Guess where I was last night! Did you answer: “At a quiz”? I can give you only half a mark for that, because that’s the way people score in quizzes. Get two words the wrong way round in a Sartre quotation, or identify the wrong body part that dominated a key segment of the Paris Hilton video, and they penalise you this many points, depending on their mood and how persuasively you plead. It’s as if the quizmasters are courtroom judges and you’re Perry Mason raising an objection: they say “sustained” or “overruled” on a whim, and there’s no recourse.

The quiz was a fund-raising event for PEN, a marvellous organisation that supports writers, opposes political censorship around the world and does everything it can to uphold the values of literature, short of banning Jeffrey Archer from writing again.

Lest you think I mention this quiz as a roundabout way of boasting about how our team from The Times won, let me say straight away that we didn’t. The publisher HarperCollins did. At the half-way stage we stood third, but had somehow slipped back by the end. Who knows? Maybe all the other teams were being marked in the quiz equivalent of dog years, earning seven points to our every one (Quizmaster: “Objection overruled!”).

Disappointingly — my having just learnt the entire Alpha-Bravo-Charlie Nato Phonetic Alphabet from my son’s Dangerous Book for Boys — I was hoping to nab some easy points with a question on how to spell, say, “PEN” in the Nato alphabet (Hah! Simple! It’s “Papa, Echo, Nodule”!). But the question never came.

Now I come to think of it, I can only give you a quarter point for your answer to my opening question, because although I did, indeed, attend the quiz “last night” as I now write, it actually took place on Monday evening; that is, the night before last. What? No, sorry: overruled! So why did I say last night? Because that’s what we journalists do when we want to make something sound “hot off the press”, which is the technical journalistic jargon for saying, “the most recent thought I had in my brain when the editor commissioned me to write a piece”.

It’s one of those bits of journalistic shorthand, like “research shows . . .”. In fact, one of the most popular forms of research in newspaper offices is to quiz colleagues about their views on an issue that happens to be exercising the nation that very day (“hot off the press”) — though, obviously, we don’t then just write what these colleagues say into our newspaper article, because that would be unprofessional. No, we diligently and rigorously crosscheck this information by asking a completely different set of colleagues in another part of the office, “Do you think that — if I were to publish this stuff that Johnny and Tim just told me on their way out to lunch as, you know, actual fact — anyone would sue?”

Given such a dogged commitment to factual accuracy, I can’t believe we didn’t win. Can you? (Answer carries one point).

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