Run Your Own London Pub Quiz

London does its gathering indoors for half the year. The light goes early over the Thames, the bus windows steam up, and by six the pavements outside every station are full of people deciding where to shelter. It is a city of villages stitched together by the Tube and the night bus, and each village has its own local, its own regulars, its own table by the radiator that everyone wants.

The pub quiz belongs to that geography. On a Tuesday in Walthamstow or a Wednesday in Brixton, a room of strangers splits into teams with names that are mostly puns, and for two hours the city's oldest argument (who knows best) is settled with a biro and an answer sheet. Nobody is too clever for the music round. Somebody always knows the capital of Burkina Faso and is unbearable about it.

It only happens because somebody turns up to run it. The quizmaster with the crackling microphone, the folk trio in the back room, the comic trying out ten new minutes upstairs in Camden: they are what keeps a weeknight in London from being a night in. Go out on a Thursday. Buy a round. Clap for the tiebreak.