Cloth cap and whippet

I've spent a lot of today sorting out the things people are going to memorise at Cambridge. The random words was fun, if horribly time-consuming. I have an Excel spreadsheet that picks random words from a list of about 50,000 English words, but for the competition I had to pick out the reasonably common ones - I like to think I've got a pretty cromulent vocabulary, but there are plenty of big words that thing comes up with that I've never heard of.

Having done that, then they need to be translated into German. Which means rejecting another bunch of words if the dictionary can't find them or can't provide a one-word synonym (had to lose 'whippet', because the best translation I could find online was 'kleiner Rennhund'). And then there's agonising over whether it's more or less difficult in the two different languages. In my considered opinion, based as it is on my imperfect grasp of German, the two versions are about as equal as it's possible to get in terms of how commonly used the words are, how easy it is to confuse a word with a similar one, and so on. And they're all spelt right, I can promise that much at least.

I've also finished off the names and faces papers - roughly one third English names, one third German and one third international. Again, with the same difficulty level whichever of the two main languages is your first, scrupulously measured. That just leaves the spoken numbers to generate and record (on my laptop and on cassette in case of technological disaster - no translations here because there isn't the time or the technology, but I need at least two different sets of 100 and 200 digits in case something goes wrong) and the historic dates to do (relatively easy, although again the German translations are a headache).

Organisers of memory competitions always get blamed for everything that goes wrong, and get no credit for everything that goes right. It's like being a football referee.