Events, dear boy

In 2025:

1. Name the singer of ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ whose concert in Perth, Australia, was cancelled because a fatberg had blocked a main sewer.

2. What hub of intelligence did Blaise Metreweli take over?

3. In which capital city did state media warn people weighing less than 8st to stay at home during a spell of windy weather?

4. A swarm of what shut down a nuclear power station at Gravelines in France?

5. At the end of a summit in Alaska, who said in English: ‘Next time in Moscow’?

6. Why did Aalborg Zoo in Denmark appeal for guinea pigs and horses?

7. In which country did the ruling regime ban chess?

8. In which lake did a man from Billericay catch a world-record 105lb carp?

9. The cost of a ‘mitigation structure’ on the HS2 railway line was estimated to have risen to £125 million in order to help which mammal?

10. Who said: ‘We risk becoming an island of strangers’?

Capital fun

1. What is the capital of Kansas state?

2. What is the seat of government of Narnia?

3. Albany is the capital of New York state, but of other cities, which is bigger: Albany, California, or Albany, Georgia?

4. What is the county town where Felpersham is the cathedral city?

5. Name one of the cities in Morocco bigger than its capital.

6. ‘The first request I made after I had obtained my liberty, was that I might have licence to see Mildendo, the metropolis,’ recounted which visitor to a fictional island?

7. What is the capital of the German Land of Schleswig-Holstein?

8. What is the capital of the Land of Oz?

9. What is the county town of Mayo?

10. Name the capital of Ruritania.

Royal flush

1. Having lost his titles, who gained a hyphen in November?

2. In October, at Neasden Temple, the King and Queen witnessed an abhishek, the pouring of water over the image of a god. What religion is practised at the temple?

3. Who announced ‘As Ever’ to be the new name for her lifestyle brand of jam and things?

4. When Athena Mapelli Mozzi was born on 22 January 2025, she became 11th in line to the throne. Who was her grandfather?

5. Who recorded a special podcast with Cate Blanchett and Elinor Breman to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens?

6. Which uncle and niece became patrons of Outward Bound?

7. Who witnessed a canine therapy session for veterans when she visited Ukraine at the end of September?

8. In October, at which cathedral did the King inspect the Table for the Nation, made from 5,000-year-old Fenland black oak?

9. Who told the actor Eugene Levy in a television documentary: ‘I think it’s safe to say that change is on my agenda. Change for good.’

10. Which sportsman was made Marquess of Llevant de Mallorca by the King of Spain?

Medium rare

1. Name a rare-earth element.

2. Released in Britain in 1978, ‘Komm, gib mir deine Hand’ and ‘Sie liebt dich’ were two tracks on Rarities, with performances by which group?

3. In which poem did Coleridge write: ‘It was a miracle of rare device,/ A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’

4. Who wrote:

Pretty! in Amber to observe the forms

Of hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms;

The things, we know, are neither richnor rare,

But wonder how the Devil they got there?

5. In which English epic do we find:

The fiend

Ore bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,

With head, hands, wings or feet pursues his way,

And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flyes.

6. Which Roman satirist wrote of Rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno (A rare bird on this earth, and very like a black swan).

7. Name the Irish author of ‘The Last Rose of Summer’who also wrote these lines, later set by Benjamin Britten: ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore,/ And a bright gold ring on her wand she bore.’

8. In the Dunciad, Pope wrote:

Know, Eusden thirsts no more for sack orpraise;

He sleeps among the dull of ancient days;

Safe, where no Critics damn, no duns molest,

Where wretched Wither, Ward and Gildon rest.

Which of the poets mentioned wrote the following lively lines?

I loved a lass, a fair one,

As fair as e’er was seen;

She was indeed a rare one,

Another Sheba Queen:

But, fool as then I was,

I thought she loved me too:

But now, alas! she’s left me,

Falero, lero, loo!

9. Name the author of ‘Lepanto’, who also wrote these lines:

And I dream of the days when work was scrappy,

And rare in our pockets the mark of the mint,

When we were angry and poor and happy,

And proud of seeing our names in print.

