To continue my life as a cliche, tonight is quiz night. We used to go to the glossier pub on the corner that was reputedly once owned by Jade Jagger (though why that should add cachet, I'm not sure) with big screen televised football matches, and wonderful food, until the bailiffs came in a month ago and took everything, including the pot plants. Now there are around forty of us crammed into the tiny Greek pub in North Kensington's equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle with the railway line that carries nuclear waste on one side, fronted by a small industrial estate made of corrugated metal, the Westway on the other, and the traveler's camp on the last. It's very picturesque. Richard Curtis doesn't know what he's missing living at the posh end of the Borough, especially now that you can't smoke in there.
Until recently, the Greek landlord completely ignored the smoking ban and stood at the bar with his own ever-present roll-up hanging out of the corner of his mouth. For my smoker friends it was like stumbling across Shangri-la - though the everlasting life connotations may not be particularly apt. There certainly was something quite wickedly illicit about going in for a drink and seeing all these smokers huddled around tables, engulfed in a grey, carcinogenic fug, and the fact that there was, more often than not, usually a motorbike in pieces in the middle of the floor, only added to the quaintness. I can't abide cigarette smoke, so was never as keen as others on the whole bohemian, mechanics workshop thing he had going on, but I'm a total convert now that he's conceded to the law as far as ciggies are concerned, though there's obviously nothing the licensing authorities can do about the motorbikes. No longer in bits, there are a pair of them, leaning against each other like teenage lovers, shiny as beetles, smack bang in the centre of the pub. Sometimes, if there's a big turnout, we can convince him to wheel them outside and people can actually sit down, but it's by no means a certainty.
It's a very convivial evening. We do general (lack of) knowledge, eat lamb rotis (despite being Greek, the landlady is from Trinidad) and have great fun. There's Mark the builder with paint stained jeans who always has a pencil stuck in his long, coiled dreads and seems to have more useless trivia jammed into his brain than I have shoes. He is joined by my neighbour Belie who, mystifyingly, always wears a fur coat, even now, when the temperature is in the 70s, and her husband Fran, who despite hating Abba, knows every single song lyric, all the flags of the world, and can identify countries from their outline. We are joined by a whole host of other locals who share Fran's affinity for useless information - an artist, a film producer (it is Notting Hill darling, even if on the wrong side of the tracks), a woman in the process of ditching her husband whose son drums at 6am which elicits faint homocidal tendencies and a great many teachers whose average age is 12.
At the other pub there was a team of footballers who rocked up at the last minute, half way through the first round,and cockily got the mental arithmetic question in 2 seconds, and the anagram, and consequently always ruddy won. Week after week after week. I can't protest too much as my sole contribution is to sit there and pretend the answer is on the tip of my tongue when a team-mate gets the answer. I can't remember where I've put my Oyster card, let alone who starred in The Big Lebowsky which, in any case, I've slept through four times. And even when I do know the answer, I'm too shy to insist that I'm right.
Mark says, 'Be more assertive, Marion' and points his sharp little pencil at me, which, strangely, is not as encouraging as he thinks.
Our team scraped in at second a couple of times (prize - a bottle of wine which, if you've been sitting there drinking all night is not that welcome) while the footballers with their ham hock legs and dirty socks, always got the Sunday lunch for six. It was really disheartening. Especially as they came in specially from Ealing.
And then the posh pub went into receivership and we all defected to the Greek tavern. Suddenly, the evening became even more fun as, amazingly, without the footballers, we started to win the occasional game.
Okay, the prize is a bottle of champagne that is more of a punishment to drink, warm, at the end of a long boozy night, than a prize, but victory is, finally, very, very sweet (as, indeed is the fizz).
I confess I did see the crowd of footballers peering in the window of the bankrupt pub as I walked past the other night. I tried to hurry by but one of them spotted me and asked me what had happened to the place.
'Oh it's shut down,' I said innocently and walked on, failing to mention that I was on my way to another, nicer, pub two hundred yards down the road with a fully functioning quiz night. In fact, as we reminisced over our goat rotis and warm winner's plonk, that the one consolation for losing our fancy local is that those ruddy footballers won't be ever able to cash in their Sunday lunch for six.
