We all know that after a dominant win comes a humiliating defeat. This is why, since our last outing three weeks ago, everyone’s been coming up with bad excuses and avoiding the quiz. Oli and I eventually decide to turn up and take one for the team.

Chris is setting the quiz, and he’s a fan of the dirty North Londoners who beat the dirty West Londoners in the league cup the other day. He takes offence at our team name, which doesn’t surprise us at all, and tells us we’re not going to win. That doesn’t surprise us either. Even if we called our team ‘Chris is a legend’ we wouldn’t be fighting for the title tonight.

At the end of round one, we’re four points off the lead, which is not so bad. But at the end of round two we’re already in freefall, some 12 points off the pace. This is despite a good question about a current Premiership footballer who played for Liverpool in 1995 and who was a fashion model in 2005. We struggle for a while before I realise it’s ex-Watford keeper David James. Being a hornets fan is surprisingly useful for pub quizzing. But the slump continues, and our main mission is to avoid total humiliation. We define avoiding total humiliation as being less than 20 points off the lead at the end of the quiz, and to our surprise we manage it. We’re miles outside the money but we’ve got a half-respectable fifth place.

The snowball is worth quite a bit at the moment. My ticket has a round number on it and I feel sure it will be drawn, but it’s not. At least Evil Patrick hasn’t been called up. The question begins “No two fermions…” and already I know that the answer will be the Pauli exlusion principle. If I was back on University Challenge I’d have been on the buzzer and ten points would have been mine, but I’m not on television, I’m at the Prince of Wales, and all I can do is stand around looking gloomy. The ticket holder offers Planck as the originator of the principle. Chris knows that I know the answer and thinks I might be the only person in the pub who does. But there are a couple of other scientifically-minded people in tonight so even that minor glory is not to be mine.

So we know that a good win is always followed by a crushing defeat. Next time we come we’ll be testing the hypothesis that the opposite can also be true.

We’ve assembled a Dream Team this week - Pete’s dad is around for the first time in ages, as is Ivan. We should be in with a good chance of a second victory in four weeks, and if there are any cricket questions we’ll be laughing. Well, I’ll be groaning but Ivan will be laughing.

One of the questions in round one is which painting depicts a scene at a farm near Flatford Mill. I say it’s The Hay Wain, but Pete and his dad both say it’s American Gothic. I don’t like to try to overrule both Hinstridges at once so we put American Gothic. I should have overruled them. Such are the disadvantages of a team of six. Luckily, the advantage of a large team is that at least one of us knows the answer to almost every question. We’re in a solid-looking second at the end of the round.

Round two sees us leap into the lead, pulling out four points where we’d been two behind. We then get all five answers correct in the beer round - they are the five films recently nominated for best film in the 2008 Oscars - but so do several other teams. The tie-breaker requires us to guess the total number of epsiodes of Dallas, and we apply the usual average theory. Pete, Stu and Pete’s dad are going for numbers in the three hundreds; Oli, Ivan and I are going for sub-100 guesses, so we end up on a bit less than 200. The answer is 357 and most teams were closer. I offer my apologies and head to the bar.

My favourite question in round three asks who is the youngest person ever to score a point in Formula One. It’s my favourite question because I turn out to be the only person in the pub who knows that it’s Sebastian Vettel. By the end of the round we have an eight point lead, and even with our abysmal record of collapsing in the later stages, we think it would be hard to lose this one.

The final round sees us agonising for a very long time about US states and their capitals. These are a pub quiz standard but tonight’s setters have given us an impressively original take on it. We have to work out which state and its capital have common male names as first syllables, which have common female names, and which has a male name for the state and a female for the capital. Oli says ‘Alaska and Juneau’ startlingly quickly, suggesting he might actually have thought about this question beforehand. While Pete writes down all 50 states, I suggest Kentucky and Pete’s dad says the capital is Louisville so that seems to sort out the male syllables. We struggle for a while on the females, narrowing it down to one of Louisiana, Maryland or (possibly) Pennsylvania. The capital of the first one is Baton Rouge and the last one is Harrisburg, so we think it must be Maryland. But what’s its capital? Stu suddenly remembers that it’s Annapolis, and even though it turns out that the capital of Kentucky is not Louisville but Frankfort, we’ve done enough to preserve our lead and take a dominant victory.

But the Dream Team will be losing a member, at least temporarily. The newly Doctored Ivan is moving to St. Andrews to do teaching and research. We’ll just have to hope that Pete’s dad can make it along more often than he has done in recent months, or that the frequency of cricket questions in Prince of Wales quizzes drops dramatically.

We’re back in the hotseat. When I say we, at first it looks horribly like it might just be me as my co-setters are nowhere to be seen at 9.05pm. I am frantically trying to think of twenty more questions when Oli turns up. Now we just need ten more, but luckily Pete appears just before we get really worried. He is ill, but has dragged himself here from his sickbed to deliver us ten questions and a beer round. Such is our dedication to the cause of setting a good quiz.

