My mother did Wednesdays until she died in 2021. After that it was a woman called Ivy two doors down, who took two eleven-year-olds in after school for four years and would not take a penny for three of them.
I am putting that in because the medals are the part everybody wants, and the medals were not built in that auditorium.
They were built by a woman two doors down, and a grandmother on Wednesdays, and about eleven hundred evenings at a kitchen table where somebody checked the homework.
What I did not know.
Here is the part that turned that weekend into something entirely different from the story people tell about it.
At about half six, in the car park, Rafe Farrow came over to my sons.
Thirteen years old, blazer, extremely nervous, and he said — and Cai has repeated this to me three times because I kept asking — “Are you allowed to talk to me?”
And Idris said: “Yeah. Obviously.”
They had known about each other for two weeks.
Not because of me. Not because of him.
Because all three of them are on the Northern Quiz League, which is an online thing that runs from September to May, where you are assigned to a squad by ranking and everybody uses a handle.
