I started to get my confidence back. I was starting to see a chink of light. Covid disoriented me and plunged me into a place where I had crippling self-doubt and depression but bit by bit, I was rebuilding and starting to feel like the enthusiastic, bubbly person I used to be. The puns were back. The challenge was to come up with a different name each week to make people laugh (or cringe).
My wife had been encouraging me to go out to AMC and the quiz. I assumed for good reasons, but it turned out she was using this time to start several cyber-affairs with men she found through tiktok and instagram.
One of the darkest moments in my life was when I was sat in the pub, doing the quiz and I had managed to track down the person my wife was having an affair with.
He was sending me picture after picture of their conversations, the lies she told him (she made out she was single), and explicit images. I completely shut down that night, and if it wasn’t for the lads around me, I could easily have ended up doing something stupid.
We tried to fix things, we went to marriage counselling and we tried to spend more time together. She started coming to the pub with me for the quiz, after I promised her nobody would say anything to her.
We did the quiz either as a couple or in a three with my friend, and we were quite successful. I always thought she should do catchphrase. She was very good at the 6 I felt the bond coming back. I was still traumatised by what she had done, but there was hope.
That hope evaporated when I caught her in the act again. In hindsight, I should have kicked her out but she begged me not to leave her and I took the pragmatic decision that it was better to stay with her, and not lose my home and half my family but it was clear she didn’t respect me and it was clear that I could never trust her again.
She decided she no longer loved me, and her behaviour deteriorated into more attention seeking and deliberate provocation. I decided to take back control, so I filed for divorce, and I gave her the option to buy me out or let me buy her out.
Living with her was hell on earth, but I wasn’t going to let her get what she wanted, a rise out of me. I spent as much time as I could out of the house socialising.
The King George quiz changed from a Sunday night to a Thursday and that didn’t suit me, but I knew the quiz master did other pubs, including one much closer to me, so my friend and I decided to switch to The Parrs Wood Tuesday quiz.
Having that social routine kept me sane. At one point we even branched out and tried three different pub quizzes run by the same quiz master, who we regarded as a friend by this point. We had dreams of winning at each of the pubs to achieve a grand slam, although that turned into a pipe dream.
My friend was very competitive and would get annoyed with me when I spent half the time flirting with girls on dating sites when I was supposed to be doing the quiz. A few of those girls turned out to be scammers, but I did have fun turning it around and enjoying a laugh at their expense.
The quiz has been a little bit of consistency and entertainment through the most painful chapter of my life. It’s seen me at my lowest, and it’s helped get me through.
I’ve met some wonderful characters and people I admire and respect through doing it. It’s important to have something you do just for you.
For a couple of hours, I get to forget about work worries, financial pressures, family problems, health etc. I get to be Jon, the idiot that randomly shouts out inappropriate answers to make people laugh,
Jon, the guy who gets way too excited when he actually knows he’s got a question right (rarely happens). Jon, the guy who tries to bribe the quiz master with shortbread and Jon, the guy that tries to come up with team names, the quiz master can’t or won’t say.
It’s more than a quiz to me. More than faster finger first on a tablet. It’s part of my recovery journey, a journey that continues, and I cherish the friendship, laughs, and camaraderie.
Laughter is indeed the best medicine for melancholy, although victorian doctors’ treatment for hysteria comes close too!
Until the next round my friends!
Rant Over 