The pub is having one of its Black Hole of Calcutta weeks this week, and there is barely even enough space for me, Pete and Oli to stand by the bar. Marcus accuses me of papering the house but there’s only three people I know here. I think the huge turnout must be because of the spiralling popularity of this blog. Or something. There is a photographer here tonight taking pictures for a feature in a London newspaper. This is a good thing because we like appearing in the press, but also a bad thing because I didn’t go to work today and I may now be rumbled spectacularly.

With 16 teams, we have a frenetic evening marking and adding. The quiz goes well but to my enormous disappointment the beer round has only one clear winner; I have spent a non-negligible amount of time devising what I think may be the best tie-break question ever, and my efforts have been in vain. Further disappointment comes at the end when my ticket is not drawn for the snowball. This is no longer as heartbreaking as it used to be - my hopes have been dashed so often that I’m hardened to it. But the person whose number is drawn has never been to the Prince of Wales and didn’t even know it was quiz night until he turned up. Thankfully he doesn’t get the question right. Nobody does - the answer is “Televised sheep dog trials” and even in the Prince of Wales you don’t get people who know the answers to questions with answers like that.

After the quiz, as I am chatting to Marcus and Chris, I am accosted by Tosser. Tosser is someone I’ve never seen in the pub before but who complains about the wording of one of my questions, which began “If you were reasonably young in the early 1990s…” and to which the answer was the Tetris theme tune. Tosser’s team got it wrong, and he thinks I should have said “mid to late 1980s or early 1990s”, because according to Tosser the game was originally released in 1984. Marcus and I suggest that the exact wording was really not that important.  Tosser starts telling us a detailed history of the game, and when it was released on which machines. “I cannot believe”, says Chris, “that I am even taking part in a conversation like this”, and moves swiftly on to another part of the pub. Undeterred, Tosser starts looking up websites on his mobile phone. Even as we leave the pub he is calling after us, saying “But according to Wikipedia…”. If Tosser is there next time we set a quiz he can expect some fantastically harsh marking.

All our questions are here

Evil Patrick is setting the quiz this week, and last time we were here for one of his we won it, so we feel confident. This feeling soon disappears. We don’t do so badly on the first round - Patrick asks who was associated with Approaching Menace until he died earlier this year, and we know it’s Magnus Magnusson, but we earn the disapproval of the quizmaster when we suggest that the great Icelander is still associated with the tune, even posthumously. “If there’s going to be any pedantry this evening, it will be coming from me”, he says, but despite the reprimand we find ourselves in third place.

But things begin to slip, and the second round goes very badly. Oli is the only one of us who knows that Jose Mourinho’s dog is called Gullit, which is remarkable considering that Oli is extremely proud of his utter ignorance of football and everything to do with it. The only time his number has ever come up on the snowball, the question was which Dutch footballer is the only person to have won the Champion’s League with three different clubs - despite the hundreds of pounds at stake, and the anguished cries coming from Ivan who knew the answer, Oli looked delighted as he said “I have no idea and I can’t even offer a guess”.

We have a bonus round this week - from extracts from poems we have to name the poet. I can offer no help here, except to suggest that Tennyson and Betjeman may well be among the answers. Patrick’s quizzes are unashamedly highbrow, and he obviously relishes being able to say things like “Quite a few teams put Sappho for that one, but it refers to Lesbia, not Lesbos and the answer is of course Catullus”. Of course. Our score is modest, and we drop down the order. Afterwards, I say to Patrick that poetry has never been our team’s strongest point. “Clearly”, he says.

As the quiz goes on we are slipping further and further from the money. We do know the three players other than Federer and Sampras to have won Wimbledon in the last 15 years (Richard Krajicek, Goran Ivanisevic and Lleyton Hewitt), and after much debate we realise that what connects Natasha Hamilton, Alex Best, Nell McAndrew and Javine Hylton is not that they are or were all married to footballers but that they’ve all won Rear of the Year. Patrick’s quizzes do occasionally contain such lowbrow moments but I am not sure Patrick really enjoys them. But we are enraged by a preposterous question which requires us to know not just that Laurence Olivier was born 100 years ago today, but also what each of his three wives were called. Marcus tells us afterwards that he actually got this question right, and I may have to refer to him from now on as Smug Marcus. Come the final reckoning we are a horrific 18 points off the lead, and yet again we’re in the worst position, just outside the money. We’re setting the quiz next week and we all agree that will be a lot more fun.

The pub is heaving this week, and I want to call our team “Who the hell over-publicized this place anyway?”, seeing as Marcus, who over-publicized the place with a book about it, is setting the quiz. Stu over-rules me, saying it “won’t do us any favours”, and so we have a dig at the landlord instead.  With 17 teams in, Marcus becomes headmasterly in his efforts to control the proceedings.  “Will you all…. please…. shut…. UP!”, he shouts.  The rabble calms, and the quiz gets underway.

