Your Non-Starter for Ten

In which The Author takes the path of most resistance

After a long absence from the big chair, I've finally given into Ian the guvnor's nagging and agreed to set a quiz in the Cambrian. Bear in mind that the Wednesday Night Wingding was my idea in the first place, many years ago. It seems only right that I should come out of retirement – especially as my old pal Alan Everett wants to try and reboot the Cynon Valley Quiz League after a nine year absence. Doesn't time fly when you're not having fun?

Alan captured me at Iwan's leaving party on Friday evening and gave me a couple of posters to hand out. He's hosting a meeting tonight, to discuss the plans seriously and invite teams to register. I've spread the word around over the weekend, but a bit more notice might have helped. He's got my number now, so he can keep me updated on developments. Suddenly my 'social life' is actually starting to resemble a social life.

Anyway, I put my name down originally to do the first Wednesday in November. It falls neatly between Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night, so I've got two possible themes to explore when I start putting it together. Then a space in my diary opened up unexpectedly over the weekend, so I've agreed to set the quiz in a fortnight's time. In fact, during the most sleepless night I've experienced for several weeks, I sat up all night making notes and jotting down possible avenues to research. In fact, last night the creative juices were definitely flowing.

I was having a pint and a chat with my old pal Mel C. (who's a male musician and singer, not a former Spice Girl) before the Cambrian open mic night got underway. Mel was born in Nottinghamshire, and – perhaps unsurprisingly for a folk singer – is very interested in history. He mentioned an important sporting figure who was from his local area, and it gave me an idea. It's sort-of related to the exhibition at the newly reopened Cynon Valley Museum and Gallery, about the legendary Victorian cyclists of Aberaman. I wrote a couple of pages of ideas, sketched out a couple of drawings, and made a list of people to sound out about it. Describing it as embryonic would be overstating the case – it's still more of a zygote than an embryo – but the idea might have legs. Watch this space …

This afternoon I decided to plunder the YouTube archives for music for my first quiz in several years. I'd drawn up a list of possible songs overnight, so I listened to my choices for real (as opposed to vaguely remembering most of them). After that, I pulled a couple from the field of play and sent the substitutes on. Having compiled my definitive list, I decided to acquire them for real.

There's a nice Firefox add-on which allows you to convert video files to mp3. I've used it before (primarily to source offbeat karaoke backing tracks), so I knew it was perfect for my requirements. I converted all the files, shoved them into a subfolder, loaded them into Audacious (Ubuntu's answer to iTunes), and saw that it was good. Then the fun really started.

I knew from bitter experience that it's almost impossible to regulate the playback volume of videos uploaded to YouTube. Luckily, Ubuntu comes with a nice little utility to batch tweak the gain, so they all come out at more or less the same level. It only takes a couple of minutes to equalise a cluster of files, so I let it run in the background while I updated my Answer sheet.

Then the fun really started. I had to use Audacity to cut out the chunks of the song I'd be using on the night. After watching a parade of clueless Loteks trying to skip to the exact same spot on a CD using the remote control during the second play through, I discovered several years ago that there was a much better way to go about it.

Audacity is a nice (if rather fiddly) open source mixing console, with a huge range of features and bugger all documentation. I've been using it for about ten years on and off, and I've still only scratched the surface. Since I wasn't trying to lay down live guitar tracks, like my pal Louis M. was failing dismally to do a couple of weeks ago, the basic features were all I needed. I snipped, tweaked and shaved the samples individually, saved them to a subsubfolder, and then loaded them into Audacious to make a playlist. After a great deal of fiddling around, I was able to save the music round in an easy to use format.

Have you spotted the flaw in the argument yet?

Neither did I, until I was walking from the library to Thereisnospoon for a glass of Pepsi and a piss (I'm not necessarily listing them in the right order). You know the moment in cartoons when the light bulb goes 'ping' above a character's head? That was pretty much what happened to me as I was passing the old St David's Presbyterian Church.

I didn't need to make a bloody playlist. I just needed to stitch all the samples together into one big mp3 using Audacity, insert a couple of seconds' silence between tracks, mix it down, load it into Audacious in one shot, and Robert would be my father's brother.

When I got to the bar, I told my friend Casey what I'd just done, then told her about my amazing conceptual breakthrough and Gibbs-slapped my own head for being so bloody dim. Still, I guess that's what happens in the early stages of sleep deprivation. There was a young chap at the bar, so the three of us started chatting. He told me that after Day 3 of enforced insomnia, people start to hallucinate. On that basis, this week could start to get really interesting by about Wednesday …

This Sporting Life

In which The Author is on the run

Quite by accident, I seem to have invented a new sport. Unlike William Webb Ellis's famous departure from the rulebook at Rugby School, though, I can't see this one catching on any time soon.

I call it DODGEBORE.

I've actually been playing the game at strictly amateur level for about thirty years, but I started taking it seriously back in 2009. I reported on some of the matches during my university days in my other blog, starting with 'Freaks, Geeks and Space Invaders'. Over the past eighteen months or so, however, I've thrown myself into it with a passion and a devotion which I've found quite astonishing.

It's surprisingly easy to play, requiring absolutely no specialist equipment or regular training. All you need to do is identify people who are likely to bend your ear for hours about devolution/rugby/immigration/'the council'/trips down Memory Lane/the NHS/reality TV/public transport/Euro 2016/stamp collecting/the European Union/the Second World War/whatever, and then make up a perfectly believable excuse for running very quickly in the opposite direction. The winner is the person who manages to make it through a whole week without being captured by one (or more) ill-informed fuckwits.

For a comparatively small town, Aberdare has several first-rate Dodgebore pitches, including the Prince of Wales, Thereisnospoon, the Lighthouse, the Market Tavern … In fact, every pub offers the novice player ample opportunity to hone his/her skills against a huge number of vastly experienced, full-time, professional Bores.

For those of you who don't fancy a pint, fear not. The library has a large crowd of regular Bores (every morning between 10.30 and midday) who will give you plenty of scope to develop your Dodgebore abilities.

When the weather is fine, outdoor Dodgebore is a great way to spend half an hour. Simply park your arse on one of the benches in town and Bores will gather as if by magic. After a few moments a Dodgebore match will kick off around you, leaving you to work out an exit strategy without appearing rude or resorting to foul language.

Experienced players of the game have a number of 'gambits' (short strategic sequences) which can be employed whenever a Bore hoves into view. My personal favourites include 'I can't stop – I've got to catch a train' and 'I can't stop – I've got a doctor's/dentist's/hospital appointment.'

A word of caution: being busy with work doesn't deter the professional Bore. The prevailing belief in the Valleys holds that you aren't actually working unless you're down a coal mine, serving in the armed forces, standing on the production line in a factory, sitting in an office, or punching the till in a shop – and even that last option isn't a safeguard against being invited to play the game. Working on a manuscript in public is as good an invitation to play Dodgebore as anything else I've encountered so far in my sporting career.

Furthermore, Bores can find you anywhere, at any time of the day or night. Just this morning I had to play the 'train' gambit against a notorious Bore before I'd even arrived in Aberdare. There were gasps from the crowd as my quick thinking and nifty footwork enabled me to give her the slip with remarkable ease. (Admittedly, it completely fucked any chance of my going for breakfast in Thereisnospoon – but there's no such thing as a perfect strategy.)

In fact, I'm becoming so good at the game that I'm seriously thinking about turning professional. There won't be any money in it, of course, but I might be able to secure some corporate sponsorship to tide me over. When I become too old to play for real, maybe I can coach youngsters in the subtle art of telling certain people to go fuck themselves without actually using those very words. It's more of an art than a science, after all.