10. John Aubrey wrote of the grave of Ben Jonson ‘with this inscription only on him, in a pavement square, of blew marble, about 14 inches square,

O RARE BENN:

IONSON

which was donne at the chardge of Jack Young (afterwards knighted) who, walking there when the grave was covering, gave the fellow eighteen pence to cutt it’.

In which church is it?

Good obits

From 2025, name:

1. The author of The Day of the Jackal, who died aged 86.

2. The actress and widow of Laurence Olivier, who died aged 95.

3. The singer whose hits included ‘Lipstick On Your Collar’, who died aged 87.

4. The frontman of Black Sabbath, who died aged 76.

5. The singer of ‘As Tears Go By’ and one-time protégée of Mick Jagger, who died aged 78.

6. The ally of Margaret Thatcher of whom Michael Foot said ‘It is not necessary that every time he rises he should give his famous imitation of a semi-house-trained polecat’, who died aged 94.

7. The songwriter with the Beach Boys, who died aged 82.

8. The American satirical singer-songwriter of numbers such as ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’, who died aged 97.

9. The editor for 23 years of Blue Peter, who died aged 92.

10. The astronaut who guided the Apollo 13 moon mission safely back to Earth in 1970, after radioing ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem’, and died aged 97.

Book labels

Match the authors with the Christmas quotations from their books: P.G. Wodehouse, E. Nesbit, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Margery Williams, Coventry Patmore, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Anthony Trollope.

1. ‘Not far away from here lies a poor woman with a little newborn baby. Six children are huddled into one bed to keep from freezing, for they have no fire. There is nothing to eat over there, and the oldest boy came to tell me they were suffering hunger and cold. My girls, will you give them your breakfast as a Christmas present?’

2. ‘What an excellent device, the use of a sheepskin for carriages. How very comfortable they make it; – impossible to feel cold with such precautions. The contrivances of modern days indeed have rendered a gentleman’s carriage perfectly complete. One is so fenced and guarded from the weather, that not a breath of air can find its way unpermitted. Weather becomes absolutely of no consequence. It is a very cold afternoon – but in this carriage we know nothing of the matter. – Ha! snows a little I see.’

3. ‘The big turkey would be very good; – capital fun to see a turkey twice as big as it ought to be! But the big turkey, and the mountain of beef, and the pudding weighing a hundredweight, oppress one’s spirits by their combined gravity. And then they impart a memory of indigestion, a halo as it were of apoplexy, even to the church services.’

4. A Christmas Day or a Good Friday uncovers the ugliness of London. As you walk along the streets, having no fellow pedestrians to look at, you look up at the brown brick house-walls, corroded with soot and fog, pierced with their straight stiff window-slits, and finished, by way of a cornice, with a little black line resembling a slice of curb stone. There is not an accessory, not a touch of architectural fancy, not the narrowest concession to beauty.

5. It being Christmas Eve, there was, as I had foreseen, a good deal of revelry and whatnot. First, the village choir surged round and sang carols outside the front door, and then somebody suggested a dance, and after that we hung around chatting of this and that, so that it wasn’t till past one that I got to my room.

6. They bought her a pink silk handkerchief, a pair of blue and white vases, a bottle of scent, a packet of Christmas candles, and a cake of soap shaped and coloured like a tomato, and one that was so like an orange that almost anyone you had given it to would have tried to peel it – if they liked oranges, of course.

7. There are not, I say, many people who would care to sleep in a church. I don’t mean at sermon-time in warm weather (when the thing has actually been done, once or twice), but in the night, and alone. A great multitude of persons will be violently astonished, I know, by this position, in the broad bold Day. But it applies to Night.

8. He was fat and bunchy, as a rabbit should be; his coat was spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink sateen. On Christmas morning, when he sat wedged in the top of the Boy’s stocking, with a sprig of holly between his paws, the effect was charming.

9.

And there it was I last took leave:

’Twas Christmas: I remember’d now

The cruel girls, who feign’d to grieve,

Took down the evergreens; and how

The holly into blazes woke

The fire, lighting the large, low room,

A dim, rich lustre of old oak

And crimson velvet’s glowing gloom.

10. It was then the first week in December. I understood that I might reckon – at the utmost – on three weeks of life. What I felt, on arriving at this conclusion, I shall not say. It is the one secret I keep from the readers of these lines.

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