Oli and I make a last-minute decision to turn up tonight. It’s actually later than last-minute – I get there half way through round one, and Oli makes it just before round two. Probably as a result, we find ourselves mired in the mid-table.

The only bright spot is the beer round. Once upon a time we won quite a few beer rounds, but it must have been a fluke, like monkeys producing Shakespeare, because it’s now been years since we last triumphed. This time, we twig early on that all the answers begin with A and end with Z. An island discovered in 1775 by Juan Manuel de Ayala – that would be Alcatraz. And Fred Astaire’s actual surname was Austerlitz. A ship which ran aground in the Channel in 1978 causes us some trouble, but somehow Oli drags the name Amoco Cadiz from the depths of his memory.

We get all five answers, and all we need to do now is say how many times Joe Kinnear swore at the press in his infamous diatribe. I say 45; Oli says 63, so our answer is 54. The actual answer is 52. Surely we’ve won! But no! A team of lucky shits has put 53. We’re cruelly denied. Will we ever win a beer round again? Is Joe Kinnear a well-spoken gentleman?

As is customary we now descend into bitter infighting. We’re asked the least common letter in the periodic table. I reckon it’s A, Oli says O. I don’t know why I write down O but I do, and it’s wrong. We’re then asked which is the only element to contain all the vowels in its name. After we’ve handed in our sheets, Oli tries to look up the answer on his iphone. He is rummaging through the periodic table as the quizmasters tell us that the answer is praseodymium. Oli is outraged at the obscurity, and virtually shouts at some nearby teams, demanding they show him where in the periodic table this preposterous element is. They don’t look too pleased and surely must think we have been cheating despicably. We depart the pub rapidly at the end of the quiz, and I think we’ll have to lay low for a couple of weeks.