My second’s in muesli, but not in mince
My third is in roti, and also in bries
My fourth’s in zucchini but isn’t in cheese
My whole is a myst’ry; of that there’s no doubt.
But I’m perfectly sure you can all work it out.

I want to go back to when I was fifteen years old, and at school; specifically, to the moment when I was sitting in the hall until my name was called and I went in to see the careers master.

Careers advice was a relatively new concept, and it’s fair to say that my school did little more than pay lip service to the idea that teenage pupils should be given some guidance in mapping out their future path through the educational minefield and into the world of work.

I remember envying (let’s be honest, I still envy) those focused folk who knew from the age of 7 that they were going to be gastro-enterologists, or criminal lawyers, or ministers of religion. As I mentioned in a previous post, I had briefly, a year earlier, entertained the notion of a life in journalism, until I discovered that it involved not only talent but also application and self-discipline. By the time I was 15, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up.

This may be just as well, since any idea I might have had would almost certainly have involved a university education, and I was at the age of 15 heading for very disappointing results in my A levels at age 18. Thinking back to my last two years at school, with the perspective of life experience, I begin to suspect that two years of concentrating only on those aspects of my studies that really interested me, and spending the last months before the exams pretending to revise but actually doing jigsaws, may have played some part in my failure.

So there I was, sitting in front of the careers master, being asked what career ambitions I had. I can no longer remember what I answered, but I am sure my vagueness accurately reflected my lack of direction. I basically had no idea. So, on reflection, the career master’s recommendation that I aim to read English at university was sound advice: a university degree in English can be leveraged as an intro to a wide variety of occupations, or, put another way, a university degree in English qualifies you for nothing….except teaching English, which is what I eventually ending up doing. But that’s another story.

Allow me to indulge myself, and to spirit myself back 65 years. If I had again my five minutes with the careers master, I believe I now know what I would have answered when asked about my career ambitions. “Well, sir,” I would have said, “what I really want to be is a bespoke quiz designer.” Try as I might, I am unable to imagine what his response might have been, other than to send me to the headmaster for insolence.

When I look back on my working life and wonder how it might have panned out differently, I find myself coming to the conclusion that compiling quizzes to order might well have given me more satisfaction that anything I actually did, except, probably, English teaching, which was a rough and uneven ride, but whose satisfactions, when earned, as they occasionally were, were very deep and rich.

I count myself very lucky because I have been able, over the years, to indulge my passion. Unfortunately, nobody has ever seen fit to pay me for a quiz, but you can’t have everything. Anyway, I thought I would tell you about some of the quizzes that have given me the greatest satisfaction.

When we first moved to Maale Adumim, 24 years ago, our synagogue ran an annual supper quiz, and, after we had been here for a year or two, I took a stint as question master. Since the participants included immigrants from half a dozen different countries, and even a couple of native Israelis, one challenge here was devising questions that were not culture-specific, and, where possible, not verbal. Picture and music rounds were safer than arcane references to minor characters in Coronation Street.

For the most part, I have concentrated on quizzes as part of birthday or anniversary celebrations. Rather than being faced with a blank canvas, it is easy here to concentrate on the number of years. I remember a very nice 29^th birthday quiz for Micha’el which dealt exclusively with questions based on the number 29. In the past, this would have been challenging, since 29 is not an obvious number, but these days all you need to do is google ‘29’, and then sift through the mountains of material to find the nuggets of question material.

For my late mother-in-law’s 70th birthday, I devised a very elaborate quiz and board game. We were spending the shabbat away together, so I thought there would be plenty of time to play. An array of 10×7 squares represented the 70 years of her life, with a separate question relating to each year.

In addition, there were questions built around 7’s, with all the usual suspects: dwarves, Magnificent, deadly sins, sisters and so forth. (Incidentally, the actor that you can never remember in the original, 1960, The Magnificent Seven is Brad Dexter.) I was very pleased with the end-result, and on the Friday I eagerly packed my box of index cards, coloured tokens and stoutly laminated board.

We never actually played the quiz game; the moment never seemed right. But I have hung on to the questions, and Bernice should be warned that if she isn’t nice to me I shall inflict it on her for her 70^th birthday!

Fortunately, Sue and David, Bernice’s sister and her husband, are keen quizzers, and have often been kind enough to ask me to provide questions. This is well within my comfort zone, since we are all of the same era (although they are considerably older than Bernice and myself!) and have similar backgrounds, as do most of the friends they invite to their celebrations.

What I regard as my masterpiece was a musical quiz I devised for David’s 70^th birthday. Sue had asked me to incorporate questions on The Barber of Seville, The Shadow of Your Smile and Scherezade. I managed to construct a round of questions built around barbers (ranging from Samuel’s Adagio to Chris’s When the Saints Go Marching In), and a further round in which I spliced together recordings of six different artists singing The Shadow of Your Smile, demonstrating, on the way, that Andy Williams and Johnny Mathis sing in the same key, and with very similar guitar accompaniment.

A round of matching Leroy Anderson pieces to their titles (I knew that David rightly admires Anderson’s ability to write and orchestrate melodies) followed, and we also had a formal, recorded, public version of the game David and I often played privately, each of us in turn singing the eight bars of intro to American standards and inviting the other to identify the song. It is interesting how some songs have remained very well known, while their intros have slipped into relative obscurity. Consider, for example, this lyric:

At words poetic, I’m so pathetic
That I always have found it best
Instead of getting ’em off my chest
To let ’em rest unexpressed

I hate parading my serenading
As I’ll probably miss a bar
But if this ditty is not so pretty
At least it’ll tell you how great you are

The ease of the flow of the language, the effortless but sophisticated internal rhyme, are unmistakably Cole Porter. But I never heard them until I was preparing the quiz. They are the intro to You’re the Top which Porter himself sings inimitably here.

What made me so pleased with this quiz was that David beat everyone else (as the birthday boy should), but even he had to dig deep for one or two answers, and, at the same time, the others were not just bystanders, but were (or at least seemed) eager participants.

Of course, participants are sometimes just a little too eager. I regard myself as being as competitive as the next man, unless of course the next man is a guest at a party I quizzed many years ago.

As well as the usual rounds of questions, the teams had a crossword that they could work on throughout the evening. Eventually, having allowed everyone a final five minutes, the time came to collect the crosswords in, and I had to physically wrestle one guest to the ground to separate him from his crossword.

In recent years I have also started preparing a Purim quiz as part of our price of admission to friends’ seuda (festive meal). This is always a flippant and brief affair, but the family in question are knowledgeable, great lovers of language, for the most part, native Hebrew speakers, and inveterate quizzers. I have taken it upon myself to devise what is almost always a language-based quiz in Hebrew, with wordplay and anagrams. It stretches my command of Hebrew well beyond its normal limits. Nevertheless, so far I have received no complaints.

Last year, when we returned from Portugal the day before Purim, we had to go into isolation immediately, and therefore missed the seuda, Our friends were horrified, and demanded the quiz anyway. Our internet was down (long story), so they had to collect the question sheets from our house, and I had to run the quiz by phone.

Now that I’m retired, of course, I have to prepare quizzes on my own time, rather than my employer’s, but, even so, it is a labour of love…and I do still take bookings.

Meanwhile, back in Portugal, someone is learning that all that food preparation and cooking generates washing up, but nobody has yet told him that this is a chore rather than a privilege, and his parents would appreciate it if you don’t burst the bubble.