It’s the last quiz of 2008, and only Oli and I have made it up here for Patrick’s Christmas special. If the quiz is anything like the normal Patrick fare of poetry and classics we could be in for a grim evening. Oli says he’ll leave before the beer round if we don’t look like having a chance of some money.

And the first round seems like a disaster. Many quizzes have themed round, and sometimes the quizmaster doesn’t tell you what the connection is. That’s fine, we can handle those. But this time in each round there are three separate connections going on, and although we manage to work out that some of the answers seem to be Monopoly properties and some seem to be numbers, we only get four questions right. Luckily, it seems that everyone else is having trouble as well, and we’re in a shock second place.

Things get better in the second round. This time we are definitely looking for the three pink monopoly properties, and the numbers four, five and six. We work out that Pall Mall is the street named ultimately for a ball game, but we can’t remember the other two pink properties. Despite this we have now moved into joint first place, and Oli grudgingly agrees to stay until the end.

But then it all begins to unravel. We fail to get a single question right in the beer round, and then the quiz goes all poetry and classics on us. We don’t know our Greek mythology and I can’t even remember what the question was, to which Aglaea was the answer. We get one question right in round three, and from joint first we’ve plummeted to seventh out of eleven teams. Evil Patrick can scarcely conceal his glee as he reads out our score, although he tries, saying he doesn’t want rude things written about him on the internet.

The fourth round does not offer much solace. We are quite pleased to notice that the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, is one of the answers which involves numbers, but we get just three correct answers, and finish the quiz well into the bottom half. Oli instantly runs for the door, saying his bus is coming. I follow shortly after.

Oli has managed to get to the pub long before I turn up, which is no surprise but he seems angrier than usual this week. Stu turns up quite some time after even me, and I join Oli in slating his slack attitude to punctuality. Oli names our team in homage to Hugo Chávez moving Venezuela into a new time zone half an hour later than the previous one, and we get under way.

The most memorable question of the night is one which asks what words like wizard, bevy, hovels and vole have in common, and which US president’s surname also shares this property. We struggle to think of anything likely, and it looks like we’re going to struggle in vain. But while Stu and I work on the rest of the round, Oli goes into a kind of trance, writing down alphabets and scribbling furiously in his notepad. Just after question ten is read out, he emerges from his trance to tell us he has the answer. If A=1, B=2 etc, then the sum of the first and last letters and all the other letter pairs working inwards is 27.

The only problem then is to work out how to write this down sensibly in a box four inches wide and half an inch high. This takes us the rest of the time allowed. And the US president? James K. Polk, of course. We’re massively pleased with ourselves, Stu and I in spite of our minimal contribution to the answer, but we’re very disappointed to find that two other teams also managed to get the answer. We decide they were probably the two teams either side of us.

At the end of the quiz we’re yet again in the worst position, just outside the money in fourth position. Maybe we’ll do better next week when Patrick will be setting a quiz on a Christmas theme. He does this every year, and last year we won it. I tell him this and say we’ll be hoping to do the same next week. He tells me we might have a chance because the Christmas quiz is always dumbed down a bit for the occasion.