Evil Patrick is setting the quiz tonight, and the one time we stormed to victory in one of his quizzes has made us all forget the numerous other times we’ve floundered in them. All five of us are going to be here this week, and we think the odds on us making it two victories in two weeks are not too long. But Stu is running late, having apparently had an appointment with a Hong Kong tailor that over-ran. He arrives just after we’ve handed in the answers to round one, not looking very tailored and seconds too late to tell us that Reggie Perrin’s middle name was Iolanthe. But in the second round he shames us all by knowing the first three Irish winners of the Nobel prize for literature, while the four of us who are British score zero between us when trying to name the first three British winners.

The beer round answers this week are all terms relating to cricket, and despite Ivan’s deeply tragic knowledge of the sport and its history, we do not get full marks. Luckily this saves us from an argument over the tie-break. How many VCs have ever been awarded? We follow the average theory, as always. Oli says 1,200. I think this is preposterous, and I make a low guess to bring the average down, as do the others. But the answer is 1,356, and so it’s a good job we weren’t even in the running.

Round three contains a question that sounds slightly familiar. Who was originally lined up to play the Terminator before Schwarzenegger got the part? OJ Simpson is our bête noire, frequently coming up as answers to questions he has no right to be the answer to, and which we inevitably get wrong. But we think we’ve had this one before, so we put him down and for once he is the correct answer. We are also the only team which knows that hills with a relative height of more than 150m are known as ‘marilyns’. This is what passes for humour among fell-walkers, the Scottish peaks higher than 3000 feet being known as Munros.

In the final round we struggle to work out who might have invented Meccano. It’s French, according to Oli and Ivan, but that doesn’t help much. In the end, Pete writes down Hornby just for the sake of not having an empty box, and we’re amazed to find that he’s correct. But when we are asked whether it’s true or false that the element Cerium was named after the asteroid Ceres, Pete refuses to accept my assertion that it’s true, saying that they must both be named after Ceres the goddess of agriculture. It’s been almost a year since I said that Neptune was green but I still find it almost impossible to get my team-mates to accept my answers to astronomy questions.

We finish the evening in third place, and we’re all buying up slightly more snowball tickets than usual. Our shocking luck persists, though, and none of our numbers are drawn. Someone from a table who we suspect are pooling their tickets has his number come up, and wins £250 with a question about the first British team to win a European football competition. He answers London, apparently correctly, and we flounce out of the pub in disgust. We’ll be back next week though, for two reasons - firstly because there is still over £500 in the snowball pot, and secondly because we’re setting the quiz.

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