I asked a picture question which was:

Q. Which city do you have to visit to see guardsmen dressed like this?

Well these are the Swiss Guard and they look after the Pope and all his dodgy crew, so the answer is the Vatican.

Seeing as how the Vatican is entirely contained within the city of Rome, I also accepted “Rome” as a correct answer. After all, you have to visit Rome to get to the Vatican.

But one team were sore aggrieved. They had originally written “Vatican” on their answer sheet but then scored it out and put “Venice” instead.

The woman came up to complain.

Her line of reasoning was thus: “We originally thought Vatican – but you asked for a a city and the Vatican is a country“.

I explained that the Vatican, whilst being a country, is also a city, the clue being that it’s called “Vatican City State”.

She wasn’t having this and re-iterated her initial point: that I asked for a city and the Vatican is a country.

I tried to say, in different words, what I’d said before.

She put her point of view for a third time. We were getting nowhere. It was like having a Brexit meeting in the middle of Heathrow’s third runway.

So I asked her if she was asking me to give her the points for putting down the wrong answer?

She re-stated the fact that they’d written down the right answer before scoring it out.

I said I can’t really go giving people points for everything they score out.

And that was that. She went off back to her table, clearly pissed off.

Except that, by the end of the following round, the team had left the pub and I don’t know for sure, but I kind of suspect they took the hump at my strict stance of not awarding points for incorrect answers…

… which is rich, considering I gave them the points for “Olympic Rugby” when the answer should have been “Wheelchair Rugby” in another picture question.

Sake.

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