Hillsborough is a very hilly place

I hadn't considered it before, despite it being my ancestral homeland, but the 'hill' part of Hillsborough is probably because there's lots of ups and downs there. Anyway, it was to the Hillsborough area of Sheffield that ten othello players flocked this morning for the latest regional tournament. I flocked rather later than the others, not having got out of bed in time to get the early train, and also didn't bring my othello set as I'd promised because I couldn't find one of the boxes of discs (no good ever comes of tidying up your flat for the benefit of Japanese TV crews). I didn't think that'd be a problem, though, since we always have enough boards, but it turned out that this was the one tournament where we didn't.

Lately we've become very uncoordinated at getting boards, clocks etc to the people who can bring them to the next event - this is almost certainly Geoff's fault for moving to Denmark and leaving the uncoordinated British to their own devices. Still, we improvised with three good boards, one rubbish titchy Character board and one i-phone othello app. There also weren't any transcript sheets, so we weren't able to preserve our games for posterity.

I arrived in time to find Iain waiting for our game - we played our game inside while the rest of the gang were out in a conservatory where the light was too bright to see anything and the temperature was somewhere in excess of 100 degrees, and I ended up winning. I'm not sure how, exactly, but it's the end result that counts. That's the first game Iain has lost in a regional this year, after draws with me in Oadby and Ian in London.

The tournament moved inside before everyone melted, to the main room of the pub - we weren't paying anything for the venue, but did have to put up with the general background noise. I proceeded to lose to Roy and Steve, as I generally do far more than I really should, while Ian drew with Iain again to head the leaderboard at lunch. After that, I beat Kali, wiped out Ali again, as I also did in London, and then followed it up by beating Ian in a completely awesome game that I wish I'd written down - I made lots of moves of the kind that common sense dictated would eventually go horribly wrong but never did. It was either a moment of inspired genius or the kind of game that would make the othello program wZebra swear at me and call me an idiot. Then I came alarmingly close to losing to Rob but somehow managed not to, to finish with five wins out of seven, and third place half a point behind the Ia(i)ns. Which is really quite cool.

It seems to me that just about every othello competition I ever attend can be summed up as "I beat the winners but lost to Roy and Steve". I need to find a way to stop doing that. Especially the losing-to-Roy-and-Steve part.