I had a great idea
*”I’ve got an idea,”* said Nick. My idea would have to wait.
We were showing an awful performance in the pub quiz. Any chance of victory was long since gone, and we were now fighting to avoid last place. The number of questions to which we had absolutely no idea was too high for comfort, and we were doing our best to fill in these blanks with witty responses, hoping for a sympathy point or two from the quizmaster.
*”What’s a suitable name for a lion?”* said Nick.
This particular round was entitled *Mythical Beasts*, and we were struggling to remember the name of the beast with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the arse-end of a dragon
*”Leo,”* somebody offered. Nick wrote this down on the answer sheet.
*”What’s a suitable name for a goat?”* he then asked. It was, by now, obvious where this was going to end up.
Billy and Nanny were both suggested. Nick appended the word *billy* to the answer.
*”What’s a…”*
*”PUFF!”* I interrupted, to make sure that nobody could cut me off with an inferior answer.
*Leobillypuff* soon stared back up at us from the page. I think that it was at this point that Karen began to collapse in uncontrollable laughter. Due to her special pregnant-woman emotional powers, this manifested itself not as tears of joy, but as tears of abject misery.
Murmurs crashed with hearty chortles and swung round the table – *”Not Nordic enough. Not mythical enough”*. A couple of deft strokes of the pen and the name became Leøbillypufför. Perfect. We all laughed so hard that we didn’t care about our appearance anymore, our faces screwed up into forms that would be ugly, were it not for the fact that genuinely happy people are unquestionably beautiful.
You’re probably wondering what happened to that great idea that I had before this whole debacle began. As it happened, it really was a truly great idea. I don’t know much about mythical beasts, but one thing that I do know for certain is that more than one [TVR][] model has been named after a mythical beast. Had I pursued this line of thought, it would only have been a matter of time until I’d been led to [the correct answer][] via the TVR Chimaera.
Ah well. So it goes.
[tvr]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TVR
[the correct answer]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_%28mythology%29
