It's The Mind

I've finally got round to sending off my entry form for the Mind Sports Olympiad. Longtime fans will remember that I didn't go to last year's, for the first time since it started in 1997, and I did feel guilty about it. But this year I'm going for the classic MSO experience - staying in a student hall of residence like I used to in the early years when I didn't have any money, competing in lots of games that I don't even particularly like just so as to have something to do, late night poker, no TV for a week (got to dig out my little clock radio so I can have the pleasure of listening to slightly out-of-tune London radio stations all night), lots of unhealthy food, it'll be great.

I'm also almost certainly going to skip the last couple of days in order to go to the othello nationals in Crawley. Now that the WMC has been moved and I only have two major mind sports competitions clashing that weekend, it's only fair to go along to the othello after a week's MSOing. Especially since I'll have to do the treasurer's report at the AGM before the competition starts. Besides, there's still the outside possibility of qualifying for the British team at the Worlds in Japan in October, which I would really love to do. And although 'outside possibility' here means 'no chance whatsoever because I'm not nearly a good enough player even when I've been practicing rather than barely playing at all for months now', it's still enough to give me a gleam of hope in the eyes.

So come along to the Mind Sports Olympiad if you want to play me at azacru, stratego, pacru, acquire, othello, twixt, mental calculations, decamentathlon, entropy, abalone, boku and lots of poker, and to the British Othello Championship if you're British and want to play me at othello more than you can do at the MSO.

Incidentally, I still haven't written the memory tips that the Alzheimer's people asked me for. It should just be a matter of churning out a few bullet points of the usual waffle that everybody says in this kind of situation, but I want it to be actually profound and useful and meaningful. Which, as you might have noticed, isn't something I'm very good at.

(I do have something important and earth-shatteringly significant to write about, but I'm not going to just yet until it's all sorted out for fear of jinxing it. Updates shortly, hopefully. Now that's a cliffhanger worthy of Doctor Who, isn't it!)