I’m early this week – the first round is not even over when I leap off the bus and into the pub at 9.20pm. I’m just in time to tell the team which Ealing comedy which took its name from a Tennyson poem. And I also tell them the answer to a question asking which capital city has tourist sights to the north east of it known as the Golden Ring. I tell them with absolute certainty that it’s Reykjavík. I’ve been there after all. But to my horror it’s actually Moscow. I’ve been there as well, and now I realise that the sights to the north east of Reykjavík are called the Golden Circle, not the Golden Ring. Well anyway, I’m a traveller, not a tourist. Bloody day trippers.

The beer round answers are all connected, but what the connection is is not apparent. One of the answers is Cherie, though, from which we guess that the answers are all prime ministerial spouses. We get them all right, and so it’s down to the tie breaker. How many escalators are there in New York? Or did they say elevators? Maybe because of this uncertainty, my guess is way too high, and we lose out. But we go on to finish the quiz in second place, the first time we’ve been in the money for about six months.

Our numbers don’t come up in the snowball, and I’m a bit upset when the winner’s question starts “Which two countries…”, because despite occasional evidence to the contrary I think I know the answer to any question that might start with those three words. On this occasion, though, the following thirteen words are “…are members of the International Paralympic Committee, but not the International Olympic Committee?” No-one expected that, and it’s quite honestly one of the most ridiculously hard snowball questions that has ever been asked. Even the greatest Paralympians from the Faroe Islands and Macao wouldn’t have known that their two countries have this distinction. So there will be more than a thousand pounds up for grabs next week, and I might even have to get to the pub before 9pm if I don’t want to stand all night.