Back in the swing

I really haven't posted enough on this blog, lately. I'm going to have to fix that - I never did do a full write-up of the MSO championship in London in August, nor my holiday in the Azores in September, and I haven't at all mentioned that now it's October and I'm in France for the French Open Memory Championship.

Well, I'm in France right now. It's the French Open Memory Championship at the weekend, and I'm feeling entirely happy about things. Not my chances of winning the competition, because I've done literally no training for longer than even I can remember, but I'm downright delighted with my ability to find my way around places today! After an early start this morning to get the plane from Birmingham, I arrived in Paris early on, found the airport train station was temporarily closed, got a bus from the airport into the city centre, successfully found a comic shop that sells this week's American comics (allowing me to buy Powers of X #6 before anyone spoiled it for me, although as it turns out there's nothing really spoilerable in it anyway), then got on a train pointed in the direction of Cergy and got off at the first stop to see if it looked like the kind of place where my hotel and the competition venue might be. And it was - the hotel's practically right next door to that station, and it was only on a last minute whim that I got off at the first Cergy station rather than the middle one of the three!

And in the kind of situation that always makes me nostalgic for the days when I went to memory competitions more regularly, I was greeted by someone in the hotel reception whose face looked familiar, said it was great to see him again, acted like I was in a great hurry to get to my room and said I'd see him a little later, looked through old photos on Facebook until I was fairly sure who I'd been talking to, and now can confidently go to the "Optional Pre-Registration / Enregistrement facultatif" at the nearby competition venue in a couple of hours, nonchalently say "Hi again, Preeda", and then all the other strangers in the room will believe that since I know one person's name, I know all their names too, and all kinds of social awkwardness will be avoided.

Unless they read my blog, of course, but I don't imagine anyone still does that. After all, I never post here any more.