Normal order is resumed tonight, as I arrive much later than everyone else. Stu looks a bit under the weather and it turns out he’s joined in the pandemic fun that’s sweeping the world and had swine flu. He reckons the infectious phase is over.

The quiz seems pretty tough tonight. Keith and Anne are setting it, and I always rely on their penchant for the odd Formula One question but tonight they’ve gone all Linnean and half the questions seem to be about the names of phyla and genera of various plants and animals. Accordingly, we struggle, and it’s not until round three that we finally get the F1 question. I almost don’t get it – the question asks who recently replicated the achievements of Walter Wolf’s team in 1978 of winning at the first attempt, but I mishear it as ‘Walter Wolfstein’. I realise in time that it’s Brawn GP, who will no doubt be hoping that their emulation of Wolf doesn’t extend as far as following up a winning debut season with a season of mediocrity, a season of inadequacy and then bankruptcy.

We’re firmly entrenched in the mid-table. The last round includes a question asking which is the only US state whose last four letters form the first four letters of its capital. It amazes me how many different questions you can ask about US capitals. Why don’t people have the same urge to fill their quizzes with questions about counties, or départements, or oblasts?

The answer isn’t obvious to us, so we take a sledgehammer to this walnut of a question and start writing down states. After a few minutes we’ve only got a woeful 27 of them, but we persevere and as the quizmasters start to demand answer sheets we’ve managed to write down 49 of the 50. Does this help us? It does not, but we still try to work out the 50th to convince ourselves that we can remember some pointless stuff. Finally we get it – Vermont. Oli suddenly starts as if he’s been jabbed in the ribs, says “Montpelier!” and our walnut is duly cracked.

Feeling like we’re on a high from that, we all push the boat out and buy two tickets for the snowball. And Stu’s number comes up, for only the second time. Oli and I have a quick discussion about whether or not we want him to win and decide we’d probably be very grudgingly pleased if he did. But he doesn’t. It’s a question about motorbike constructors from the 1950s and no-one in the pub knows the answer. Five years of snowball failure continue…