I am an astronomer. Astronomers need to use telescopes. Telescope application deadlines come twice a year, every year, at the same time of year, without fail. Somehow I have never quite got to grips with this system, and this year I decided to go on holiday to far-flung parts of Eastern Europe just before the October deadlines. Thanks to this poor timing and resultant two weeks of working late, I haven’t been quizzing for a month. So tonight, I’m raring to go.

Our team title, let me specify clearly, is suggested by Oli this week. Unfortunately whatever comic impact we might have hoped for is lost when the quizmaster reads it out as ‘general election’ after the first round and then calls us ‘Gordon Brown etcetera’ for the rest of the night. As happens quite often, we’re in the lead after the first round, helped on the way by my recollection of the first syllable of ‘I’s name from Withnail and I. It takes me the whole round to get anywhere near it – I ignore all the other questions and simply make sounds beginning with M as I struggle to remember it. I get as far as ‘Mar’ before we have to hand it it, so we put Marwick. The answer is Marwood but the quiz master is generous enough to give us a point for it.

But from the lead there’s only one way to go, and week after week we find ourselves hurtling down the order as the rounds progress. It happens so often that it’s probably purely psychological now, and even if round two started by asking for the capital of France we’d probably get it wrong these days. By the end of the night we’re in a disappointing fifth, eleven points off the lead.

There is still the snowball. The pot is now so huge that the top prize is limited to £1000. Across the way from us, a team of despicable poolers have bought twenty tickets between them and seem to be thinking about getting the smuggest member of their team to have a crack at the question if any are drawn. Luckily their numbers don’t come up for the first question, which asks who is the third longest-serving manager in the Premiership, after Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger. The person on the stand doesn’t get it but one of the despicable poolers knew it. The second question names two albums and asks which band released them. Again, the person on the stand doesn’t know, and this time the entire team of despicable poolers shouts out “Whitesnake”. It seems they have very dodgy music tastes as well as a highly unethical approach to pub quizzing. The third question asks for the country whose name means hippo and whose capital’s name means crocodile. I’d have guessed Mali, which turns out to be the right answer. But the whole pot rolls over to next week, and even if someone wins £1000, there will still be several hundred pounds left.