Pa and the visitor

Pa was sitting on the beach, enjoying the fruits of a coconut he had cracked open, when he saw the boat. He immediately shot to his feet. Visitors were rare to his island. It was well off the trade wind routes and well away from the path that anyone would take to get from one place to another.

There had been the occasional visitor in the past but they usually came armed with spears, ready to pillage whatever they could, including the island’s females.

He thought about going for help, but the only village on the island was on the other coast where the reef offered bountiful fish and shelter from the prevailing wind.

As the boat got closer, Pa noticed that there was only one occupant and he felt brave enough to greet him. He waved and when he saw that the sailor was unarmed, he helped him ashore.

They stared at each other for a few minutes until the visitor spoke. Pa didn’t understand all of it but picked up enough to know that coconuts were the target of his trip. His home island had suffered an ecological disaster which had wiped out their crop and he had been sent out across the waves to seek help.

Pa’s island had more coconuts than they could use and every year they would gather up all the rotting remains of unused husks and use them as fertilizer for the vegetables they grew.

Pa offered the visitor as many coconuts as he could fit into his boat, but the sailor shook his head and explained with a mixture of hand movements and broken vernacular that he was interested in a long-term relationship.

He reached into his pocket and took out a small bag filled with roughly crafted coins. Pa stared at them in wonder and asked what use they would be to him.

The sailor walked back to his boat and retrieved a box filled with chocolate and fizzy drinks. He explained to Pa that he would pay for the coconuts with coins and then Pa could use the coins to buy as much chocolate and fizzy drinks as he wanted.

Pa sampled some of the products and his taste buds exploded. He’d spent his like living on a diet of fish, vegetables and coconuts. Refined sugar was as alien to him as space travel.

The visitor sat on the beach and with the help of a stick drew out his plan. He would lend some coins to Pa who would then lend them to his island friends. They could then use the coins to buy the chocolate and fizzy drinks from Pa. To repay the coins they had borrowed and to earn more to satisfy their new found processed food addiction, they would work for Pa during the week to collect as many coconuts as possible. The visitor would return each week with new supplies of chocolate and return with a boat of freshly picked coconuts.

Pa sat down and stroked his chin. His island had never needed money. They had more than enough food to feed themselves, fresh water and if you needed a new house, the village would gather round to build it. They also had the advantage of not knowing what was going on in the rest of the world and therefore had no idea what they were missing.

He looked at the box filled with chocolate and fizzy drinks and realised that this was a window into the wider world that could change everything. He shook hands with the visitor and with the box under his arm, returned to the village, rehearsing the speech he would make as he went.

Six months later, most of the islanders were working for Pa and living on a diet of chocolate and fizzy drinks. They were having to go higher into the mountains to source coconuts and several of them had already been killed trying to desperately fill the weekly quota.

Pa quickly built up a large bounty of coins. It didn’t take him long to realise that he could pay the workers much less than he was receiving from the visitor and sell them the chocolate and fizzy drinks for more than he had paid for them. But he struggled to find anything to spend them on. He quickly lost interest in the chocolate after it rotted his teeth. And the islanders started to resent his wealth with meant he was excluded from most of their social events.

Then the visitor arrived for his weekly visit. As he unloaded that week’s cargo and refilled his boat with fresh coconuts, he explained to Pa that this would be his last trip. He had found another island that could supply coconuts at half the price that he was paying currently.

Pa was speechless. His fellow islanders mistrusted him already. How was he going to explain this? In the end, he took the coward’s option. One thing he had managed to do with his money was to convince the best carpenter on the island to build him a boat. He had planned to use it to travel but never built up the enthusiasm. It had sat on the beach outside his house for months, used only by a family of crabs that nestled in it’s hull.

He waited for darkness and then slipped back to his house. He gathered his belongings and collection of coins and loaded them into his boat. As he was pushing it towards the water he heard a noise behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw the islanders marching towards him carrying torches that lit up their angry faces. They shouted at him to come back. To explain why he had ruined everybody’s life.

But Pa ignored their call and pushed his boat into the waves. He climbed in and started rowing as fast as he could. The islanders tore down his house and cast the nameplate with “Capitalism” written on it into the sea.

