Ivan is back in London after a few months away in Scottish parts, and Pete, Oli and Stu are around as well. I am around, but forever delayed, and I turn up half way through round one. My main contribution is to guess that the answer to a question involving divorce is Wallis Simpson, and to my own anti-royalist disgust I’m right.

In round two we have to name the country which contains five of the ten highest waterfalls in Europe. I say Norway, while Oli and Stu say Switzerland. I am not totally sure it’s Norway, but despite occasional evidence to the contrary I always feel supremely confident on geography questions, and bristle at the suggestion that I might be wrong. I am holding the pen, and so I write down Norway. When the answers are read out, I’m bracing myself for serious abuse if it’s Switzerland, but fortunately it is the land of fjords.

We are thirsty and it’s the beer round, so we are concentrating hard. It is to no avail, as we do not remotely spot the connection between the answers, which relate to British female olympic gold medallists. The tie-break question asks for the distance in miles between Manchester and Baghdad, and with our infallible average theory, we end up with a guess that is within ten miles of the right answer of 2659 miles. Sadly some other bastards got the questions right and take the beer money.

Round three throws up a cricket question. With great ceremony and deference, we pass the answer sheet to Ivan, who has missed being the fount of all cricket knowledge on our team, and inscribes the answer on the sheet in gothic calligraphy to mark his return to the role. Sadly, he gets it wrong. Luckily he redeems himself by knowing that Marco Pierre White is one of two presenters who has got into trouble recently for using the word ‘pikey’.

At the end of the quiz we’re in the mid-table positions, and all our hopes for money rest on the snowball. And whose number should come up but Pete’s. Off he goes to the front of the pub, to get the question “who was the first female tory cabinet minister?”. He gives a reasonable answer, but it’s not the right answer. Who has ever heard of Florence Horsbrugh? Not anyone in the Prince of Wales, anyway. This is the eighth time one of us has been up for the snowball, and eight times we’ve failed. Surely next time….

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