I am in a blissed-out jetlagged haze this week, having just got back from China, and presumably because I’m still thinking in a time zone seven hours ahead of here, I make a startling break with precedent and arrive before everyone else. The quiz is being set by a first-timer tonight, and it’s certainly challenging. But some are finding it more challenging than others, and at the end of the first round we have 16 points, another team has got 15, and everyone else is in single figures. A couple of teams have scored nothing at all – we almost got lynched once when something similar happened in one of our quizzes, but everyone obviously feels that these questions were hard but not unfair and the quizmaster survives to read another round.

Following our habit that now seems unshakeable, our form is hit in round two by the Slump. We are not obsessed enough with football to know that West Ham were the last non-top division team to win the FA Cup, and even though we know that Man U v. Newcastle in 1999 was the last FA cup final between two non-London clubs, we still drop into second. Our cause is bolstered when Pete’s dad arrives just before the beer round, though. It’s been a while since he was last here and he’s keen to remind us of his tremendous command of pub quiz trivia. The answers to the beer round all turn out to be related to Shakespeare plays, and it’s Pete’s dad who gets the tricky final answer, about two DC Comics heroes and an album released by the Insane Clown Posse. They’re all called Tempest.

But dissent breaks out over the tie-break, in which we have to guess the number of different airline sick bags in the world’s largest collection of them. Oli says 17,000; Stu and I think he’s insane. Pete and his dad are unsure but becoming infected by Oli’s madness. We follow the average theory, and I’m tempted to put in a negative guess; we discuss this briefly and decide that guesses have to be physically possible. We end up with 10,240, which Pete’s dad is now convinced is far too low. “We got all five questions, and now we’re throwing it away on the tie- breaker”, he says, “so I’ll be buying the next round I suppose”. The answers are read out. The tie is between us and one other team. They put 23,000. “Given it away”, says Pete’s dad, morosely. But the world’s largest sick bag collection numbers a mere 5,034 items, and we’ve taken the round.

Back to trying to win the quiz. We have an entertaining discussion in round four about where Madame Butterfly was set, in which almost every city in Japan is mentioned at least once. Pete’s dad says Nagasaki and he seems very sure of that, but for some reason he is over-ruled and we put Yokohama. The answer is Nagasaki. We end the quiz miles off first place but miles ahead of third, and three pounds for each of us is the prize for our endeavours.