Sunday, 6pm: to the pub quiz at the Uxbridge Arms in Notting Hill. A funny time for a pub quiz, you might think, but it used to suit me down to the ground. It was, when I was married, more or less the only time I was allowed out of the home, even though, as my wife never failed to remind me, it fell smack in the middle of feeding-children-and-putting-them-to-bed-time. Oh really? I would say, although this, I have to say, constituted one of its chief attractions. But I felt that as I had done a lot of the feeding-children-and-putting-them-to-bed stuff for the previous six days of the week, I could afford to take an evening off.

Now that I no longer have the impetus of flight from the family home to shoot me into the pub, it must follow that I only go there for the pleasure of it. Which, as I type those words, somehow does not strike me as quite the right way of putting it.

It is not like other pub quizzes. There is a fluctuating but generally stable hard core of about a dozen regulars, and we mingle among each other to form teams of, depending how many people are there, between two and four. The main objective among teams is not to be saddled with S-, a very nice lady who parts company with reality on or around her third glass of Pinot Grigio, and E-, who is best described, unfortunately, as a cantankerous old ****. (He goes to India a lot in order, as far as I can gather, to let the local Hindus know that they have not, in fact, been reincarnated to a higher plane of existence, and that there is still plenty of suffering for them out there. When one of his visits coincided with the terrorist outrage in Mumbai, reaction in the Uxbridge was, shall we say, robust. "Jesus," said J-, the rich American, "you pay all that money and they still can't get rid of one little old guy.") Everyone puts two pounds into a half-pint mug; the winning team pockets what is left after the second-placed team, and the quizmaster, have been bought drinks.

So, winning the pub quiz can leave you seriously out of pocket. The idea is for the knowledgeable not to get above themselves. Newcomers and innocent bystanders are encouraged - no, bullied - into taking part. The young are particularly welcome, because they cannot pace their drinking, not that it would matter much if they could, for they know absolutely fuck-all about anything, especially as the quiz is set by the regulars, none of whom is ever going to see 45 again, and whose frame of reference reflects this.

However, such solidarity as exists among the regulars is at best superficial. The real point of the quiz, as far as I can see, is not to win, but for everyone to shout at each other. The casual observer might be forgiven for thinking that he had stumbled into a riot on a Saga holiday. (That was one of the questions once: What do the letters S-A-G-A in such a context stand for? No one admitted to knowing.) See that word in asterisks up there in the third paragraph? That one gets used a lot. Even the landlady gets into the spirit of the occasion. She can make the famously rude Norman Balon look as delicate as a courtier at Versailles. Once she had to go down to the gents to slap some Dulux on a peeling door. "Hello, L-," said M-. "Got the painters in?" "No, I'm always like this," she snapped.

As for the questions, the general idea is not to make them too obscure, but it is only the impossible ones that stick in the memory and can be recalled for the purposes of invective. Personally, I don't see what's so hard about that question from the first quiz I set - "List the following fielding positions in clockwise order, starting at 12 o'clock from a right-handed batsman's point of view: gulley, mid-off, midwicket, point, mid-on" - but I get stick about it four years down the line. Similarly, I do not think T-'s friendship-threatening extravaganza, when he played the intros to ten power ballads on his laptop and asked us to identify them, is going to fade from outraged memory for a decade.

The best thing about the Ux quiz is that it represents an atypical cross-section of British society. (I was going to qualify this with the proviso that lack of worldly success is a common theme, but then I remembered that James Lever, author of the Booker-longlisted Me Cheeta, sometimes shows up.) M- used to operate cranes but is now a minicab driver; E-, the cantankerous old ****, is a plasterer; T- is a sommelier; and I've forgotten what the rest do, if I ever knew, but you won't see them pulling up to the pub in brand-new Porsches. Tell you what - why don't you turn up yourself next Sunday? You'll learn some new swear words, and we could always do with your money.