Duston GP (and other stuff)

I attended my first Grand Prix quiz event of 2015 on Saturday, held in Duston in Northamptonshire. It's possibly the best-attended GP event of the calendar, and indeed 103 souls made the trip there to take on the individual 240-question paper and other quizzes. One of those souls, you've probably already guessed, was me.

Pleased to say that I scored 61.4 on what was a very testing individual paper, in which the average score was only 69 (it's usually somewhere in the 80s), which managed to place me 67th. I also came joint-21st in the Civilisation genre (comprising human geography, world cities, travel and transport, politics and all that sort of stuff). The more eagle-eyed of you (or the ones with the most retentive memories) will recall that finishing in the top 30 of a genre before the end of the year was one of my 2015 quizzing resolutions, so I'm glad to have achieved it on Saturday. Hopefully I can get a few more before the end of the year but it'll all depend on various factors, including how hard I'm willing to work.

I did OK on the first three genres of the paper (Art & Culture, Civilisation, and Entertainment) and then mostly crashed and burned on the final three (Lifestyle, Physical World, Sport & Leisure). Still, I'm heartened by how I did and hopefully with a bit more work on those weaker genres I can pull my score up into the 70s, which is where I'd like it to be by the end of the year if possible.

In other news, I'm in the middle of filming University Challenge with the University of Liverpool team. Obviously I can't say too much other than it's an experience and we're just going to give it as good a go as we can. All will be revealed by July anyway.