I’m late to the quiz this evening, as so often. Luckily Ivan and Oli arrive in time to cover round one and most of round two, and they get us into a respectable position.

The beer round involves paintings. Back in the day we used to win the beer round with impressive regularity, but inexplicably we lost the knack and we haven’t won it for about two years. We have almost given up trying to win, though we still never buy drinks until we know we’ve lost it. Tonight it doesn’t look good – we’ve got to identify the artist of a selection of 10 paintings, in which only the eyes are shown. My sole contribution is recognising the Mona Lisa. But Oli and Ivan between them know almost everything else. We get nine out of ten, and it’s down to the tiebreak.

If you took 100 pounds to the post office, changed it into US dollars, then changed it back, all at the most favourable rate on offer, how much would you have? I travel a lot so I should probably have an idea. But on the other hand I’m extremely financially careless and I get all the foreign currency I need at cashpoints. I have no idea how much this costs me because I never check my bank balance.

So it’s down to the average theory. We put £77.50. Another team, in a display of touching naivety, puts £102. A third team, in a display of breathtaking cynicism, put £55. It’s bad but it’s not that bad – you’d get £88.70 back, and to our complete astonishment, we’ve won the beer round.

It’s very hard to keep concentrating in round three, especially as it’s unusually complicated – right answers are not required. Instead, the quizmaster wants us to give the most commonly given wrong answer, according to some survey or other. Luckily Stu arrives, and after we’ve plied him with a drink or two from our winnings, he helps us to get almost full marks.

Round four involves a lot of anagrams of tube station names. We’re on blazing form now and we get most things right. What station is between Togetherness Thinking and Teary Swab? We can get the anagrams but are we bourgeois enough to know the answer? It turns out we are. But it’s not enough to get us into the money – we finish fifth, again.