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…

Try our questions here.

The team tonight is me, Stu and Pete. We agree that it’s been a while and it’s definitely time we won, or at least got some money out of our evening. We start with a good first round, correctly identifying Jools Holland as the author of Barefaced Lies and Boogie-woogie Boasts, and Eric Gill as the sculptor of the statue outside Broadcasting House. I say that as if we all know all about Eric Gill, but actually I’ve never heard of him and I don’t think Pete has either. Stu’s the man with the necessary ridiculously obscure knowledge this evening.

Somehow in round two we avoid our normal collapse. Pete knows enough about hockey to say that it starts with a pushback, and between us we manage a pretty good stab at naming all the British winners of the Nobel Prize for literature. We don’t manage to work out the animal whose name is also the acronym for the Harry Potter equivalent of A-levels, which turns out to be newt rather than toad. We decide to have a few bitter recriminations, as I say I knew it would have a W in it and the others demand to know why I didn’t mention that. I did, but they weren’t listening.

When the results are read out, we’re in second, but Chris is tonight’s quizmaster and he seems to have taken some kind of offence at our team name and states very clearly that we are not going to win tonight. We thought no-one would be too upset by our comment on some Liberal Democrat leadership issues, but it seems Chris might be a hardcore Ming fan.

Can we even hold onto second place? Round three is pretty tough but a question asking for all the countries that border Algeria is a big help. I love this kind of question and we get all six right (Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritania, Mali and Niger). And after much scribbling and disagreement, we also manage to name seven of the last eight foreign secretaries. The only one we miss out is the man who is in the job right now - his name’s Milliband or something, apparently.

As round four progresses, we discover that Chris is not a diehard Campbellite, but that Marcus has been spreading the vicious rumour that the ‘old git’ was Chris and that ‘ginger pisshead’ refers not to Charles Kennedy but to Evil Patrick. At least two other regular quiz setters think that ginger pisshead might refer to them. Patrick seems very offended that someone might call him ginger. We set the record straight, but still we don’t win - second place is ours, though, and we each go home £4.33 richer.

The team tonight is me, Pete, Stu and Stu’s new flatmate Ian. In their youth, Stu and Ian appeared on an Irish schools quiz television programme, losing in the first round but apparently in the most exciting round ever seen, in which they clawed back a 17 point deficit to take the lead with seconds to go, only to be retaken at the very last possible moment after a cheeky interruption from their opponents. Given this auspicious quizzing history we should surely be in contention tonight.

Ah, but it’s one of Evil Patrick’s quizzes. We won one of them once, but that was an unusual Patrick quiz because it wasn’t dominated by poetry and classics, and the sort of cerebral, cultural questions that young folk like us struggle with. Tonight’s is, but despite mostly guessing in the first round, we find ourselves second. Pete arrives incredibly late but just in time to tell us that the radio station that stopped transmitting on 30 September 1967 was not Radio Luxembourg but the BBC Home Service. How does someone in his mid-20s know such things?

We had thought that if we did really badly in the first round we might actually improve in subsequent rounds, but having come in second we know it’s all downhill. We’re asked which company, ‘appropriately’, Helen Sharman was working for before she became the UK’s first astronaut. I say Mars, my team-mates say Comet. I’m sure it’s Mars but I decline an invitation to veto comet, saying I’ll be happy just to be insufferable if Mars is the right answer. It is, and Comet is not just wrong but so wrong the quizmaster singles us out for specific ridicule. As people laugh almost hysterically at us, I don’t have a single word to say.

By the fourth round we need to make up six points even to get back into third place. It looks like an impossible task, and it proves to be just that. I try to save the day by claiming that the definition of callipygean is fat-arsed. Unfortunately it actually means ‘nice-arsed’ and Patrick says that anything derogatory about arses doesn’t get any points. We finish fifth again.

A snowball pot of over a grand and a half drives people to madness, and Stu goes over the edge with a five ticket purchase. It doesn’t help him - the first question is answered wrongly but the second question finally sees some money taken out of the pot. The question is which were the two states before Alaska and Hawaii to be admitted to the US, and the man whose ticket was drawn whips out a pen and paper and starts drawing crazy doodles to help him remember them. I’m sure this is outside the rules but he scribbles uninterrupted and eventually goes for Arizona and New Mexico. It’s the right answer and he’s £500 richer. There will still be £1000 or more in the pot next week.

I am an astronomer. Astronomers need to use telescopes. Telescope application deadlines come twice a year, every year, at the same time of year, without fail. Somehow I have never quite got to grips with this system, and this year I decided to go on holiday to far-flung parts of Eastern Europe just before the October deadlines. Thanks to this poor timing and resultant two weeks of working late, I haven’t been quizzing for a month. So tonight, I’m raring to go.

Our team title, let me specify clearly, is suggested by Oli this week. Unfortunately whatever comic impact we might have hoped for is lost when the quizmaster reads it out as ‘general election’ after the first round and then calls us ‘Gordon Brown etcetera’ for the rest of the night. As happens quite often, we’re in the lead after the first round, helped on the way by my recollection of the first syllable of ‘I’s name from Withnail and I. It takes me the whole round to get anywhere near it - I ignore all the other questions and simply make sounds beginning with M as I struggle to remember it. I get as far as ‘Mar’ before we have to hand it it, so we put Marwick. The answer is Marwood but the quiz master is generous enough to give us a point for it.

But from the lead there’s only one way to go, and week after week we find ourselves hurtling down the order as the rounds progress. It happens so often that it’s probably purely psychological now, and even if round two started by asking for the capital of France we’d probably get it wrong these days. By the end of the night we’re in a disappointing fifth, eleven points off the lead.

There is still the snowball. The pot is now so huge that the top prize is limited to £1000. Across the way from us, a team of despicable poolers have bought twenty tickets between them and seem to be thinking about getting the smuggest member of their team to have a crack at the question if any are drawn. Luckily their numbers don’t come up for the first question, which asks who is the third longest-serving manager in the Premiership, after Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger. The person on the stand doesn’t get it but one of the despicable poolers knew it. The second question names two albums and asks which band released them. Again, the person on the stand doesn’t know, and this time the entire team of despicable poolers shouts out “Whitesnake”. It seems they have very dodgy music tastes as well as a highly unethical approach to pub quizzing. The third question asks for the country whose name means hippo and whose capital’s name means crocodile. I’d have guessed Mali, which turns out to be the right answer. But the whole pot rolls over to next week, and even if someone wins £1000, there will still be several hundred pounds left.

I am writing this entry weeks and weeks after the quiz. Can I still maintain the use of the present tense to give readers the sense that all the action is happening right now? Probably not. I can’t remember anything about the quiz - I think I’ve given up remembering stuff about evenings at the Prince of Wales because I normally write it down. I think we finished third, though. Or maybe we won. I’m pretty sure none of us won the snowball though.