Sheffield Regional

I'm not sure why they still call the othello tournaments 'regionals'. They don't really represent any particular region, except in as much as they're all in different towns randomly scattered around the country. Anyway, I went to the Sheffield one today.

Missed the train I was intending to get because my bike had a flat tyre and I spent too long dithering over whether to go back upstairs, find my pump and fix it, or walk to the station. I walked in the end, but not quickly enough. I still got there before a couple of the other players, though, which was lucky because it gave us a moment to clear up a potentially awkward situation - Rob Stanton, the organiser, had been under the impression that I still live in Boston, and had told the owners of the building we were using to send an invoice to my old address.

The tournament took place in a strange little church-hall-style building called the Heeley Institute, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Sheffield. There were nine of us in all, when Aidan had managed to find the place halfway through the first round. I won my first couple of games against Rob and Aidan, which gave me great aspirations of winning the whole tournament and becoming a worldwide celebrity, but then lost three in a row against Geoff, Phil and Steve Rowe (whose surname wasn't meant to be a pun there), which rather squished those dreams. Phil had meanwhile been kicking every available ass and was winning in a very impressive kind of way.

We went for lunch after the third round, finding on the third attempt a pub that was both open and serving food. The people of Heeley obviously aren't keen on pub lunches. But it was a lovely day - summer's on the way! Apart from the occasional torrential downpour, of course, but they only lasted a few seconds before the sunshine took over again.

Anyway, back at the Institute, my impressive losing streak was enough to get me a bye in round six. Rob beat Phil, which put Phil level with Geoff on five wins, and after the final round they ended up sharing first place. Joel Blackmur (who, in a longstanding othello tradition, I avoided being drawn against) came third, and I survived an extremely complicated endgame to beat Roy 33-31 and end up joint 4th with Steve. So it could have been a lot worse.

If you gave it half a chance, what potato would not DANCE?

Latest thing that I like: Edward Monkton. Actually, it turns out to be one of those things that I discover and then find out that Jenny knows about already (see earlier posts on George Papavgeris and Lady Godiva (who, she informs me, is an ancestor of Boy Howdy, but it's just never come up in our conversations)). She sent me a card ages ago with the hair that wants to be a dragon on it. But my actual 'discovery' comes from the cafe/bookshop in the Eagle Centre, which has a range of brilliant cards in the window.

I'm particularly impressed by the way someone can make money by selling crude sketches of potatoes. There's hope for my artistic career yet!

Skiving

I didn't notice my alarm clock going off at all this morning, and woke up at 8:25, which is the exact moment I need to leave the house in order to catch my train. So rather than get the next one and arrive half an hour late, I took the day off. I'm contractually entitled to five days' bereavement leave after all, although my mum is doing all the work involved with funeral arrangements and things, so I honestly don't need to be off work. And sitting moping around the house is really not a good idea either.

Nonetheless, that's what I've been doing all day. I'm all moped out.

In the living years

My dad was one of those rare people who literally nobody had a bad word to say about. Except his immediate family, and that was only in an affectionate kind of way. But everyone really did like him, and with good reason. He never thought of himself, and spent his whole life helping other people out, just because that was the way he was.

He was a very recognisable kind of guy - short even by my standards (whenever he had to give his height, he always put 5'6", which he readily admitted was a rough guess, because he'd never measured himself. I'd say he was a good couple of inches less than that), always somewhat on the chubby side, bald on top from a very early age, with wild curly hair, big sideburns and a moustache. Which he'd had since he was twenty and never considered changing. His taste in clothing was similarly unchanging through the years - brown suede boots, brown trousers and a white long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up, open at the neck. Yes, even in the middle of winter, outside in a blizzard. He didn't feel the cold, but whenever the temperature got a few degrees above freezing he was horribly uncomfortable. And on those rare occasions when he had to wear a tie (he owned two or three of them, all square, knitted wool ones that might have looked more or less passable in the early 1970s) he always looked like he was on the point of collapse. During his teaching days, he had a photo taken every year (18 of them in all), and they're all exactly the same - the hair a little more sparse every time, turning from jet black to grey to pure white by the time he was fifty, but exactly the same pose, with toothy grin and twinkle in his eyes.

I think I've mentioned his chronic earliness on here before - he'd always arrive somewhere two hours before the time he'd agreed, he didn't like to stay up much past seven o'clock at night and was always up and about by three in the morning. He lived his life in fast-forward, so I suppose it's not all that surprising that he's died (heart disease) at the age of 59.

