Family Fortunes: My father’s love of general knowledge led us to believe we were geniuses

My father loved general knowledge. He loved quizzes and board games and took any opportunity to spring a question on you. What is the highest break you can get in snooker? What is the capital of Brazil? In what studio were the Bond movies filmed? And so on and so forth as we traversed our family life peppered with nuggets of knowledge.

One Christmas many years ago he decided to treat us. We were all very excited about this present, but that only lasted until the wrapping came off to reveal Trivial Pursuit. Hadn’t he gone and picked the Genius Edition. For many years we bemoaned the difficulty of the questions and the length of time it would take us to finish a game.

It was banished to the back of the wardrobe for many years, but it recently made a reappearance. We are older now; surely we are smarter? Turns out we aren’t. We hummed and hawed and laughed over the ridiculous questions.

“Why would March have eyes?”

“I said ‘ides’. Not eyes.”

Later that night my gaze fell on the box, and it finally occurred to me: “genius” has an i in it. Had they spelled it wrong? It was the Genus edition, not the Genius edition, as we had all thought. Genus translates as “category”. It turns out my father was dyslexic, and we were all a lot dimmer than we had thought. What we had thought was for geniuses was in fact for normal people, and our level of ability was questionable.

My father has since died, and the game now sits proudly on my diningroom table, waiting to be dusted off. My parents-in-law were over for dinner recently, and I joked that if we ran out of conversation there was always Trivial Pursuit. “No way,” was the reply, “that’s the Genius Edition.”

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