Our team name tonight is Stu’s idea. We like it a lot but feel that Stu should have the honour of writing it out on our team sheet. By the end of the night he’s just writing “Greetings!” and the quiz setters have long since stopped reading it all out anyway.

We are six this evening. Besides me and Stu, Ivan is back in town after sojourns in Coventry and Rome, and Oli, his girlfriend Sarah and her sister Alice are here as well. Alice is a physicist, so if there’s a science round we’ll be sorted. I arrive late as always, but just in time to answer a question asking which 1970s film prominently featured Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. It’s Close encounters of the third kind and we are in third place.

There are a lot of questions about the Olympics this week. I used to live next door to Britain’s Greatest Olympian Steve Redgrave, years ago, but there aren’t any questions about him unfortunately. We think for a long while about which two British medallists this year have almost the same surname, and we’re about to put Thomson and Thompson for a Tintin-inspired guess, but then Alice says she reckons it might be one of the cyclists. I remember that Nicole Cooke was Britain’s first medallist of the games, so we guess there must also have been a Cook who won a medal, and we’re right.

The beer round is fairly easy this week, the answers being ten people who appeared on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hears Club Band, and we and five other teams get them all right. It’s down to the tiebreak, and so we apply the usual average theory to guess how many competitors there are at the olympics this year. It’s mostly my fault that we don’t win – my low guess of 4,500 puts our average too far from the actual total of 10,500.

In round four we’re given a list of words including warmth, spoilt, bulb, and cusp, and asked what connects them. For a while we think we’re onto something with the idea that they are the only words that end with the three letters that they each end with, but then Stu says ‘built’ and Oli says ‘spilt’ and we go back to the drawing board. We end up putting that they are the only words which contain the letters they contain, in the order that they contain them, which can’t really be faulted but isn’t the right answer. We were painfully close with our first idea – they are words without rhymes. We finish the evening just outside the money. Normally this is quite disappointing but after last week and the week before we’ll take fourth and be happy with it.

So it’s snowball time again, and there are hundreds of pounds to be won. I am always amazed when I read about lottery winners who say they will carry on going to work as normal despite their newfound wealth. I bloody wouldn’t. I’d probably think about quitting if I won the snowball. Sadly I will have to go to work for at least one more week because my number is not drawn. The question is something ridiculously obscure about a cricket match in 1981 – the kind of question that makes me recoil in horror. Ivan loves this kind of question, and he knows the answer. He’s smug but not nearly as smug as he would have been if his ticket had actually been drawn.