As a teacher, everyone agrees, he was something truly exceptional. He taught at Clinton Park primary school from 1971 till 1990, teaching and inspiring nine and ten-year-olds for generations. He would walk through town and have dozens of people of all ages say 'hello, Mr Pridmore!' One of his real passions in life was teaching people to spell and punctuate properly - NOBODY left his class without learning how to use an apostrophe. He always said he could teach anyone how to do it right in twenty minutes, and despaired of the way so few people made the effort to teach it. Once a week in the afternoon, he'd get his guitar out and sing to the class - he had a large and eclectic range of songs, from Ilkley Moor Baht 'at to Ellen Vannin to Football Crazy. He was always trying to learn the piano, but never got very far. He used to take me and my brother to the park in Horncastle and spin us around on the roundabout which (by accident or design, I'm not sure) also bounced up and down wildly, and sing "Sons of the sea, bobbing up and down like this"

He was a Sheffield Wednesday fan, having grown up just down the road from Hillsborough, but cricket was his sport of choice. Just a couple of years ago, he finally splashed out on Sky Sports, so he could watch all the Test Matches. It's nice to know that the last one he watched was an England win. He didn't play any sports actively, having the genetic Pridmore dodgy legs, although he was surprisingly agile in short bursts - he still played badminton well enough to teach it to his classes, and he'd occasionally play backstop in rounders games and amaze everyone with his ability to catch the wildest bowl and throw it with pinpoint accuracy. He played snooker in his youth, very well or so he always told me, but gave it up when his eyesight got too bad. He still played pool occasionally, but found it wasn't enough of a challenge.

Steam trains were a major passion of his life. I'll never quite understand what the appeal was, although his own father worked on the railways for his entire life, so it's obviously a lifelong thing. Every Father's Day we went to the steam railway museum at Butterley for a Sunday dinner on the train (booked eight months in advance at least, so we always got the best seats and were the first to be served). A meal and three rides up and down the little line pulled by a steam train - what more could anyone want, he asked without the slightest trace of irony. He was a keen birdwatcher too, used to run the Young Ornithologists Club at the school (I came along on one or two outings and found it horribly boring). He went to various night school classes over the years, learning sculpture, heraldry, calligraphy, all kinds of strange things, and became very gifted at all of them. When he put his mind to it (which wasn't very often, sadly), he could write little funny stories that had everyone in hysterics.

He was a really, really great cook. You hadn't lived until you'd had his rabbit stew and dumplings (seriously, nobody in the world could make suet dumplings like his), or steak and kidney pud, or Sunday roast, or spaghetti bolognese, or chocolate cake. He never ate sweets or desserts himself, but he made a great cake - everyone was always asking for the recipe, but nobody could get it to turn out quite like his. I think it was the ancient oven he cooked in. The secret's died with him, anyway. And everything in huge servings - he had an enormous appetite and assumed everyone else did too.

Above all, he was a decent man who got things done and never once in his life had a thought that was selfish or mean. He raised me and my brother practically singlehandedly without a complaint (and we were really horrible teenagers, I'll tell you), and I think we both turned out okay. I owe a huge amount to him, and it just won't be the same without him around. The world really is poorer for his loss.

Oh, and I can't post a blog entry tonight without recording that Jenny sent me a card and a milk chocolate Happy Duck Lolly to make me feel better. It did, a whole lot.

RIP George Pridmore

My dad's died. I went round to my brother's last night and we spent the evening getting drunk and reminiscing about him. In four or five hours of talk, we barely scratched the surface of all the good memories. I'll write more later, when I'm more in the mood.

Philippe is standing on it

I've spent quite a lot of time today reading my way through the archives of Achewood, a rather strange and often extremely funny webcomic. I'm kind of annoyed that I haven't done this before, actually - I've seen references to and snippets from it for months and thought I should maybe check it out some day. And now I have, it turns out that while the snippets were okay, there are bits in there that I can't see anyone else recommending, but that my particular sense of humour finds absolutely hilarious.

James Kochalka even drew a strip for it back in 2003, for Pete's sake! If anybody had told me that, I would have read the thing straight away! What's the matter with you people, not telling me when there's something by James Kochalka out there on the internet that I don't know about?

Curse the man who invented the common cold

I'm still all bunged up. Practicing memorising cards with a runny nose reminds me of the MSO championship in 2003, when I was similarly afflicted. I had to pause every couple of minutes to wipe my nose, without making too much noise - sitting in silence for long periods of time when you've got a cold is difficult.

