The lost art of being loudly wrong

Elsewhere in today's paper we report how the creators of Trivial Pursuit spent a quiet winter in Nerja dreaming up 6,000 trivia questions for their soon to be blockbuster game.

This took me straight back to the early nineties, when I arrived a bit further along the coast. Back then, before the Costa del Sol had high-speed fibre optic cables or mobile phones that could fit inside a trouser pocket (to be fair, nowhere had high speed fibre optic and mobiles were only just entering the mainstream), boredom was an art form and trivia was a contact sport.

In the mid-90s, a slow Saturday afternoon in a coastal bar meant dragging out a battered, slightly beer-stained box of Trivial Pursuit. Those little plastic pies were serious business. Without a search engine to rescue us, an argument over who won the 1966 World Cup (well, of course I knew that one!) or the capital of Burkina Faso could rage across three rounds of cañas and a plate of boquerones.

If the card's answer seemed dubious, you had two choices: accept the cardboard oracle's verdict or find the local 'know it all' to settle the question with all the solemnity of King Solomon. Never mind that his answers were even more dubious - his word was law and no one could think of a better solution than a neutral arbiter. As long as he was confident enough, he could assert Brazil won the 1966 World Cup and we would have run with it.

Walk past a café near the Balcón de Europa today and the contrast is comical. The tables are still full of visitors enjoying the winter sunshine, yet nobody ever wonders anything for more than four seconds. Mention an obscure 80s pop singer or the exact height of the Sierra Nevada and three thumbs immediately twitch beneath the table. Before the waiter has even set down the olives, someone has consulted the oracle in their pocket and killed the conversation dead with cold, hard facts.

Of course, having the sum of human knowledge on tap has its perks - especially when trying to translate a baffling Spanish parking sign or remember where you left the car. Yet I miss the uncertainty of those early years on the coast.

Chris Haney and his friends came to Nerja to escape the Canadian winter and invent a game built entirely on what people could pull from their own heads. Forty-six years on, we have traded our little plastic wedges for glowing glass screens. It is undeniably clever, though I maintain that knowing the right answer immediately is only half as much fun as being loudly, passionately wrong over a cold beer.