It was a balmy Wednesday evening when nine JCI Barnsley representatives turned up in Leeds to take on the other chambers in the JCI Yorkshire Wharfdale quiz.

It was quite well attended with Leeds making up the remainder of the numbers. Our quiz master had brought his passport as he travelled across from Manchester and there was no small amount of rivalry as he told us he'd run the same quiz over in the red rose county two weeks earlier so we could directly compare scores in our very own war of the roses at the end. His Manchester origins perhaps explain the hat he chose to wear when doing the final round. (see pic)

The loosely Olympic-themed quiz ranged over a number of subjects with, for example, the aquatics round containing watery questions.

The two Barnsley teams were made up of me, Charlie, Gemma, Ben and Steve as the Big Hitters and Debbie, Ian, Ollie and Scott as Kermit's Tadpoles after Debbie requested a Muppets-themed team name. I'll leave you to guess who came up with that one.

In our team Gemma decided there probably wouldn't be a shoe round, so offered to be our scribe so she could feel she was contributing. I was similarly concerned that I wouldn't have much to offer, so took to writing down random bits of questions we needed to go back to. (I just needed to feel like I was helping, okay?)

As you might expect, Ben and Steve answered the vast majority of the questions, with notable input from Charlie on occasion. Steve's absolute triumph came when challenging what four crotchets make. We'd written quaver but a determined Steve was sure this wasn't correct. Much scribbling took place and a hushed discussion finally concluded that we'd put semibreve instead. We were the only ones to get that answer right.

And as it turned out I was able to grab us a point by knowing the name of David Cameron's eldest daughter who had been left in a pub on her own last month (it's Nancy, seeing as you're wondering) - only one other team got that one right. Gemma was also able to offer kite surfing as one of the new Olympic sports for 2016 along with naming an obscure Rhianna song for an extra point in the music round.

Despite a few chair-related near misses - and one actual incident - the Big Hitters eventually came second to a team of suits who nobody seemed to know. They were quite a way ahead at one point and we came back from fourth at the halfway point to take the silver medal. But after the presentation of their winner's wine, controversy struck as Leeds President Heather announced that, because they didn't have an active JCI member in the team, they couldn't technically be declared winners and therefore the trophy was ours!

When I say trophy, it's a couple of bits of plastic, badly stuck together with Blu Tack on a couple of bits of imitation marble, so it's not the best prize in the world, but to us, it was like getting a gold medal.

So Barnsley will host the quiz next year and the hunt is on for a quiz-master to de-throne Ollie, otherwise no one will get any points. Any volunteers?

By Louise Turner