But for reasons which are about to become clear, I can hardly remember the actual quiz. The reasons are snowball tickets number 45 and 46, which I bought way back in round two. It’s been almost six years since we started coming here, I’ve bought one or two tickets every single time, and my number comes up about once a year on average. Every time it does, I get some stupidly hard joke of a question about cricket, fail to even guess, and go home humiliated. Then the following week some other bastard normally gets a laughably easy question about physics or geography and takes home wads of cash. Actually winning the snowball has become a distant, impossible dream. I hardly know why I buy tickets any more – it only means that every Tuesday ends in bitterness. But I do. We all do.

Tonight, the prize fund stands at £1000, as it has done for a long time. Remarkably my number comes up, for only the sixth time. I sidle up to the front, already wondering what nightmare question might be. If it’s about cricket, I think I might punch Marcus to the ground and run out of the pub, never to return. I feel horribly certain that even if it’s not cricket, it will be ridiculously obscure. In times past I’ve been actually shaking with nerves when my number came up, even when I was facing a maximum win of £67, but tonight I feel quite relaxed.

Which African country has a lowest point that is higher than any other country’s lowest point?

Wow. Did Marcus really just say that? Forget punching him to the ground – I almost have to stop myself kissing him. I hear myself saying “Lesotho”, before I’ve even had time to consciously realise that I know the answer. Then I have a second or two of horrific, crushing doubt. Did I mishear the question? Is Lesotho actually right? Have I just made an idiot of myself in front of the whole pub, again?

“…is the right answer!”, says Marcus, and I almost collapse to the floor in shock. I can hardly believe even that my number came up, let alone that I could answer the question, still less that it’s just made me £1000 richer.

The rest of the evening passes in a haze of geeky happiness that knowing obscure trivia can bring such rewards. Now I know what winning the snowball feels like, I might up my stake to a fiver each week. Pretty soon, I’m sure, my numbers will start coming up as often as Evil Patrick’s and Annoying Dave’s do, and I’ll have to call myself Shitty Roger or something.

Actually, it’s much more likely that I won’t win anything else until 2016, so I will enjoy this moment of triumph for quite some time. I laugh loudly to myself all the way home.

Postscript

I’ve decided to finish on a high note, and this is my last dispatch from the Prince of Wales. Thanks for reading – see you in the pub any Tuesday you care to drop by.

I have no idea what it must mean, then, when round four sees us plunge back down to 8th. Disappointed, I head back to the office for a few more hours of work.

As a result, I contribute almost nothing and we finish poorly. Must remember to keep cycling and quizzing separate in future.

There is only one way to go from here. Round two is a bunch of questions which have an easy answer and a hard answer. We are big enough fans of the Manic Street Preachers to name both their songs which have “Life” in the title (and they are both masterpieces), and there’s a cricket question for Ivan as well. We hold narrowly on to the lead.

But then we begin to slip. The patron saint of Jersey, we guess, is St. Helier, but then there’s a question about a sitcom which ran from 1979 to 1981 and then returned in 2007. We argue fiercely, very very nearly write down To The Manor Born and then decide to write down the wrong answer instead. We fall to second.

Can we retake the lead in round four? It does contain a travel/geography sort of question, and I do like them, but the question is what are the five most populated islands entirely in the western hemisphere. Many options are considered, some plausible and some implausible. One that we didn’t consider at all was Long Island. We did get Cuba, Hispaniola, Ireland and Puerto Rico, but it’s not enough. We are three points off the win, and have to content ourselves with 12 pounds for second place.

Luckily our form improves, and we get into second place. The beer round answers are all cricket grounds, but even Ivan doesn’t know that the SWALEC stadium is one of the test cricket grounds. I don’t even understand what test cricket is, let alone where it’s played, but I berate him anyway.

We finish the quiz in joint third place. The quiz masters have overrun a little bit and decide that it’s not worth a tie-break to sort out who wins the five pounds of prize money, and we get £2.50 for our efforts – 83.3p each for me, Ivan and Oli. It’s probably the smallest prize we’ll ever get at the Prince of Wales.

By the time of the beer round it’s clear we’re not going to be troubling the money, so we concentrate hard in the hope of salvaging something from our evening. It’s an excellent beer round – the quiz master showed his small children some classic album covers and noted down their descriptions of them, and now we have to name the classic album from the descriptions. We get Led Zeppelin IV, Velvet Underground + Nico, Parklife by Blur, Screamadelica by Primal Scream, and Autobahn by Kraftwerk despite me trying to convince the others that it might have been Man-Machine. The description mentions cars, so why would it be anything by Autobahn? Luckily the others don’t listen to me.

We put down the wrong Blondie album for question six and end up with 11/12. But we are mismarked, given 12 and proclaimed the winners by a point. Moral debate ensues. We eventually decide to be honest. Stu goes to fess up, and we find ourselves needing the tiebreak if we want some drinks. But then the other team on 11 makes an appeal, saying their handwriting was misread. They actually got full marks, and the beer money is theirs. We are left merely with a round of applause for our honesty.

Being honest losers is no fun. Our morale is shattered and we finish in the mid-table.

