I’m on my way back from hosting a quiz in Worthing, a supposedly every-other-week gig which has rapidly turned into an almost-every-week commitment. [1]

I don’t mind, though. It’s actually quite hard to be a part time quiz host. You need to be there most weeks to build up a rapport with the regular teams, which – at most local pub quizzes – is pretty much everyone who takes part.

These teams take the quiz seriously. One, Tequila Mockingbird, even have their own monographed pens. Hosting feels like a great responsibility, like becoming Doctor Who, except with two dozen boomers who won’t be alive in twenty years for me to clean up by exploiting them and their money on the convention circuit.

I’m in a slightly awkward position, too, in the sense that I don’t actually write the questions.

And unlike a journalist who doesn’t write the headlines, whose article at least forms some kind of legitimate basis for the headline (at least at reputable publications), my personality and the personality of the guy who writes the quiz are actually fairly different.

Nevertheless, I have to own them, as it were, though on occasion I have had to do some desperate last-minute internet searching to clarify the wording of questions that don’t, to me, seem entirely watertight.

Tonight’s main cock-up, though, I can’t blame on the quiz-setter and his mildly contrasting question-writing idiom.

I don’t get the questions long before the quiz, and so sometimes I don’t get a chance to read them all in advance.

Tonight, though, I really should have done better than announcing round 3 was about “New Zealand’s famed director Peter Jackson” before checking if any of the questions were about where Peter Jackson is from.

Question 2: in which country was Peter Jackson born?

I did well here though – coming up with a replacement Peter Jackson themed question on the spot, without hesitation. Which was: which genre was the film that marked Peter Jackson’s directorial debut? [2]

For this, I was praised by the regulars for my quick thinking, much akin to the genius regularly shown by fictional television character Doctor Who. [3].

This was my fourth time hosting, and I’m getting used to the quirks of the quiz and its people. There is, for example, a creative round, involving people making things out of clay around a certain theme.

In the previous quizzes I have run, I have refused any kind of subjective round. In the quiz, things are either wrong or they are right, and the quiz master’s decision is final.

In this manner, facts become Schrödinger’s facts: they may be wrong, they may be right, but until you open the box, or in this case check your phone after the quiz finishes, the facts are both true and not true at exactly the same time.

Most sensible quiz-goers implicitly understand this, and don’t argue the toss.

But with clay, it feels like prejudice and favouritism are too easily in play.

With this in mind, I judge the clay round before I know who has won (or course: I’m not a monster); but I always hope it makes no difference to the overall standings.

And, so far, it hasn’t.

Let’s wade through the soup of time and remember my previous quiz hosting experiences.

The first quiz round I ever wrote was for my friend Paul’s family’s traditional Boxing Day quiz, which I had somehow wrangled myself into by a) being at their house already, drinking Archers and Lemonade, and b) no one having the heart to ask me to leave.

I wasn’t the overall quiz master, but as a bit of fun each attendee got to write their own, five-question round.

Being drunk, young, and an egotistical wannabe situationist, I made my entire round about my relationship history, with killer questions such as: “how many girlfriends have I had?”, and “how old is my girlfriend?”.

Everyone else’s questions were about sensible, middle class things, like the doomed Grand Slam career of Tim Henman.

A couple of years after this came my quiz hosting debut proper, at Woodies, the local pub in New Malden where myself and my friends – including Paul’s family – took part in the quiz most weeks, under the name Mr Wimpy, if me and my peers were around, or The Rat Pack, if it was boomers-only.

The regular setter was away and regular teams were asked to fill in. Myself and Euan, already frustrated Blue Peter presenters at 22, jumped at the chance to show our skills and our charm.

I remember one round in particular, which I was proud of as it involved a lot of local history.

But I didn’t know enough local history for a full 20 question round.

And so round 4 became “Piracy, Privateering, Scurvy and New Malden”.

The quiz went ok, but at the end one of the older charges, who may or may not been in local covers band Aged to Perfection, offered me some words to the wise.

He said, “look, most pub quiz teams are just here to have a good night out.”

“So make sure that 7-8 questions per round are pretty gettable.

“The last 2-3 really separate the wheat from the chaff.”

I remembered this six years later, when I started regularly hosting a quiz at the Rose & Crown pub in Stoke Newington, then rapidly gentrifying as the old mung bean radicals and queers moved out, and the Guardian editors and marketing professionals moved in.

Again, it was a case of sharing out the duties with other regular teams, but on a more permanent basis.

My co-host was Alan, a young posh [4] chosen one from the Guardian’s foreign desk. The foreign desk being the paper’s poshest desk, whose editors, when they came over to ask me to do something, I’d say yes, then spend half an hour trying to figure out what they’d said.

This was a problem, since Alan, who had written all our cleverest questions, wanted to co-host the quiz. As in, MCing.

It took one round of no one being able to understand what he was saying to change his mind.

As I said, this was gentrifying Stokey, but there were still some normal people about, for whom the public school accent was still a bridge too far.

I loved doing that quiz with Alan. He’s the one who encouraged me to go along in the first place, and I made some amazing friends along the way, at least one of whom I still know today.

But my God, the amount of time we spent on that quiz. It was insane. That shared google doc went through a billion alterations, and the music round was like a sacred playlist.

There was, of course, a chance we were taking it too seriously. But we were a good duo, me and Alan, and we never descended into full pseud.

And so, decades later, full circle. Back to quizzing, now with someone else’s questions, and not even a microphone to reinforce that I’m the loudest and therefore most authoritative person in the pub.

There is a book to be written on the strange rituals and etiquettes of the pub quiz. I don’t think I’m the person to do it, as in quiz hosting terms I’m still a baby.

But understand the quiz, and you understand a certain version of England.

And so, back in Worthing earlier tonight, and after the picture round, I put on Black Box Recorder’s “England Made Me”, and gazed around my tiny but proud domain of eyes down looking.

[1] This is cos the guy who has been running it for a number of years wants to keep it going, despite other pressing things happening in his life. This is community-minded and I respect that.

[2] Horror. Would also accept comedy horror and zombie, and, indeed, did.

[3] I know, I know. I’m just winding you up.

[4] Alan was a great guy, a fellow cyclist and indie nerd. And his accent wasn’t the full story; he was from Essex, a fact that was once met with this incredulous response from one Hackney geezer: “Essex! But you sound like Prince fackin’ William!