Exercising the grey matter

We love our trivia, general knowledge crosswords, quizzes and puzzles of all kinds.  When we are at home, we enjoy the daily sudokus and often sit down to watch (and shout at!) Pointless before getting supper together.  Here at sea, the daily trivia quiz has always been a "must do" each day and we have met some very special friends as a result.

So each day when we begin our trivia sheet by putting our name at the top, I write "missing you Jim" in tribute to the chap who joined our team on one of our first cruises, who had a wonderful knowledge of sport - a subject about which we are woefully ignorant.  As you can see, we did rather well yesterday though, even we should have got one of the two wrong answers correct (my hero overthought it and didn't just go with his instinct).  The other one was about an event on the 7 July 2007 watched by millions of people on TV worldwide.  Since that's my hero's birthday, we felt we should know what it was but we didn't and simply guessed a total exclipse.  The answer was Michael Jackson's funeral!

These days, however, there's another challenge to enjoy each day in the form of a few Mensa puzzles.  We pick up the sheet and between us, work out the answers during the day, sometimes mulling them over for several hours before suddenly coming up with an answer - not necessarily the correct one, but we can always hope.  Five correct answers are rewarded with three points each and as a result, we've collected quite a few during the last couple of weeks.

Mercifully, there were no points to play for in the fun round of mini golf we just enjoyed.  I'd like to blame the motion of the ocean for our woeful performance but sadly, it was a definite lack of skill on my part at least.  I think that the rather huge lunch we just enjoyed might have been partly to blame as well, but I'll try not to dwell on that one!