Keith and Anne are setting the quiz tonight. Apparently their beer rounds have been rated as too hard so they’ve dumbed this one down especially. The first two answers are Jimmy Hoffa and Marie Celeste, and I feel sure the connection has something to do with the Osmonds. But it’s simpler than that, it’s just things to do with disappearances. We get all six questions right, and it’s down to the tiebreak. How long is the longest golf course in the world? We guess 779 miles and hand in our sheet. The answer is apparently required in kilometres but we can’t be bothered to multiply anything by 1.609 right now. We say, go with the flow. 779km will do. The answer is 1365km, but we’re closest anyway, and we enter round three with thirst slaked.

One of the questions in round three involves book titles of 2, 3, 4 and 5 letters. From their descriptions, If, Kes and Scoop are easy enough to get. But a book about a girl who dies in a boating accident we don’t know. I suggest “Gulp”. This is not correct. We find ourselves in joint second with three teams. Can we avoid fourth? Amazingly, we can. We’re helped by Keith and Anne’s usual grand prix question. Which sport’s championships have been decided for the last five years at the Autódromo José Carlos Pace? It’s Formula One, and second is ours.

Stu is in possession of the winning snowball ticket. Could we take second place, the beer round, and the snowball? If only it had been Pete’s ticket, we could have. He knows that Dundee United used to be called Dundee Hibernian. Stu doesn’t. It’s been more than five years now – surely our snowball time is coming.

We dominate in round one. We did this last time out as well, and we know the form: we will do really badly in round two and squander the five point lead. We all agree that this will be a difficult task, but we concentrate hard and manage to do it – after round two we’re in second. We’re impressed that we pulled this off and there are handshakes and congratulations all round.

Round three has a nice question about Harry Nilsson and Mama Cass – she died in his flat, as did Keith Moon, and everyone at the Prince of Wales knows this because every regular quiz setter seems to have asked this question. But who had hits in the 1990s with covers of their songs? That’s a bit more difficult, but I know my middle-of-the-road 90s chart successes. It was the Beautiful South, but despite this we drop another couple of points.

Furious arguments erupt in round four, and our answers are scribbled out so often that our sheet is more ink than paper when we hand it it. Purple quality streets – did they once contain hazelnuts and then brazil nuts, or the other way around? Jon and Bill Pertwee – did they co-star in Worzel Gummidge, Dad’s Army or Doctor Who? Ivan sneaks out for a cigarette to avoid getting involved in a fight, but ends up getting the casting vote when he comes back in. “Dad’s Army”, he says. Stu and I shout “no way!” and throw our arms up in disgust. “”OK, ok, Dr. Who”, he says. Oli and Pete shout “no way!” and throw their arms up in disgust. We put Worzel Gummidge.

It’s right, and we’ve snatched back first place. It’s our first win since 2008. We are overjoyed, but cold water is soon poured on our excessive celebrations when David tells us actually he mis-marked and we should have been second. We should probably feel a bit deflated by that, but we decide that even a false win is better than the miseries of fourth.

We start the quiz on blazing form. We know everything in round one, except for one question – what was the first oscar-winning film to have an all-male cast? We think it might be “12 Angry Men” – luckily Stu arrives just before the end of the round and tells us it’s “Lawrence of Arabia”. We’ve got full marks and a three point lead. Surely we’re going to win.

But it’s all downhill from there. By the end of the second round we’re only in joint first. The third round sees Ivan get a cricket question wrong, and us stumble into fourth. We’re not far off the money and our table is a scene of grim concentration during round four. It does no good – we continue the Slump and finish fifth. It’s a disastrous start to 2010.

It doesn’t look like we will at first. Ivan’s round is pretty tough, and it includes a question about Rome. Who or what are the biancocelesti? We haven’t got a clue and I’m having flashbacks to a time when Ivan set a whole round about Rome in which two teams scored no points at all, and we almost got lynched. The biancocelesti are Lazio football club, as it turns out. We manage to score three points, and decide not to lynch Ivan, for now.

The beer round questions are completely beyond us, but we still end up arguing fiercely about the tie-break. It’s a list of food items, and Pete wants to know how much more the list would cost in Waitrose than in Sainsburys. Oli and I pointlessly manage to come closest to the right answer, but we didn’t get any of the questions right, which is unfortunately a prerequisite. We buy our own drinks.

Stu’s questions make a few references to places he’s just been on holiday. This should give us a slight advantage, and we get a question about Argentina easily enough. But which country did Eliza Lynch become the empress of, in the mid-19th century? Not Argentina again, surely. Brazil had emperors, we think, so we put that. But I’m forgetting, despite hearing from Stu while he was there, that he went to Paraguay on his South American travels.

By end of round 3 we are in fifth, and have a chance of making fourth. But it’s not to be, and we slip disastrously down the field to end in 7th. And so our hopes fall once again on the snowball. We would be outraged if Evil Patrick’s number were to be drawn; we’re even more outraged when it’s Stu’s number. Luckily it’s yet another impossible question, and another ticket is drawn. It’s Evil Patrick’s. Fortunately it’s too tough for him as well. A third hapless punter is called up, and they too fail to answer the question. The money rolls over again. It rolls and rolls and rolls, this snowball pot. It will yet be mine.