Day 46 - Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

‘Come back safely, Neville.’
‘Don’t worry Marjory, I’ll be back before you know it. One day this war will be over and we can be together.’
‘Damn this war…’
‘Yes, damn this war. Damn it all to Hell.’
‘War is Hell’

The secret that Pete, Nick and I have been carrying for the last few days is that today, Thursday 17th November 2005 would be the last day of T-Shirt Wars. We knew that the whole Quality Competition rested on today’s result. I was one point ahead of Nick. Neither of us had any Hexes or Jokers left. We had all worked out the permutations:

Case #1: Brian comes first today, scoring 3 points, giving him a 4 point lead that Nick cannot match, so Brian wins.
Case #2: Nick comes first, scoring 1.5 points; Brian scores nothing for coming behind Nick, so Nick wins with a 0.5 point lead.
Case #3: If Pete comes first, Brian second and Nick third, Brian gets no points but Nick only gets 0.5 points, not enough to catch up Brian.
Case #4: Pete first, Nick second, Brian third - Nick gets one point and Brian gets none, so Nick and Brian tie for first place, but Nick wins on black marks (Brian has one, Nick has none).

So with everything to play for, we all came out in strong threads this morning, me in my black Steve Vai tour T-shirt with a cool side-print, Nick in the ever-popular sky blue cityscape and Pete in his orange Eruption number. Lab 405 was judging and gave nothing away as they scrutinised our best efforts. They retired to deliberate – we had surreptitiously handed them ‘Hex’ style envelopes the day before containing the message ‘This is the last day of T-Shirt Wars’ – and reappeared with a result…

1st place – Brian
2nd place – Nick
3rd place – Pete

So I am victorious and have won the Double of Longevity and Quality! And that’s T-Shirt Wars over!

A big thank you to all the Judges and onlookers who have supported us in our ventures and of course, thank you to my fellow contestants for a thrilling contest. Fear not, it is not completely over – expect a week or so of ‘post-match’ analysis before we wrap things up completely. Bye bye!