To make things more exciting tonight we multiply all scores by a million in the style of an eighties video game. This goes down quite well, with even the lowest scoring teams enjoying scoring 25 million points. At the end of the quiz, a team of staggeringly clever people who have come over from Belfast especially for the quiz take the victory with 75 million points. They won the beer round, and then amazingly one of them is in possession of the winning snowball ticket. He correctly answers the question to win £333, or half an Evil Patrick, and his team have taken a clean sweep. That doesn’t happen very often. Luckily, they will be safely back in Belfast next week and the rest of us will have a chance of winning something.

Try our questions here.

Buoyed by last week’s victory, we’re all keen for tonight’s quizzing action. Oli and Stu are fed up with me being late every week, so I tell them I will buy them both dinner if I get there even a second after 8.45pm. I arrive at 8.50, but luckily they are both later and I can pretend to have won the bet.

So, will tonight see a second victory on the trot? By about the fourth question we think it’s already clear that it won’t, and by the end of the second round we know we’re not even in with a chance of the money. Our aim now is just to avoid humiliation. At least by starting off near the bottom of the field we can avoid the usual slump in form.

The beer round requires us to guess which is longer of six pairs of Wikipedia articles. We spend a long time trying to work out what would be longer out of Charles and Diana, and Mercury the planet and mercury the metal, arguing like there is some logical way to work it out when really we all know this is pure guesswork. We manage to guess four out of the six, but other people have managed to get five, and we enter the last half of the quiz drinkless. By the fourth round, we’re more than 20 points off the lead. We decide that if we score more than half of whatever the winning team gets, we’ll consider that a moral victory. When the scores are read out, our final tally is 33 points, and the winners have 64. We are so happy that everyone else in the pub thinks we’ve won and give us evils.

Evil Patrick is on the winning team, and to no-one’s great surprise but everyone’s despair and disappointment, his number comes up in the snowball yet again. Luckily he doesn’t win it this time, and the pot will roll over. Next week’s quiz will be set by a crack team of UCL graduates and will be a tremendous evening for sure.

Having finished 2007 in ignominy, Oli, Stu and I are looking for a better start to 2008. My punctuality has slightly improved and I’m there by five past nine, but for some reason the quizmasters got the thing under way at bang on 9. I redeem myself by knowing that Amity Bay was the scene of Jaws, and the benefits of having an astronomer on the team are clear when we are asked what royal position Martin Rees is the current holder of. I’m so pleased at knowing it that I say it loudly enough for the team next to us to hear. But when the scores are read out, they are last and we are first. Round two contains the first of a series of questions about the royal family. We are far from royalists but we still manage to work out that the queen’s most recent grandchild is eighth in line to the throne. We don’t know what title the child has been given but even so we’ve managed to hang on to first place.

It’s my round, but hold in, it’s the beer round. We have enough faith in ourselves to hold off buying drinks. I know that the longest country name which has no double consonants and no double vowels is United Arab Emirates. Bruce Lee died at the age of 32, and despite my suggestion that it’s blue, the most common colour on flags globally is red. 50 in Latin is XL, and the connection is sponsors of premiership teams. We get four of the five answers, and take a sledgehammer to the nut of the one we don’t know by trying to write down every single premiership team and their sponsor. But it’s in vain - we fail to work out that Eileen Derbyshire is the second longest serving actor on Coronation Street, someone else gets all five, and I’m off to the bar.

The pub’s sound system is notoriously unreliable, frequently cutting out or generating feedback that makes me think of the opening scene of Scanners. This week it outdoes itself during round three when a speaker falls off the wall into the lap of someone on the team next to us. He says he’s uninjured “except my hand might be broken”, and after a pause to reattach the speaker to the wall we get back underway. I persuade my team-mates that the word dungaree comes from Bengali and not Hindi but against all our expectations we’ve held onto the lead. We are a single point ahead of Chris, Marcus and Evil Patrick, and it’s a rare week in which they finish outside the money so we are concentrating intensely as round four begins.

More royalty questions and our team of three republicans seems to see the prize slipping away. But somehow I know that Sandringham is in Norfolk and we’re feeling good. Then we have a question about the scorer of the most goals in a single world cup game. I know he was Russian, I know it was against Cameroon, and I also know it happened 13 years ago and there’s no way I’ll remember who it was. Fortunately, Stu does - it was Oleg Salenko and he was “awesome in Championship Manager 93” apparently. For the final question of the quiz we are given five postcodes and simply have to say what you would find at them. We know that two of them are Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, and that the final one is the very pub we are sat in, but have to make wild guesses for the other two. While the sheets are being marked, Marcus’s team tell us they put the London Eye for one of them, just for a laugh because they didn’t know it. To our horror and their delight, we got Downing Street and Buckingham Palace in the wrong order, and the London Eye was correct. We can hardly bear the tension as the scores are read out but we’ve managed to hold on for our first win in ages.

