83. A Prize

The other evening a couple of friends and I went along to a literary quiz at a local charity bookshop. It's not your normal charity bookshop: the selection of first editions and rare books is impressive and the fiction section features very few pink covers. Anyway, arch-sceptic that I am, I turned up thinking that it would either be full of book weirdos and embarrassing, or high-brow and clever and I'd be embarrassed for a different reason and have to get my mother on speed-dial. In the end, of course, it was somewhere between the two.

My friend Jill (whose debut novel, The Last Kestrel, is published next month - please look out for it) turns out to be fiendishly competitive and excellent on poetry and foreign literature. Joanna is not at all competitive and excellent on twentieth century female writers and 19th century american fiction. I am good at faces and fairy tales. We knew this.

There were twenty people in the room, 5 teams, and we came joint second. I hadn't paid enough attention to the e-mail and had no idea that there were prizes to be won, or I might have done some swotting. We won a voucher for books to be spent in the store that evening, and when the quiz was over we spent a merry half-hour spending our winnings. Fun! It has been a long time since I won anything and we all went quite pink and felt rather pleased with ourselves. We might even go back for more.