Attempted to boldly go where no one except Andi Bell and possibly a couple of others have gone before today, and tried to memorise 36 packs of cards in an hour. That gives me time to go through each pack twice, and about three-quarters of them for a third time. But my recall had way too many gaps in it. Still, I'm pretty sure it's something I could do with a bit more practice, and it's good to aim high in these things.

On the other hand, I could stick with 30 in the world championship and get most of them right, and still win the discipline comfortably, if nobody else does much better than in previous years. I'll have to decide closer to the time and see what everyone's achieved in the half-hour cards at the German championship, and hour cards at the MSO or British Championship, if any of these promised events actually happen this year. But if Andi's not competing, or not properly competing this year (and who knows what he's going to do, if anything?), I wouldn't expect anybody else to go much over 20 packs. I'd like to be proved wrong, though - if I keep up the kind of form I'm in at the moment, I'm going to be well ahead of everyone else, touch wood. Always with the proviso that someone else might have improved too, and people usually do...

President and First Tiger

Congratulations are in order for Sam, who's just been elected president of the Bangor students' union. I'm sure this is a start of a great golden age for the university, and that his appalling right-wing views won't bring about the collapse of all peace, happiness and moral rights throughout the student population of Wales and the wider world. I have been saying for years that Sam is the kind of person who's going to be Prime Minister when he grows up, and I think this goes some way towards proving me right. He's certainly the kind of person you want to stay on the right side of, just in case. Luckily, I've still got the photos from that night in York, in case I ever need to blackmail him.

In other news, I've just taken the unprecedented step of giving my phone number to someone from the BBC after a single email request, without even being pestered for it for weeks on end. I'm going through a phase of feeling like I could be a TV star again, and this is part of the latest get-rich-eventually scheme that will never come to anything. They only want me to be a consultant on a programme about memory, rather than the star of my own variety show, but it's a step in the right direction. Who knows, I might even get round to writing that book this weekend - I'm not doing anything special again (two weekends in a row? Have I really that little social life?)

Elsewhere, I've just been quite tickled to see that in the German translation of Ozy and Millie, Dr Wahnsinnig is called Dr Insane. I don't know why, but this little detail makes me laugh. I like useless trivia like this, and the way a strip last week revealed that Ozy's middle name is Justin, which suits him perfectly somehow. I know I've plugged it before, but you should really go and read it - at the moment, Ozy's curse of annual baldness has manifested itself in the form of an overzealous security check at the airport, while Llewellyn is building a windmill in his garden in order to annoy the neighbours.

Oh, and I must get round to hassling the WMSC about getting that promised abstract image generating program available - if it's not on the internet a month or so before the Cambridge championship, I'm going to have to drop it from the schedule and acquire a poem instead, with all the attendant translation difficulties that entails.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

I've still got a terrible cold, and it's getting on my nerves.

One of the builders working on the bit of our office building that isn't finished yet is a woman. I think this is very cool - I don't think I've ever seen a female builder outside of politically correct fiction before now.

There's a Brazilian guy called Renato Alves who's claiming to have broken memory world records with some really unexceptional performances, which is riling the 'memory sports' message board today. As best I can understand Babelfish's translation from Portuguese, he does courses on memory and charges a lot of money for it. There are a quite a few people in the world who do this, and they really don't teach anything you can't find on the internet for free.

At the US Memory Championship, the water provided free was 'Smart Water' - water with added chemicals that help the brain. I didn't dare touch the stuff.

Spiders

Spiders are made predominantly of nitroglycerine, and explode at the slightest touch. Although they are actually insects, spiders like to describe themselves as 'arachnids', a made-up word that doesn't mean anything. This is just typical of the spider mentality. Among the other things that spiders do that really get on my nerves are passing themselves off as human beings in order to claim unemployment benefit, cleaning the windows of their houses so well as to put other people to shame, exploding at the slightest touch and eating wallpaper. The high price of wallpaper in this country is entirely due to spiders eating so much of it and not, as spiders will tell you, the fault of the government.

It's about time someone did something about spiders, but they hang out with all-in wrestlers and freemasons, so nobody dares to hassle them. On the other hand, hornets are mild-mannered and pleasant, so anybody wanting to take out their spider-related frustrations should go and beat up a hornet.

Football, Football, Football

There's way too much of it on TV at the moment. Tonight's a night off, because the BBC could only splash out on the rights to three of this week's four midweek games, but it's still definitely enough to get in the way of all the useful things I could be doing with my time. Or the useless things I do to avoid doing the useful things, anyway.