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.

Just three days after our last outing, we’re back at the Prince of Wales for a one-off charity quiz. It’s strange being in the PoW on something other than a Tuesday night, and the quiz is also a little bit different to the strictly-followed PoW format of two rounds, then a beer round, then two more rounds and then the snowball. We have eight rounds this evening, and we also have a joker which we can play to double our score on any round if we feel really confident.

The first round sees dissent breaking out. A question about the author of The Log from the Sea of Cortez splits me and Stu, with me being as sure that it’s Hemingway as Stu is that it’s Steinbeck. I am holding the pen so I write down Hemingway. Then, just as we’re about to hand in the paper, I have a crisis of confidence and tell Stu he can change it if he wants. He declines the opportunity. The answer is Steinbeck. I blame Stu for not changing the answer.

The second round is science and technology. I’m an astronomer and Oli has a degree in science studies (which is of course about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds) and so we play the wildcard. As question one is read out, the quizmaster says “Oh, and by the way, when we said science and technology, we meant science and nature”. Most of the questions are about animals, and we feel deeply aggrieved that we played our wildcard.

But we still manage a decent score, and find ourselves in the lead at this point. Unfortunately I have to leave before the end of the quiz, missing the geography round on which I’d surely have excelled, and surely because of that we finish the evening (so I’m told later) in second place. I also miss the snowball, which normally involves a single ticket drawn for terrifyingly high stakes, but in this charity quiz involves multiple draws for more modest prizes. I am hugely disappointed to learn that Oli’s number was drawn, and his question was about the subject he is least equipped to face a question on: football. How I wish I’d seen his face when he heard it.

To everyone’s astonishment I arrive first this evening. I bag a spot by the fireplace and give evils to two people sat at a nearby table, hoping they’ll be leaving before the quiz. But it turns out they are two friends of Pete’s so all is well.

We start reasonably well, especially when the first question asks which country had identical twins for its president and prime minister until October this year. We asked almost the same question more than a year ago so we know it’s Poland, and at the end of the first round we’re in third. The second round is good - we can name all four Shakespeare plays in which ghosts appear, and we only drop points on the final questions, when we can only name three of the five tube stations named after pubs. Going into the beer round, we’re sharing the lead with three other teams.

To earn a free round at the bar this week, we have to identify the golfer from the menu they chose for the US Masters Champion’s Dinner. Oli is disgusted - he thinks we have no chance and wants us to hand in an empty answer sheet. But then we realise that most of the answers are quite easy thanks to the validity of crude national stereotypes. Paella? Olazabal. Haggis? Must be Sandy Lyle. Burgers is Tiger Woods, and wiener schnitzel and black forest gateau must be Bernhard Langer. The only one we struggle with is one which is obviously a Canadian because it involves elk, but who the hell knows any Canadian golfers? It turns out Stu does. For the tie-break, we have to say how many of Ferdinand Magellan’s crew actually made it around the world. Averaging our guesses gives us 27. The answer is 18, we’re closest and even with six of us we can just about squeeze a whole round out of £15.

Things take a turn for the worse in round three. The only bright spot for me is an astronomy question - Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka hold up whose trousers? They are the three stars of Orion’s belt, but we’ve somehow slipped into fifth place. All socialising is off in round four as we try to claw our way back into the prizes. After much argument we decide it’s Noel Coward and not Ian Fleming who is buried in Firefly Hill, Jamaica, and we end up in third. But it’s joint third and we need another tie break. How many chinchillas went into the making of Madonna’s favourite coat? Again we apply the average theory for a guess of 67, but for once it lets us down as apparently only 40 were required, and the other team put 30. Thus robbed, we flounce out of the pub in disgust.

It’s us in the hotseat again. Due to a series of miscommunications between us in the previous few days, we turn up to find we’ve got 70 questions between us instead of the required 40, and we have some whittling to do before things get under way. In the best tradition of quiz setting, about half of my questions self-indulgently reference my recent holiday, so I scrap about half of those in the cull.

At the end of the night, there is still over £1000 in the snowball. And, for the first time ever, Stu’s number comes up. Unfortunately for him, it’s a question about an architect who designed a fountain at Chatsworth House. Stu’s chance of a grand is gone, and the second ticket drawn belongs to none other than Evil Patrick. His questions asks for the father and son who were both prime ministers and who were not the Pitts, because everyone knows them. Patrick thinks for a few seconds, then his eyes flash red and he says “Greville”. Actually, the answer is Grenville, but his answer is judged close enough and he wins £500.  Even in the Prince of Wales, no-one is pedantic enough to begrudge him the winnings for the sake of one letter. Except me. A bit.  Once Patrick’s taken his money, there is £666 left in the pot…

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