Our first two rounds are marked by some astonishing guesses. What product’s logo features Major General Sir Hector MacDonald, being served tea by an Indian servant? Sir Hector was apparently a Victorian military legend, serving with the Gordon Highlanders in Afghanistan, Sudan and South Africa to widespread acclaim. This isn’t any sort of clue, but Oli has some vague recollection that Camp Coffee has someone in a kilt on the front of it, so we put that and it’s right. Rather poignantly, it turns out that Sir Hector shot himself in 1903 when facing a court-martial for homosexuality.

We also manage to guess that the Mountain Chicken of Montserrat is actually a frog, and when faced with a profusion of questions about Poet Laureates, we score two out of three by putting whichever seems most plausible out of Betjeman and Tennyson, these being the only two Poet Laureates we know. But I earn aggressive disapproval from my team-mates when I insist, for reasons I can’t entirely recall now, that Cardinal Wolsey was Archbishop of Canterbury rather than York as they believe.

The beer round involves naming films, given the title of the short story they were based on, and the year the film was released. Stu is on blazing form with this, and quickly gets six of the seven, including 2001: A Space Odyssey being based on The Sentinel and not, as Oli and I had thought, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The tricky seventh is the 1946 film based on The Greatest Gift. I think it must be It’s A Wonderful Life - more than that, I know it must be that. Stu says that was released earlier than 1946. I protest, but he and Oli invite me to remember Cardinal Wolsey, and they put down Miracle on 34th Street. We buy our own drinks before the start of round three.

We’re looking to make up about five points to get into the money, and we think we might have a chance after a good third round, in which Stu recalls after several minutes of gripping his forehead fiercely that Cal Trask, Jim Stark and Jett Rink were the three major roles of James Dean. But we slip up, when asked what happened when Ashley Revell sold every single thing he owned, and bet it all on one spin of a roulette wheel, changing his mind on what colour he called after the ball had been released. We think the ball must have landed on zero, or at the very least that his change of mind was a terrible, terrible error, but somewhat prosaically it turns out that he actually doubled his money. We finish in the worst position of all, just outside the money.

The snowball is worth 180 pounds this week and Evil Patrick is looking strangely confident. We are very relieved when someone else’s number is drawn. Which band released albums called Second Coming and Garage Flower? The person who is on the spot doesn’t know, so as usual Chris asks if anyone else knows. Everybody else knows, and people elsewhere in Highgate must be wondering why they just heard a hundred people shouting “The Stone Roses!”. I am now reconciled to the fact that never will an insanely easy question coincide with my number being drawn.

I am in a blissed-out jetlagged haze this week, having just got back from China, and presumably because I’m still thinking in a time zone seven hours ahead of here, I make a startling break with precedent and arrive before everyone else. The quiz is being set by a first-timer tonight, and it’s certainly challenging. But some are finding it more challenging than others, and at the end of the first round we have 16 points, another team has got 15, and everyone else is in single figures. A couple of teams have scored nothing at all - we almost got lynched once when something similar happened in one of our quizzes, but everyone obviously feels that these questions were hard but not unfair and the quizmaster survives to read another round.

Following our habit that now seems unshakeable, our form is hit in round two by the Slump. We are not obsessed enough with football to know that West Ham were the last non-top division team to win the FA Cup, and even though we know that Man U v. Newcastle in 1999 was the last FA cup final between two non-London clubs, we still drop into second. Our cause is bolstered when Pete’s dad arrives just before the beer round, though. It’s been a while since he was last here and he’s keen to remind us of his tremendous command of pub quiz trivia. The answers to the beer round all turn out to be related to Shakespeare plays, and it’s Pete’s dad who gets the tricky final answer, about two DC Comics heroes and an album released by the Insane Clown Posse. They’re all called Tempest.

But dissent breaks out over the tie-break, in which we have to guess the number of different airline sick bags in the world’s largest collection of them. Oli says 17,000; Stu and I think he’s insane. Pete and his dad are unsure but becoming infected by Oli’s madness. We follow the average theory, and I’m tempted to put in a negative guess; we discuss this briefly and decide that guesses have to be physically possible. We end up with 10,240, which Pete’s dad is now convinced is far too low. “We got all five questions, and now we’re throwing it away on the tie- breaker”, he says, “so I’ll be buying the next round I suppose”. The answers are read out. The tie is between us and one other team. They put 23,000. “Given it away”, says Pete’s dad, morosely. But the world’s largest sick bag collection numbers a mere 5,034 items, and we’ve taken the round.

Back to trying to win the quiz. We have an entertaining discussion in round four about where Madame Butterfly was set, in which almost every city in Japan is mentioned at least once. Pete’s dad says Nagasaki and he seems very sure of that, but for some reason he is over-ruled and we put Yokohama. The answer is Nagasaki. We end the quiz miles off first place but miles ahead of third, and three pounds for each of us is the prize for our endeavours.