I am more late than normal tonight, so Stu and Oli have to choose a team name and answer all of round one without me.  To my chagrin, the team name gets loud approval when it is read out - there is almost a round of applause - and we’re in joint second place.  And worse, it all goes downhill from there.  We drop to seventh after the second round, and we’re closer to last place than we are to first.

We’re struggling to scrape together drink money because the cashpoint outside the pub is broken, so we hope for our usual form in the beer round.  The first question is who baked the cake that appears on the cover of Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed”.  I hear myself say “Delia Smith” but I’ve got no idea why I said it, the thought just appeared completely uninvited into my mind.  The others look at me as if I’m mad but it turns out to be right.  We get four questions out of five, and from the tie break question we learn that Wanker appears at 55,000 in the list of surnames in the US in order of popularity, but another team gets all five questions and ours is a round of half lemonades.

We’re sinking fast now and rounds three and four offer us no respite, except for one question.  Which great Briton’s name is an anagram of “Man making rubber dildos”?  “Think of long names, like Isambard Kingdom Brunel or something”, says Stu.  For several seconds our concentration is intense.  I’m thinking “Buckingham?  Marlborough?” but then Oli says “Um, maybe it’s Isambard Kingdom Brunel…”

We finish fifth, and all our hopes now rest on the snowball.  But Evil Patrick’s been conducting terrifying rituals again and defies the laws of statistics to get his number drawn once more.  And what an easy question - which cartoon character lived at 52 Festive Road, Putney?  Luckily, Patrick is about the only person in the pub who doesn’t know that it’s the legendary Mr Benn.  No-one feels too sorry for him.

After a month off from quizzing we return to the Prince of Wales feeling like we are going to win.  The normal practice is for me to to turn up half an hour later than agreed and the others to curse me, but this time we all turn up at more or less the same time but somehow manage not to see each other.  I’m sitting in one corner of the pub cursing Stu and Oli, and they are in another corner of the pub cursing me.  Shortly before the quiz starts irate text messages are exchanged and we work out the situation.  Despite this poor preparation we start well.  After round one we are in joint first place.  Round two sees us slip into second despite our correct guess that someone once sued Uri Geller for uncoiling her contraceptive coil through the medium of television.

The beer round is always our friend, though, and this week we’re given a list of dead comedians and asked to say whether they died in their thirties, forties, fifties or sixties.  Oli doesn’t have a sense of humour so he leaves this round entirely to me and Stu.  We agree on most of them but have to haggle over Bud Costello, Kenneth Williams and Eric Morecambe.  Neither of us have any idea who Bud Costello actually is, so we average our guesses.  Stu insists that Williams was in his sixties and I refuse to concede that Morecambe was anything other than fifty-something when he died, so we trade those off.  To our amazement we get full marks.  For the tie break we need to know the half-life of Uranium-238.  It doesn’t matter that we get it wrong by a factor of 8.2 million because the other team on full marks are wrong by a factor of 45 million.  Our science degrees have saved the day again.

Since time immemorial, the beer round prize has been ten pounds behind the bar, but the winds of change have swept through the Prince of Wales and in a moment of madness they’ve increased the prize to fifteen pounds sterling.  There are only three of us and to spend it all we are forced to buy no less than fifteen packets of crisps.  We can barely hear the third round over the sound of determined crunching, and perhaps because of this we’ve slipped to third, five points off the lead.

But we come out fighting again in the fourth round, and get every single question right.  To our consternation we even know that Noel Edmonds wrote a book called ”Positively Happy”.  Is it enough to snatch an unlikely victory?  Oh, so close, but not quite.  We’re second, a mere single point off first place.  And so to the snowball.  Evil Patrick’s supernatural run of luck appears to be over, but some lucky git gets a very easy question asking which god had ravens called Huginn and Muninn.  This is such an easy question that I would probably have got it wrong out of sheer confusion if my number had been drawn, but the git correctly says Odin and walks away with almost £300.  We polish off the last of our dry roasted peanuts and flounce out of the pub in disgust.