Some things have not got better

Last Sunday night was as usual pub quiz night at the Castle and Falcon. Our team has up to seven members depending on who turns up. We didn't win last week but came second. The usual post performance inquest took place with individuals claiming that they had known and stated the answers to questions we had got wrong but had been overruled or ignored.

One of our keener and more capable male team members, Pete, has an openly hostile attitude to the only woman in our group. Jill is a divorced 60 year old who lives alone and I would guess is very lonely. For example she seems to have very little contact with her daughter and grandchildren who live in Newark. On Christmas Day she was allowed to visit them in the morning but just before dinner was served her daughter instructed her husband "you take mum home while I strain the veg then we can start when you get back". Jill told me she spent the rest of the day on her own and was devastated by the rejection she felt she had received.

Pete explains his extreme antipathy towards this mild and harmless individual "I don't want to be with women in the pub, if I wanted a woman to talk to I'd go out with our lass". It's strange really, apart from being a selfconfessed hard core racist he can be a very decent bloke.

I used to believe that such attitudes would be bound to erode as attitudes became ever more liberal after the sixties. It is depressing.

Met with my old boss on Tuesday, the first time I have seen him since he retired two years ago. He has Parkinsons and this precipitated his leaving work early. We had a good gossip and he told me that he is now a volunteer with the Motor Neurone Disease Society supporting sufferers living with this distressing illness. Restoration of faith in humanity.

Not all bad. I forgot to mention that I won fifty quid on Quiz Night in the Open the Box competition.