Background

When you do a lot of quizzes, you're always hearing questions that you've heard before. If you're lucky the answer has stuck, but a lot of the time (last time you heard it) you moved on to the next question before you'd really taken it in. There is nothing more frustrating than vainly searching the back of your mind for an answer, knowing that it was there once upon a time!

I thought that if I started writing down the questions, and the answers of course, it would help me to remember them. So every time I heard a question that I thought might come up again, I wrote it down.

If I'd known what I was getting into, I'd probably never have started. But my list, which I'd originally thought might eventually amount to (say) three or four thousand questions, just grew and grew. At the latest count I had well over twenty thousand.

This collection of quiz questions is my Guide to the Lakeland Fells; my Key to All Mythologies. Like the former, it's a labour of love; and like the latter, it'll never be finished. It'll never be finished because new things happen every day, and become new quiz questions; and in any case, I'll never even get to include all the quiz questions that already exist.

When I started compiling my list, I don't think I'd even heard of the Internet; I'd certainly never used it. And so the list took the form of a whole load of Word documents, organised into tables. I harboured a vague ambition to publish them as a book some time.

But now, like everyone else, I take the Internet for granted and it seems a perfect place to keep all this stuff. For this purpose, the Internet has three big advantages over a book:

Once a book is published it's published, and you can only issue a new edition, which people have to pay for all over again; but you can go on updating a website as often as you like, for as long as you like.

On the Internet you can hide the answers, but provide the means to reveal them when the reader wants to. In a book your only option is to reveal the answers on a different page – and this wouldn't really work on a "database" of the sort you're looking at now.

And people can just surf on in, from wherever in the world they are; you don't have to rely on it being in stock at their local bookstore, and they don't have to rely on the reviews on Amazon to decide whether they might like it or not.

So here it is. I hope you find it useful!

© Haydn Thompson 2017