It's the cricket club fund raiser. Our son plays cricket and he used to go to the trivia nights with me but has lost patience with them. They can be noisy, disorganised, drunken rorts that go on and on and on. Until you could join in the screaming yourself. Actually, now I think about it, I quite like them.
- Irene Bellfield had rung up and invited me to join her table.
- Grace at the shop suggested that might be because she wanted to win. It is well known in the village that I am so sharp I could cut myself.
- Grace does a top job. She has the mail sorted by nine, stocks the kind of things you run out of, and has her finger on the pulse without ever crossing the line. She can be brutally honest, but she's nice with it. Like most people in the village, she is football mad, and she decorates the shop window with rabbits in red jersies, but she doesn't think any less of me because I don't take an interest. She understands that sport is not my thing.
- I packed my bottle of wine and cheese plate, left Martin and the kids watching an improving doco on SBS about Pompei, and headed off down the road early. It's sad. I simply don't get enough social interaction and am very keen to meet and greet.
- All of the menfolk Irene had invited had let her down. This is not unusual. Something comes up. An early start or a programme on the telly. So we had an all girls table. Irene, Velma, whose hands were glittering with rings, Betty from London, and me. I am not exactly a girls' girl so to ease myself into the conversation I told them the sad story of our dishwasher that was still under warranty, so we weren't worried when water started pouring out under the door. Until the repairman pulled it out and found mice had been nibbling the hoses. Mice nibbling isn't covered.
- Then I drifted off, and when I came to again, I could hear consensus was being reached about how some woman had really learnt her lesson, and was getting her act together, and one thing you could say for her was that she was an excellent mother.
- “Who's this?” I asked.
- I thought I was about to get a hot up-date on the latest village gossip. Back in the loop. Since the kids left the local school and went over to Valleyleigh to the high school I was no longer a member of the P&C. So I knew nothing.
- “Oh Fergie. Did you see her interview on Parkinson?”
- We were going great guns with our questions, and were neck and neck with table eight, but then the slide started because none of us could answer the questions about sport. What we needed were the menfolk who were at home watching sport on TV, becoming armchair experts. If they had been here Irene could have blitzed the local knowledge, she's lived here all her life, Velma and Betty could have held their own when it came to the who's who of royalty and other minor celebrities, I could have answered the questions about Shakespeare and the moonlight sonata, and the menfolk could have done the sport thing. We were doing no good. We were winning nothing. We didn't win the lucky door prize. We bombed out in the true-or-false rounds. And other tables were loading up with bottles of wine and dvds and petrol vouchers, as the raffle prizes were drawn, and we were getting bugger all!
- The best prize was kept until last. A football signed by the team that nearly of the village seem to support. I can't remember their name, but I had seen their red banners all over, especially in the shop, and their rabbit mascot.
- As most of the crowd groaned with excitement and longing, I just knew for sure that our table was going to win it. One of us was going to win the rugby ball. And we were probably the only table in the hall who didn't contain one single person who knew which end of a football was which.
- Yes. My number was drawn. Black B58.
- I stood on the stage, and held the ball in my hands, and I was just about to punt it out into the crowd shouting - “Anyone who wants it can have it,” - when I noticed some little kids crawling around the floor. Didn't want them stepped on in the scrimmage.
- I hopped down off the stage and walked towards the back of the hall. I got offers from right and left. It was a real bidding war. Bottles of wine, petrol vouchers, dvds! But I walked up to Grace from the shop. Knowing how much she loves the team whose colour is red and whose mascot is a rabbit.
- And I gave it to her. She took it without a word. She couldn't speak.
- When I went to collect the mail next morning, there was the football in pride of place in the window.
- Martin was intrigued by the possibility of winning something he really didn't want, and he promised to come to the next Trivia night. And he did too. And again our table won nothing because he is even more ignorant about sport than I am. I have a small area of expertise, Melbourne Cup winners, the life and times of Bobby Charlton.
- A village gives elbow room to allsorts - but somehow or other I have to find a friend who is really into sport and has it all at his or her fingertips, or my table has no chance of scooping up the dinner for six at Bide-A-Wee Bed and Breakfast. I wonder how I might go about it. I must learn to mingle more.
