A question of time

At last. After years of close encounters with glory, choking at the vital moment and the occasional inconsequential win, my quizzing friend Olav has finally secured himself a major title, that of European Quiz Champion 2010. No doubt the day jobs - compiling the quiz for the Times and writing questions for an assortment of TV programmes and pub quiz machines - came in handy. Hearty congratulations to the man James Richardson once called "the Wayne Rooney of the quiz world" for his hard-fought success. (I should add that the Rooney reference was back in 2003, when it was synonymous with "prodigiously talented" rather than "frequenter of ladies of ill repute".)

I think his Wikipedia page now needs updating - not least because I don't think the following is quite true, much as we'd want it to be: "He regularly appears in amateur productions in his home town Littlehampton, recently appearing as Omar Little in a re-enactment of thirteen of the best scenes from The Wire"...