My quizzical life

Mary is an expert on soap operas and the lives of the Kardashians. Graham has an encyclopaedic knowledge of every sports result for the past forty years. John doesn’t know what day of the week it is but somehow knows every useless fact in creation. That covers most of the bases, but Margaret is included in the team because she watches about fifty hours of TV quiz shows a week.

Together they are known as “I thought this was speed dating” and they win my local pub quiz every week. They are so good, it makes it boring for the rest of us. It’s like being a decent tennis player in the era of Roger Federer.

But in fairness, we don’t go to win, the chance to catch up with a few mates once a week is a bigger driving force. That and the beer of course. We are all at an age that would also count as a decent score by a mid order cricketer. So, we tend to do well at history questions and mainstream sport. By mainstream, I mean team sports that are popular enough to have their results read out at the end of news.

It’s clear when you look at the successful teams that a mix of genders and ages is the key. I like to think I have good general knowledge, but each week I’m caught out by the fact that I’ve only watched one James Bond movie, never watched any of the Star War franchise, Star Trek or any movie based on a comic book. A question will come up each week on these subjects. I’m also unfamiliar with any popular music recorded after 1989.

The first quiz I took part in was when I was 16. I was in a youth club and through the benefit of two walkovers and a close match against a team that were so dumb they they couldn’t spell their own names properly, we were somehow crowned North East Ireland youth club quiz champions. This qualified us for the national finals, which were held in Leisureland in Galway.

We lived on the other side of the country and boarded a bus in the early hours of the morning for the trip across the island. There were no motorways in Ireland in those days and we had to pick up all the other qualifiers from our region on route. We got to Galway at 10am and were immediately ushered into a stuffy room and seated beside a team of intense looking teenagers in tweed jackets and horn rimmed glasses.

By 10.15am that morning we had lost by what I believe was a record score and were out of the competition. Luckily the organisers had planned for this and brought all the first round losers together for a repechage competition that was great fun.

That weekend is also notable for marking my first ever stay in a hotel. Having a TV in the same room that you slept in blew my mind back then, as was having a bathroom that wasn’t constantly occupied by my three sisters.

I don’t remember any quizzes after that until I got to Luxembourg at the age of 27. The Irish community there is employed either in helping Europeans avoid taxes by investing in offshore investment funds, or helping to set those tax rates by working for one of the administrative branches of the European Union. I was on the tax avoiding side but spent most of my socialising with Irish people working on the other side.

A group of them invited me to a table quiz in the great hall of the European Commission. It was teams of ten and we came up with ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’ as our name, mainly to mess with the head of the quiz master who was an ex British Army officer who became an EU functionary in those days when the Brits still took it seriously.

We somehow ended up as joint winners and our smartest member (not me, I hasten to add) was invited up to the stage to take on a member from the other team in a tie break question. It’s worth pointing out for the benefit of the story that the other team was called “Court of Justice Jewish Lawyers Association”.

The quiz master smiled when he saw the question. After a night of mangling our team name, he could see that revenge was on the horizon.

“Ok, here goes. Name the twelve sons of Jacob”.

Our team member didn’t even bother writing anything down. He just muttered “I’ll get me coat” and walked off the stage.

When I moved back to Dublin, pub quizzes became a regular thing. I even organised a few myself at work.. These were in the pre smart phone days when the accuracy of answers couldn’t really be challenged on the spot. But I did experience a bit of abuse in the office the next day, when people had time to check and would send me screen prints high lighting that County Louth didn’t actually win the first All Ireland.

Here in New Zealand, most pubs run a quiz on a Tuesday night. It’s not as though the pubs are packed every other night, but on Tuesdays, they are particularly quiet. So, the quiz is a bonus to the publican as it pulls in a lot of punters.  A company in Christchurch saw an opening and they set an online quiz every Tuesday that each pub can run on it’s own.

So, if you are in Invercargill or my local in Auckland, you will face the same question and no doubt end up writing the answer down that one of your teammates was absolutely convinced of, despite the other three all agreeing on a different answer. And the three of you were correct. Maybe that’s actually the secret of a good team. Democracy rather than bullying is best, as it is in almost every other facet of life.