I arrive late again, and Stu has already taken care of a team name, which commemorates the recent thirtieth anniversary of Elvis’s unfortunate demise and gets an impressive reception when it’s read out. There are a ridiculous 19 teams in the house tonight, and during round one we’re standing by the fireplace, which we agree is never good for the concentration. Luckily, Stu has already had words with two women who have a table but who are not quizzing, and as round two begins, glances are exchanged and we dive across the entire width of the pub to claim the table before any of the other hoverers.

There are a plethora of excellent questions this week, and despite being a team of only two, we’re on fairly blazing form. We don’t actually know many answers but we’re managing to work them out. A bird which comes in Atlantic, Tufted and Horned, and which is the only bird whose beak moults? Puffin, I suggest. What did Clement Wragge start naming in the 1890s? Stu works out that it’s hurricanes. After two rounds, we’re a very respectable three points off the lead.

The beer round looks like being a disaster. There are six questions, and we really don’t know any of the answers until we get to number six, which quotes some song lyrics. Stu says they’re from “More than a feeling”, but this leaves us none the wiser. But then the crazy thought occurs to me - could the connection be insurance companies? It’s almost too ridiculous to suggest, but we’ve got nothing to lose so I mention it, almost as if I’m joking. But that’s it, and suddenly we’re hitting form. Who said in 1989 how wonderful it was that East Germans now had access to lots of lovely shops? Anne Diamond. Which station saw the tube’s first ever birth? It’s Elephant and Castle. A question about a Led Zeppelin song has to be Dazed and Confused, and the butterfly whose scientific name is vanessa atalanta must be the red admiral. Finally, magnificently, Stu remembers that the company that was at the centre of the arms to Iraq affair was Matrix Churchill. The tie-breaker asks us how many miles the queen travelled on her 1953 commonwealth tour, and following our tried and tested method of winning tiebreakers we average our guesses. But this method definitely requires more than two guesses to work properly, and heartbreakingly we are the furthest away from the right answer of the three teams who got all the answers right. The only consolation is that Evil Patrick’s team didn’t even hand in their questions because they didn’t get the connection.

We have already been working out how many packets of peanuts we would have been eating with our £15 prize, and are slightly downcast as round three starts. It’s a challenging one and puts an end to our distant hopes of a victory, but we’re still in with a shout for third. Round four trips us up with a question to which the answer really should have been Elvis but was actually Lord Lucan, but at least we guess correctly that the 1958 newspaper headline “Is this man too sexy for television?” referred to Cliff Richard. It’s not enough to get us any further up the order, and we end up in fifth. We think that’s not bad for just two people, especially when the winning team appears to have at least seven people on it.

The first snowball ticket drawn is number 370; I have number 371. The question is one that I probably would have guessed correctly. which is a little bit upsetting. But none of the three lottery winners gets their question right, and next week will see the pot go over £1000.

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