The After Party

"It's the first trophy I've ever won!" whispered Ed next to me on the stage, proudly examining his prize for being the second-best of the two international competitors.

I stole the show, though, with my slightly less embarrassing best-international-entrant prizes - receiving in turn a certificate, a large box of milk-related goodies*, T-shirt and trophy, I balanced them all in a big stack in one hand to shake hands with the last prize-presenter, dropped the trophy lid on the floor, picked it up, staggered to the back of the stage, put the stack down on a table, knocked a glass of water over Ramon Campayo's laptop, went to mop it up with the T-shirt, tripped over a speaker and nearly went flat on my face. Charlie Chaplin has nothing on me.

But the show was great - we were entertained by backwards-talker Bernhard Wolff and magician Timothy Something**, which was fun even with a limited grasp of German (although journalist Josh, who doesn't know any German at all, was a bit lost). We need a show like that at the world championships in Britain, if only to make a few people pay attention to it for once.

Later, in the bar, Christian Schmitt beat me at chess - not normally a surprise given how terrible I am at the game, but worthy of note for the way that he did it without looking at the board, relying on hearing the moves and picturing the game position in his head. Another thing I'd love to learn how to do, but since I'm such a bad player it wouldn't be very impressive even if I could do it. Now, blindfold Othello, that might be something to learn. Put that on the list of skills to develop***.

Back home in cold, rainy England, and back to work tomorrow. I feel more like sleeping for a day or two, to be honest, but I need to go in if only to book some holidays and cancel the three days between WMC and MSO that were meant to be for rehearsing pi****. Really fired up about the WMC now, which is great - for most of the last year I've been feeling like I was never going to be that motivated about it (or anything else) again.

* The German equivalent of the Milk Marketing Board were sponsoring the event. I'm wearing a 'Milch' T-Shirt right now, and I've got another one proclaiming that I stand on milk girls, or something along those lines.

**Yes, I'm the World Memory Champion and I can never remember people's names. Want to make something of it?

***Backwards-talking has also been added to the list after that show. I'd love to be able to do that.

****Long story. Check out the Yahoo group 'memorysports' for the details if you really want to know, or I might talk about it a bit more here some time.