Tuesday 12 March 2019

Pagan Phoenix Fiendish Quiz

I've just come back from a Pagan Conference in Cornwall, which was a fascinating weekend. We all had a great time (apart from the poor lady who couldn't face a night in the Very Cold Chalet with the Inadequate Heaters).
We were staying at Penstowe Manor Holiday Camp - they hadn't quite opened yet for the season, so we were the first people there.
The old Manor House itself is at the top of the hillside, once owned by the Grenville family (there were banners up around the bar). We took to calling it Stately Wayne Manor. A village of chalets of various types is scattered down the hill. Here's the back of ours, in the middle of the picture:


I've never been on a holiday camp holiday before, so I was surprised at how spacious the chalet was - there were 4 of us sharing a chalet that slept 6 (plus a sofa bed), so there were three bedrooms, bathroom, small kitchen, and a big open room with a dining table at one end and sofas at the other, with a picture window that looked out onto a hedge.
Beyond the hedge, this was in the distance:


It took all day to get there - I set out on the college bus from Hay at about 7am, and got to Stroud by about 11am, where I met the rest of the party, and we drove the rest of the way through mostly appalling weather and, when we got to Cornwall, fog. Through the fog, wind turbines loomed.

But we did get there in plenty of time for the Fiendish Quiz in the evening.
Quiz teams were supposed to be five people, but one potential member wandered off to sit with friends across the bar, and another was eating her dinner, so it ended up with the Herne's Hunters team only having two active members. I think we did quite well to get 14 points, especially as some of the questions really were fiendishly hard.
There was a picture round which was Name the Pagan Artist! By that time we were reduced to writing things like "Alistair Crowley's girlfriend?" and we didn't get any points for having seen one of the paintings in real life (MacGregor Mathers, which is in the Atlantic Bookshop near the British Museum, painted by his wife). There was also a difficult music round - but I was very pleased to get the Pink Floyd album Piper at the Gates of Dawn, for bonus points!
The Mad March Hares won the quiz with 27 points.

The friend who had invited us is one of the Gloucestershire contingent of Pagans, and we spent the rest of the evening very pleasantly in their company, before we crawled away to bed.
We discovered later that Damh the Bard had been singing in the bar after we left, which we were sorry to miss. He was one of the speakers at the conference the next day, so this was very impromptu

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