It’s the last quiz of the year.  Ivan is back from Paris, and has been looking forward to nothing so much as a good quiz.  He says living abroad is making him feel more English than ever, which is strange because he’s half-Spanish and half-Croat.  Judging by the evening, living abroad is actually making him quite a lot louder and slightly more bitter than usual.  Pete turns up unexpectedly, looking a bit traumatised after a journey from Luton.  Stu and I have just come up from central London and we’re not traumatised at all.

Evil Patrick is setting the quiz this week, which ought to mean he won’t win the snowball.  We agree before the quiz starts that we’ve got a good feeling about it, but by the end of round one this feeling has entirely evaporated.  We only know three answers, and we have a horrible feeling that the answer to a question about an actor might be OJ Simpson.  But we have gathered that this round’s answers have some kind of biblical theme that we don’t quite understand, so we write down ‘John’, ‘Luke’ and ‘Isaiah’ in various boxes and hope for the best.  We are astonished, when the answers are read out, to find that we are in joint first place - our guessing must be inspired tonight.

Round two’s answers are all connected with Christmas food.  For a question about a house by the River with well-preserved 17th century gardens, I think the answer can only be Ham House.  My team-mates ridicule me.  We also work out that the bark of the Ceiba tree must be used for stuffing, and that the Italian for ‘with onions’ is cipollata.  Ivan inexplicably starts shouting and swearing in Italian on hearing this question.  When the answers are read out, I’m vindicated about Ham House, but we’ve slipped into second place.

The beer round involves filling in the blanks in quotes about marriage.  We only get one right, but Patrick has said he’ll give points for any particularly witty wrong answers.  Presumably we’re on some kind of comedy form because he gives us five points, which to our great astonishment is the joint top score.  It’s all down to the tiebreaker: when was ‘The Night Before Christmas’ written?  We say 1848.  Everyone else in the pub gives 20th century dates, but the actual answer is 1823 and so the beer money is ours.

Round three is about more food.  I had no idea that Canadians call nice spring days ’sugar days’, but luckily Pete did.  And we all know that Dr. Seuss’s book which only uses 50 words is ‘Green Eggs and Ham’, although we’re no longer sure that there’s a Christmas connection going on here.  The biggest challenge is working out what links Agulhas, Azores, Antarctic, Alaska, Antilles and Angola.  The minutes tick by, and an intense silence hangs over our table.  I know that Agulhas means ‘needles’ in Portuguese, but at the moment this knowledge is useless.  Patrick is demanding our answers in tones of increasing irritation.  We’ve almost given up when Stu suddenly says ‘currents’.  They’re all ocean currents of course, and against the normal form we’ve moved back up into the lead.

We feel sure we’re about to crack under the intense pressure, and there’s sudden chaos when Ivan manages to collide with someone while buying drinks.  As the bar staff sweep up shards of glass, we get our heads down for the fourth round.  After intense scribbling we work out that a seasonal anagram of ‘Australian’ is ‘Saturnalia’, and we also know that Mikhail Gorbachev was the world leader who resigned on Christmas Day 1991 and that David Healy is the footballer to whom fans sing ‘Away in a Manger’.  We don’t know why they do that, but it doesn’t matter - almost every team in the house has scored 16 points and so we preserve a narrow lead to win for the first time in ages.  Of course none of us win the snowball, lack of Evil Patrick notwithstanding, but we head out happily into the cold foggy night, wondering just what to blow £5.25 each on.

The pub is absolutely rammed this week. With about 70 people crammed in and the fire roaring it feels like the Black Hole of Calcutta, and I feel sure people will start fainting before too long. It’s probably because of the book, even though it specifically requests that readers do not come to the pub because it’s too small. Regulars grumble as they gasp for air and we are all hoping that at least some people will flee in terror when they realise they’ve accidentally come here on a quiz night.

Our team stakes out its square foot of territory in front of the bar. We do pretty well on the first round, although we fail to guess what Radio 4 listeners chose as the best invention ever in 2004. We spend ages trying to think what sort of an invention ageing middle-class fuddy-duddies would think was particular fine, and we come very close to writing down ‘bicycle’. For some reason we put something else, and of course the right answer was bicycle. We do know, though, that the Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation sued Youtube.com, and we find ourselves in a promising fourth position.

OJ Simpson is back to haunt us this week. We’re asked who was considered for Terminator before Schwarzenegger got the role, and I tell everyone about Ivan’s ‘Ghost’ debacle from a few weeks ago as we write down Sylvester Stallone. Everyone else in the pub writes the same thing, and everyone is aghast to be told it was OJ, but no-one is quite as outraged as I am.

The beer round eludes us this week, but we’re still in the running for the main quiz. After round three we’re in second, no less, with four points to make up if we are to claim the top spot. But even though we know which football club plays its home games in Europe and most of its away games in Asia (Istanbul’s Galatasaray), and we can name 7 out of the 10 football people knighted since the war, and we can even name fucking OJ fucking Simpson’s proposed recent book, we end up in joint third. A tiebreak about the number of nuclear power stations in the word is required to determine who’s best out of us and the Ian Woan Memorial Team this week, and we narrowly win it to take home a massive £1.50 each.

Evil Patrick’s number comes up for the fourth week in a row. This is becoming more than suspicious.

It’s our turn in the hotseat again. I’ve persuaded some of my friends from college to come along and give it a go, and have promised them that it’s not so much that the questions are hard here as that the regulars are some of the die-hardest pub quizzers there are. I am not sure they agree with me as they find themselves propping up the bottom of the league at the end of round 1.

A question about which three countries have non-rectangular flags causes a surprising amount of anger and bitterness in the crowd. Some people disagree with our assertion that squares are not rectangles. One team becomes bizarrely convinced that we didn’t give them a mark for getting Nepal (the other two are Switzerland and the Vatican City) that they spend the rest of the quiz writing increasingly abusive messages to us on their answer sheets.

In our beer round, which is about naming films from their French titles, one team is so proud of knowing that ‘Le Samouraï’ is ‘The Samurai’ that they write their answer in Kanji script as well as English. Pete is not impressed and calls them ‘wankers’ when he reads out the answer. ‘Clever’, he concedes, ‘but still wankers’. Meanwhile, the team writing us abusive notes realise that we marked them correctly after all, and contritely ask us not to disqualify them. We disqualify them.

At the end of the quiz, my friends have almost, but not quite, moved into second-last place. They pin their hopes on the Snowball, but Evil Patrick’s number comes up for the third week in a row, which I am sure is statistically impossible. He wins, and the pub breaks into applause of the very politest kind. We suggest that if his number comes up again before next July, he should be barred.

Try my questions here.