I used to arrive at the Prince of Wales half way through the first round, but these days I’m getting less punctual and I usually arrive just after it’s finished. This week I miss a question asking for the second to sixth largest countries in the world, which is a shame, because I know Brazil is one of them and my team mates don’t.

Pete, Stu and Oli are here, and we have a random extra team member this week. A girl called Jude is with the others when I arrive, and I assume she’s friends with one of them. Turns out she just randomly decided to join the team. She contributes a pound to enter but, it has to be said, very few answers.

Patrick is setting the quiz tonight. Normally this means we’re in for an evening of poetry and classics, but tonight for some reason there are loads of astronomy questions. Astronauts come from the US, cosmonauts come from Russia, but who comes from China? I did once know the actual mandarin word for astronaut, but I’ve forgotten it, so I have to just write down taikonaut. Then we’re asked which is the only planet with a day longer than its year. It’s Venus, but Pete wants me to write down Uranus. About two years ago I told my team mates that Neptune was green when it’s actually blue, destroying forever their trust in my astronomy knowledge. This time I insist on Venus, and to my relief it’s right.

Round three includes a question about last year’s Booker Prize winner. If I ever knew the answer, I would have forgotten it slightly less than a year ago. Luckily, the winner was Irish, and Stu knows it was Anne Enright’s The Gathering. We also get a cricket question, so it’s a shame Ivan isn’t here. Luckily Pete knows it – I don’t even understand the answer once he’s told me. Something about Garry Sobers and the non-striking batsman.

We’ve been moving steadily up the order this evening – third after the first round, and second after the second. Now we’re in joint first. Almost exactly four years ago, when we were still young, we won the quiz for the first time. It was a few days before we went to Manchester to film the final of University Challenge. We lost the final and I’ve always been sure it was because winning at the Prince of Wales took too much out of us. Tonight, helped by yet more science questions like what is the third most abundant element in the Earth’s atmosphere and which country contains the Baikonur space centre, we break clear in round four and win by a couple of points. It’s our first win for a long time, and the missing link must be either Pete or Jude. I reckon it’s Jude.

The snowball is worth almost a thousand pounds. Oli splashed out this week and bought two tickets. Somehow he ended up with numbers 901 and 903, and so is deeply upset when ticket 902 is drawn. Inexplicably it belongs to someone sitting miles away from us. Oli is then driven into paroxysms of despair when the question asks who is the UK Independence Party’s only sitting MP? He’s the only person in the pub who knows that it’s Bob Spink, and the money rolls over yet again.