Oli and I are the team for most of the first round tonight. We’re doing OK but we have no idea which tube station might have been inspired by the Moscow Metro. Luckily, Stu turns up seconds before the end of the round to tell us it’s Gants Hill. With this inspired bit of obscure knowledge, we get off to a decent start, hovering around the money positions.

A question in round two starts “Laurent Cassegrain”, and immediately I start writing down “telescopes”. There is another team in the pub that is also looking happy at this point; they are also astronomers, friends of mine from UCL, but for them, this will be a rare moment of happiness during this quiz. We maintain a decent position; they hover worryingly close to bottom spot.

The beer round is a disaster. We have no idea about the answers and write down OJ Simpson for several. The tie-break asks how many people from Chapel Street in Altincham volunteered to serve in the First World War. We put 160, and the answer is 161, but it does us no good.

One of the questions in round three should suit those of us with science educations. What is the penultimate letter in the Greek alphabet? We take the sledgehammer approach which worked so well with US states a couple of weeks ago, and start writing down all the Greek letters we can think of. We make it to 23; we’re not sure if any of them is the penultimate one so we write down χ and hope for the best. The one letter we could not remember was ψ. Guess what the answer was.

Disheartened, we suffer a fourth round disaster and slip from second to fourth place. Our cash-free 2009 continues.