UKMC, episode three: Interlude

With the competition only taking place in the mornings because we were piggybacking a chess tournament's rooms, I had Saturday afternoon free. Eventually, anyway, because as mentioned I was talking to Canadians while everybody else got to wander off for lunch - and that was only after waiting around for them to finish talking to Tony (who is one of the world's great talkers, as everyone knows, and can go on for hours if you give him half a chance). Meanwhile, Ray Keene did his best to persuade me to come to the prizegiving/gala dinner on Monday evening and I said I would (mainly because of my usual difficulty in saying no to people), despite having to work in Beeston on Tuesday. Then after leaving Simpson's, it occurred to me that I was on telly on Monday night and I would much prefer to be at home for that. So I made a mental note to tell them that I wouldn't be going to the dinner after all. But I decided to wait until after the competition had finished, just in case anyone had the idea of rigging the result so that the winner would be at the prizegiving.

Not that anyone would do that, of course. I'm joking. Please don't rig the result of any future memory championship to teach me a lesson, arbiters.

Anyway, I went to Victoria station for a late lunch - I love the food court there, a couple of times when I went to the MSO and stayed in a hall of residence nearby, I had my tea there every day. And then I went down the road to the Royal Horticultural Halls down the road, where this year's somewhat smaller-scale MSO was taking place. The Horticultural Halls are surprisingly devoid of any plant life, but a nice place for an MSO, featuring rooms of various sizes spread around the building, just right for all the various competitions.

There wasn't anything happening there on Saturday afternoon that I could compete in, but I went along anyway, just to say hi to all the usual MSO suspects - the dozen or so people who can still be found there every year. Everyone seems to still think of me as a usual suspect, too, even though I've barely shown my face at the MSO for the last few years. But after that, I decided to see a few sights, seeing as I was in London. I got a tube to Oxford Circus, intending to walk down Oxford Street to Charing Cross Road, check out all the bookshops, go down to Trafalgar Square and admire that big column thing, then walk back along the Strand to my hotel.

This was a pretty ambitious plan for me - I can't cope with London streets, even if I'm only planning to walk along three really big and well-known ones. I get confused and lost if I try to travel anywhere in London that isn't within sight of a tube station. I have taken the tube from Euston to King's Cross in the past.

However, on Saturday I set out on this adventure with great confidence, which was only slightly dented when I realised after quite a bit of walking that I'd turned the wrong way out of Oxford Circus and was headed down Oxford Street in the wrong direction. Never mind, I thought, I'm still seeing the sights, and I haven't really been down this end before very much, and when I get to Marble Arch I'll get the good old tube down to Tottenham Court Road. But when I got there, it turned out that Central Line services were seriously disrupted due to what the tannoy described as "a person under a train". So I got a bus instead. I practically never take London buses, and I should do it more often. And I got off at Tottenham Court Road and successfully completed the rest of my planned walk, so I felt hugely accomplished and metropolitan.

Then it was just back to the hotel to enjoy some abstract images practice and rather a lot of Sky One. Being a Virgin customer, I really miss being able to see some Simpsons episodes other than the handful that Channel 4 keep endlessly repeating with all the funny lines edited out, and even better, I got to see the new series of Gladiators!

New Gladiators is basically exactly the same as old Gladiators, which is exactly the way it should be. I'm hugely in favour of this! And I still want to be a Gladiator when I grow up. Maybe once I've won the world memory championship I'll turn my attention to bodybuilding.