if shakespeare and chaucer somehow had a lovechild, it couldn't come up with the words...

Victory!!!!















That's right. We've only gone and done it. First place. Winners. Gods amongst men. To be fair, they didn't really stand a chance when faced with what must surely now be known as the Axis of ALL Evil. The Dream Team. The Ultimate Six. Team Awesome. I could go on...

I WILL go on. We fucking rock! Love our work. We're so hot right now. A page full of amazings wouldn't suffice. I've never felt so blessed. Actually, sod that, we weren't blessed; we did it all ourselves. I'm not sharing any of the credit. It was a performance to be written into history. They think the Bible is the greatest story ever told?! Pah!

All these weeks of slogging away with the also-rans has finally paid off. I'm sorry to baffle you with statistics but I think it's worth appreciating that our placings in the last four weeks have gone from fourth, through third, up to second (we really need to drink that beer soon) and finally, finally, FIRST. Drink it in. Five letters, one result. First.

Bwahahahahahahahahaaaaa!!!

I think we need a quick rundown of the details of our achievement so that those who weren't there can truly appreciate all the facets of our greatness. For there are many. I suppose you could say that our greatness is multi-faceted. See what I did there?

First up was, as ever, the current-affairs-told-through-the-voices-of-those-who-are-in-the-news-on-whatever-radio-station-Dave-listens-to round. A personal favourite I'm happy to admit. It's always nice to begin strongly and if it hadn't been for Les Reed we would have been off to a perfect start, despite some crazy dissent from Iano who, despite claiming to be the World's Biggest Aberdeen Fan, failed to fully recognise the sweet tones of one-time Don and general radge, Sir Alex Ferguson. Shame on you Ians. One team did know the frankly horrible christian name of the new Charlton manager, so we found ourselves in second place, with only a point in it.

Now I have to give our quizmaster, Dave, some credit and general congratulations for never failing to make the second round interesting. It always varies week-to-week and I'd have to say that he manages to be very inclusive of all players in his selection of questions. We've had celebrity piffle-paffle (loved it). We've had other stuff (see previous posts; I can't be bothered). But tonight it was to be... Latin. Not the most exciting of rounds some might think, with the potential to be rather difficult for a team of twenty-somethings. However, our team is lucky enough to have been educated at some of the finest schools in the country (props to Forres Academy) so we were nothing if not confident.

In amongst the obvious side-of-coin inscriptions and Roman nonsense appeared the frankly frightening revelation that Marlboro's motto is Veni, Vidi, Vici. Scarily true, especially amongst the white middle classes. Good to see Sof sticking with the Bennies. She was always close to the proletariat... Anyway, thanks to a little outside help with the mottos of some Premiership teams - which we did, in fairness, identify ourselves - and some educated guesses, we found ourselves three points clear (!) at the end of the round. It was getting exciting. Not to mention fucking nerve-wracking.

Three points might seem like a comfortable lead but if there was one thing that could ruin it for us it was the next round. The music round. Regular readers of my productivity-destroying rants will be aware that we're not great fans of the music round. Mostly because we're shit at it. We've thrown away many a quiz in this round and to be honest, we expect to do the same every week. Let's see how we did...

Thankfully Samin had had the good sense last week to pester Dave into revealing the general theme for this week's round. Walking and running. A lot of scope there for some great tunes (the Straits leap immediately to mind) so it didn't sound bad. Some prep was done by Sam but to be honest, I think we would've done pretty well without it. With it, we got full points. That's right! In the music! Awesome... I think it's worth mentioning that we'd heard barely a note of Craiiiig David's Walking Away before Sam was frantically scribbling down the answer. His shameful love of boy bands and cheesy crooners (which I share) was finally paying off. I won't bore you with all the details but amongst our in-seat boogying to the aforementioned Straits and the Doobie Brothers (we've got all the moves) we manged the faultless round.

We were now four points clear. A magnificent margin indeed.

Cue lots of chain smoking and drink guzzling as we awaited the handout for the final picture round. We knew we were in a strong position but it would only take some difficult pictures and/or some stupid mistakes to throw it all away. We've done it before and tasted the pain. It's not good.

All fears were soon swept aside upon the realisation that were to be asked to identify... logos. Oh, the sweet joy for a table full of capitalist whores. Depsite the inclusion of the Daewoo logo (who's going to lust after that particular brand?) and the majority's incorrect insistence that Maclaren were actually schoolboy's favourite Head (they definitely made the best boot bags), we basically nailed it. Trickier were the four or five island outlines which had been randomly included at the top of the sheet. And their capitals. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a BBC correspondent reporting from the streets of Greenland or Madagascar so I'm fucked if we were going to get their capitals. Happy with what we'd done we handed the sheet back and waited.

I'd say we were 99% confident of victory at this stage but we'd been burnt before. We couldn't allow ourselves to rejoice until the points countdown to follow. As Dave mocked the lower places (thoroughly deserved) and worked his way up to the big players, we'd still heard no mention of the Axis. The places ticked by. Fourth: nope. Third: nope. Second... No! "And this week's winners are the frankly awesome and amazing [I may be paraphrasing] Axiiiiiis offff Eeeevil!!"

Woooooooohooooooooo!!!!

Do you think we were happy? Can you tell..?
















Remeber those faces. You're gazing upon greatness. The dude in the middle's Dave. The rest are the Axis. Good looking bunch.

Well, we've finally done it. There's been a lot of heartache and some great times, but we stuck it out and it's all paid off. Although we now have the pressure of returning next week as defending champions. There are going to be a lot of teams out there desperate to steal our crown but they'll be in for a fight, that's for sure. Until then, we can bask in the glory and congratulate ourselves on some great work (as if I haven't done that enough already...)

Here's to the Axis and continued success...