This competition has now closed.

Please see below for the answers. The winner will be announced shortly.

The annual Penny Post Christmas and New Year Quiz, as ever, confers a wonderful prize on the lucky winner. Entry deadline is 10pm Sunday 23 January 2022.

The prize

Huge thanks to Nathan and Gavin from The Ibex Inn in Chaddleworth for this generous prize:

A meal for two, a bottle of house wine, a double room for the night and breakfast the following day at The Ibex Inn.

The quiz

You’ll find below 19 questions. These are about 2021, the local area or The Ibex Inn (you may want to visit the pub’s website to answer these).

When you’ve answered the questions, take the first letter of each answer and re-arrange these to form a phrase which is relevant to the prize. To give you a bit of help, the questions are ordered alphabetically by their answers: so, if the answer to one of them is “zyzzyva’”(which it isn’t), that question would be at the bottom. Five of these initial letters, by the way, appear twice.

The answers are below (apologies for my getting the last question wrong. I assure you that I can count and also know the order of the letters in the alphabet: it seems, however, that I can’t do both at the same time.) However, a good number of you inferred the correct answer notwithstanding.

In order to encourage me to check these more carefully, we shall give a £10 voucher for the Ibex at Chaddleworth to what in our opinion is the most entertaining reason as to why you would have won they competition if question 26 had been framed as it is now. Please email [email protected] by midnight on Sunday 13 February 2022 and we’ll be in touch shortly thereafter. We had a meal there last Friday and I can assure you that the food and the beer are excellent.

The questions

On your marks; get set; and off you go…

1  Which group released its first album of new material for 40 years in 2021? ABBA did – Voyage.

2  If you go north on the A338 and right into Buckham Hill, the first left to Chaddleworth is called what? Botmoor Way is the road you’ll be on.

3  Which Watts has crashed his last cymbal? Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, one of the truly great drummers (and certainly the best-dressed one).

4  2021’s tale of worms, spice and folding space. Dune.

5  Who or what was cloned 25 years ago in 1996? Dolly the Sheep (yes another in a very long list of Scottish inventions).

6  Which company makes the hybrid mattresses found in the bedrooms at the Ibex? Emma.

7  The baroness who bosses the lords. Evans (or Baroness Evans of Bowes Park to you and me) is the Leader of the House of Lords.

8  Which Clive is the West Berkshire Councillor for the Downlands ward, in which Chaddleworth is located? Hooker, Clive, is the ward member.

9  Whose Stone Lane runs to the south of Chaddleworth? Hangman’s Stone Lane. Sure there’s a story behind this name but I don’t know what it is.

10 Which testing lab made an estimated 43,000 mistakes in 2021? Immensa in Wolverhampton which wrongly reported the results of Covid tests from many areas, including those taken at Newbury Racecourse.

11 Which country pledged at COP26 that it would be carbon-neutral by 2070? India.

12 Who won the 140th final in May 2021 at the fifth attempt? Leicester City finally won the FA Cup, beating Chelsea 1-0.

13 Gavin’s co-owner of the Ibex. Nathan de Souza.

14 And the award for best picture goes to… Nomadland, winner at the 2021 Oscars.

15 Which Paterson’s case caused conflation in the house? Owen Paterson’s attempt to have the decision by the Common’s Standards Committee overturned got all mixed up with the government’s attempts to reform the system, with the disastrous results which we all saw. 

16 Which ex-servicemen and women’s association celebrated its centenary in 2021? Royal British Legion.

17 William Boyd’s latest threesome, first published in paperback in 2021  Trio.

18 Which Kane top-scored in the final but ended up on the losing side? I know that some of you thought I was talking about Harry I wasn’t. He’s played in three finals and has yet to score in (or win) any of them. The person I was looking for was New Zealand skipper Kane Williamson who top-scored with 85 in the Cricket World Cup final against Australia but still ended up with just a silver medal.

19 The 24th of 26 in English and the 23rd of 25 in French. X (Sorry, I made a mistake in the question and got my numbers one out). English has 26 letters and French 25 (no W, at least not for native words).

Put all these letters together and you get A B C D D E E H H I I L N N O R T W X which means, on the face of it, nothing. If, however, you wave a magic wand over these to re-arrange them ,then you will end up with Ibex Inn Chaddleworth, which is the answer we were looking for. 

How to enter

Please email the phrase (not the 19 individual answers) to [email protected] with the subject ‘PP 2021 Xmas quiz‘ by 10pm on Sunday 23 January 2022.

Please be sure to add your name, where you live (the town or village name is fine) and your phone number (which we’ll only use if we need to contact you about this competition). Please also see the terms and conditions below.

Many thanks again to Nathan and Gavin, owners of The Ibex Inn, for donating this wonderful prize.

Congratulations to Christine Evans from Bradfield Southend who was the first name out of the hat. Well done to all the rest of you who came up with the correct answer.

Terms & conditions

• The winner will be selected at random from the correct or most correct entries received and notified by email within 48 hours of the closing date (see above). Acceptance must be confirmed by email within 48 hours of the notification or we will select another winner to whom this condition will also apply. The judge’s decision in all matters will be final.

• If you’re not already a subscriber to Penny Post, by entering this competition you’re agreeing to have your email address added to our circulation list. We do not pass on information to third parties and you can opt out at any time.

• Only one entry can be accepted from any one email address.

• The winner will be put in touch with The Ibex Inn directly to make the arrangements for redeeming the prize.