After a few weeks away from the quiz, me and Stu and Oli are back and ready to take it by storm. We feel good after round 1, in a comfortable fifth place from which a strike at the lead seems eminently possible. We know which seas you can find Trabzon, Archangelsk, Qingdao and Eilat are found on*, and we also know how to pronounce ‘Qingdao’ (Q being pronounced ‘ch’ in pinyin-transliterated Chinese) which the quizmaster doesn’t. Round two seems less promising though, and we fear the usual late-evening slump in form has already started.

We pin all our hopes for the evening on the beer round. It’s about naming cities from their parliamentary constituencies, and we have shamelessly brazen political geek Oli to give us all the answers. Everyone in the pub knows that Edgbaston, Erdington and Ladywood are in Birmingham, most people know that Attercliffe, Heely and Hallam are in Sheffield, a few people know that Riverside, Garston and West Derby are all in Liverpool, but only Oli knows that the city with constituencies called Central, East, North, Northeast, Northwest, South and Southwest is Glasgow. We are the only team to get all five right, which is great because our answer for the tiebreak proved to be a terrible overestimate of how long it would take a snail to travel round the world. Who’d have thought the little buggers could reach speeds of 40 metres an hour? Surely their shells would crack under the strain.

Newly fortified with a beer, two lemonades and seventeen packets of mini-cheddars, we get our heads down for the second half. But as we feared, the Slump rears its ugly head. Despite our best efforts, we finish way down the order, not even close to any cash. To top it all off, Patrick, who apparently won the Snowball last week, has his number come up again. The air is crackling with hatred and resentment as he steps up to take the question, but luckily he doesn’t win it.

* Black, White, Yellow and Red respectively. The connection was almost too subtle for me to spot at first.

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