Things start badly in the first round. What instrument plays the solo part in Dvořák’s New World Symphony? I’m certain it’s the french horn. Oli is convinced it’s a Cor Anglais. He tries to convince me by imitating the sounds of the two instruments but I’m unmoved and write down “french horn”. Unfortunately Oli was right. I blame his poor musical instrument imitations for dropping us the points. Luckily it’s not all disaster, and we do know that Isla Robinson Crusoe belongs to Chile – I considered going there on my last trip to South America.

The beer round questions ask for the only country on the equator, the two countries named after products that came from them, the three with elements named after them, the four that are land-locked and the five that drive on the left. Question two also came up four years ago, and even now we somehow remember that we managed to not get Argentina. Is it tragic to remember questions from a quiz four years ago? Well, maybe, but no more tragic than knowing many of the things we know, or the fact that we spend good money most Tuesday evenings to cram ourselves into a hot sweaty pub and sit an eccentric exam for little or no reward.

So we get Argentina, and the Ivory Coast, and most of the rest. Our only problem is the elements. Francium and Americium we get, but somehow we can’t think what the third is. It’s self-kicking time when the answers are read out – Germanium seems way too obvious not to have got. It’s a pity, as we would have won the round if we’d have got it right – our guess about how many official languages there are among the world cup nations was almost exactly right. By averaging a mixture of stupidly high and stupidly low guesses, we often come uncannily close to the right answer.

Round three is a music round. I know none of the answers at all, with the exception of the final question. There seem to have been a few Manic Street Preachers questions at the Prince of Wales recently, and we’re treated to an excerpt from Australia now.

At the start of round three, we’re miles ahead of third and miles behind first. There’s not much chance of making up ground – we all have a list of world cup teams in front of us, and we know that all will be answers at some point. There are roughly ten that haven’t come up so we have a pretty good idea of the answers. The very last question of the night is the only football question of the night – which country went to war with El Salvador in 1969, a conflict triggered by rioting after a qualifying match for the 1970 world cup? Easy to get when Honduras is the only team left on your list of possible answers, but we actually knew it anyway. We finish second.