Is your brain fit enough for Mensa?

I think of myself as being quite clever, but I'm discovering that one way of availing oneself rapidly of that opinion, is by trying out for Mensa,

It's the Wolverhampton-based organisation for the smartest of the smart's 70th birthday this year, and so to help them celebrate I thought I'd give them a good laugh by attempting their gruelling entrance quizzes. And boy, they really are something – well over 200 questions and tasks ranging from the elementary to the fiendish.

• Try our mini Mensa quiz at the bottom of the article.

If I succeed, which felt pretty unlikely for the hour and 45 minutes it took to complete the test, I will be invited into the top two per cent of the IQ community, and join fellow Mensans like Carol Vorderman, Brendan 'Mrs Brown's Boys' O'Carroll (I must confess to being quite surprised by that one), Isaac Asimov and Major Charles Ingram, the man who attempted to rip off Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Sir Clive Sinclair is Honorary President.

An interesting mix, for sure, and there's an interesting mixture of people taking the tests too, ranging from mid-teens to early 70s. One chap, I overhear, has travelled from North London to be there.

I get chatting to a few of them in the mid-session interval (all of us wearing the same vague look of shellshock) and find that some of them are actually taking the test in secret because they are embarrassed to admit it to their family, which kind of makes the whole thing sound clandestine and exciting.

Some say they are doing it to boost their self-esteem – they clearly did rather better than I did then. Jane Pallister, a business consultant from Rugeley, is one of my fellow try-outs.

"A client of mine mentioned it and I was curious," she tells me. "I don't think I'll get in but it's interesting to know what my IQ is. It was quite tough at times, I had to skip a few questions.

"The shapes and patterns were a little bit out of my sphere."

The 'shapes and patterns' test is the Culture Fair Scale test, which consists of pictorial and diagram tests and is more suitable for people for whom English is not a first language – one of the other try-outs, for example, is Polish. The second, much longer Cattell III B Scale test is more rooted in understanding of language and problem-solving. Both of them are equally nightmarish, but I feel like I did okay on the language one. I'll get laughed at if I didn't.

Between tests I have a brief chat with the invigilator, Mark Gallacher (and there's a lot of invigilating to be done – you have to put your pen down as soon as each sub-test's time is up, and not look at the tests still to come, which some people don't seem to understand). He tells me that when Mensans get together, far from sedate affairs in which mathematical formulae are discussed, they can actually get quite boozy. Sounds like my kind of high IQ society.

I decide to investigate further and pay a visit to the Mensa offices on St John's Square, which I'm pleased to find is stuffed full of quiz books, mental games and gadgets. Wolverhampton has been Mensa's home for 40 years, so my first question for Ann Clarkson, the organisation's communications manager is: Why? After all, Wolverhampton is not exactly known for its smart people..

"You'd be surprised," she laughs. "You find smart people everywhere. Most people assume that Mensa is based in either Oxford, where it was founded, or London. It's a talking point when they find out it's here."

What becomes apparent from my chat with Ann is that there isn't a Mensa 'type – they have members who are only two years old, which is slightly unnerving. Mensans are just like you and me, and do indeed enjoy a big, big-brained night out.

Ann says: "They don't walk around with a sign on their head saying, 'Mensa member'. You could walk into a bar and there could be a Mensa meeting going on – you wouldn't notice it.

"But yes, they can be very entertaining.

"Mensa members have a very unique sense of humour. Jokes tend to follow a certain thread before you get to the punchline – Mensa members have a tendency to be three steps ahead and get to the punchline first. They congregate together because they get each other."

So don't try telling a Mensa member a joke then.

The tests spend two to three weeks to process and I spend most of them chewing my nails and trying to imagine how badly I did.

When the letter finally arrived, I opened it with trembling hand, and was astonished to find that I had passed, scoring 153 in the Cattell III test, which puts me in the top two per cent, and 142 in the Culture Fair test, which means I am in the top one per cent.

I made it into Mensa! I am officially clever! And very pleased with myself.

Now, I believe somebody said something about drink-ups...

• SCROLL DOWN FOR THE ANSWERS

1: 16. The numbers 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 are squared.

2: Sea.

3: Realistic

4: Do, to give dodoes, cordoned, godown and outdoing.

5: 65. A circle is worth 22, a triangle is worth 15 and a square is worth 13.

6: 8. The number is the amount of alphabetical places between the first and second letter.

7: B. These letters appear from left to right on the bottom row of a keyboard.

8: 6. Moving clockwise along each edge, subtract the alphabetical value of the second letter form the first letter to give the number.