In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay

 Yesterday was the grand final of the UK Excel Championship, live and in person in London! It all happened on the first floor of the Blue Fin Building in Southwark, with 29 Excel experts gathered around a big conference table with laptops, supervised by a whole lot of other Excel experts who did a really awesome job of running the whole show!

I was staying in the student hall of residence just next door, and very nice it was too, and so was there in ample time for the 10:00 arrival before the 11:00 start, as per the schedule.

Actually, the whole thing started rather late, although they made up the time very impressively by the end of the day. As I've said before about memory competitions and other things, if everything went according to plan I would have no idea what was going on. I like a bit of chaos at these things. And the worst technical problem seemed to be organisers' laptops that would either connect to the internet or to the big screen, but not both.

Still, Hadyn's bingo-card prediction of a late finish didn't come off, but the rest of his awesome predictions video was very impressive!

I note that he originally had me finishing fifth (as per my own goal for the championship set out in my last blog), but then downgraded me to ninth when he thought of a better way to calculate it. Shocking! But I did make sure to fulfil the other prediction that I'd bring a pack of cards. I wasn't planning to bring cards to an Excel competition, but having seen the video I made sure to do it anyway. I've generally kept quiet about being a memory man in the Excel community, but it's all common knowledge now, so that's my thing in Excel world until I become world champion at that one too.

The organising team are a very impressive mix of genius characters who manage to get everything done and look good while doing it...

And our first case of the day was written by the ever-humble Giles Male about his wardrobe of fur coats and dance troupe:

I did relatively okay at this one, but only managed the eighth-best result.

Ha Dang stood out straight away as being the man to beat, and kept that comfortable position all day!

I was feeling more hopeful about the second case, by Harry Watson, because his cases tend to be my kind of thing...

... but actually, I really made a mess of it. Mixed up a formula for one of the levels in a way I could have spotted with a basic bit of double-checking but didn't, and ended up way down the rankings. It was still a lot of fun, though!

So that was unimpressive, and I could have done a lot better. Not better enough to come close to troubling the top three, but still better than 14th. But never mind! We had one more big exciting task after lunch, this time by Harry Gross! And word had leaked out that it was going to be based around Alice in Wonderland, so my preparation for this competition (while everyone else was designing custom formulas for every eventuality and practicing hard) was to buy a copy of the book to read on the train down to London. Which I forgot to put in my bag.

I thought I did okay at this one, though again I could have been better with just a bit more attention to little details and picked up some extra points. Still, seventh-best was a new high for the day!

Lorenzo came close to knocking Ha off the top spot overall, but didn't quite get it. A well-deserved win, and some awesome performances all round! And I finished ninth, so Hadyn clearly knows better than me how good I am at Excel!

Ha wins a really awesome champion's belt, and a free trip to Las Vegas for the worldwide finals in December! And everyone else got prizes too - a medal for everyone, and our really cool name badges showing how long we've been using Excel were a real treat!

Yes, I remember when Clippy was new. There were alternatives to Clippy the paperclip that you could select, and I preferred one of those, but I can't remember which it was after all these years. And I remember when the ribbon was introduced and Ruined Excel Forever. I'm old.

But the very BEST prize was a custom T-shirt for the winners of each qualifying round and each case on the final day! And as the winner of "Old Money", the third qualifying round, I got this amazing design (courtesy of Jaq Kennedy) - 

This is far cooler than I could ever have expected. I wore my lucky Zoom-Zoom shirt to the championship, but that shirt is clearly only really lucky for memory competitions. From now on, this Old Money shirt is my lucky shirt to be worn at every Excel championship! I'll be the world champion before you know it!