It's a funny kind of situation, really. Absolutely nobody wants the FA Cup quarter finals to be held midweek, on consecutive days, which forces a few clubs to play two games in three days. But it's part of the squeezing of the football season's fixtures so as to give the England squad four weeks off before the world cup starts. And for TV reasons they can't play all the quarter finals at the same time, and for obvious reasons they can't play them during office hours, so everyone just has to lump it. Spectators aren't happy, managers and players are extremely not happy, and we'll only lose the world cup in an embarrassing kind of way anyway, same as usual.

You might have gathered that I haven't got anything interesting or unusual to talk about tonight. I've got a sore throat and cold, thanks to the germs that have been stampeding around our office for the last week or so, and I'm short of imagination just at the moment.

Media studies

I've just had advance warning that another documentary-maker, from the BBC this time, is going to be emailing me. I seem to be getting a lot more of this kind of thing this year than I did the year that I was World Memory Champion. Perhaps the TV-viewing public are really demanding coverage of 'mind sports' these days? There's also apparently going to be some kind of programme about othello, thanks to Michael Handel giving the game so much publicity on The Armstrongs (with one thing and another, I've missed every episode since the first, but I'm definitely going to see it this week. Assuming it doesn't clash with the football). Perhaps I'll be rich and famous with minimal effort yet! I can just see it, major memory championship celebrity appearing in adverts for brainy things like... well, my imagination's drawing a blank as to the kind of product that would benefit from endorsement by a clever person. Apart from furniture design, of course.

Actually, now I come to think of it, I've always wanted to appear in an advert for McDonald's. I read an article a couple of years ago about how eating junk food is supposed to damage your memory, and I thought I would be great in an advertising campaign along the lines of "McDonald's - it's not just for fat, stupid people."

People should eat a lot more junk food.

Lemming Aid

I didn't have anything better to do this evening [this is Zoomy-speak for 'I had lots of important and useful things I could have been doing, but didn't feel like doing them], so I've just spent an hour or so playing Lemmings on my old Mega Drive. Lemmings seems to be popular again, or at least I see adverts for it on the PS2 or one of those new-fangled consoles, probably with bonus features. Everything's got bonus features these days.

But it's one of those timeless, enduring games that you can just play for hours on end and never get tired of. Frustrated and terminally addicted, yes, but not tired. There's something compelling about having the fate of hordes of mindless little animals in your hands...

Anniversaries

I've just noticed that I passed 200 posts on here a couple of weeks ago, without even noticing. Maybe I'll throw a party when I get to 250. Or save it for the one-year mark, perhaps. It's really fun reading through old entries here, actually. I'm just amazed that I've kept it up, but it's still enjoyable trying to think of something to blog about every night. And as an unexpected side-effect, I'm told that a few other people enjoy reading this thing too!

Anyway, I haven't had quite as industrious a day as I was planning. I did do a half-hour binary numbers practice this morning, and very nearly broke the 4000 barrier (the four-minute mile of memorising 1s and 0s), but just had a couple of mistakes too many, ending up with a score of 3980. I'm definitely happy with the way my training's going in this - I've recorded my score every time I've practised since I started properly training again, and it's gone 2545, 2715, 3005, 3195, 3355, 3650, 3865, 3980! The sky's the limit!

I was going to do an hour numbers this afternoon, but I couldn't be bothered. I did shuffle a few packs of cards and get halfway through compiling the names and faces papers for Cambridge (got all the faces, I just need to come up with a suitably multilingual selection of names to give them). Also spent a lot of time watching Tom and Jerry cartoons - I recall saying here before that even I couldn't spend a whole day doing that, but I've come to the conclusion that I can, if I'm in the right mood.

I need to do something about my sofa. All the springy things that hold the cushions up have broken. I need to either do some makeshift repairs with spare bits of wood, or persuade the landlord to replace it with a new one - preferably one comfortable enough for someone to sleep on, so as guests don't have to sleep on the floor when they came over. Or I could just move to Burton-on-Trent and furnish the place myself. It's not like I couldn't afford it...

Guessing games

So do I get any clues as to who's posting comments here and calling themself "Dominic O'Brien's Liver"? I suspect Step, but the weird thing about being me is that I have several friends who might do something like that...

Anyway, the weekend's here, I've got it all to myself, and I'm going to use it very productively. Honest. Lots of memory training for the long disciplines, lots of the tedious preparatory work for the Cambridge memory competition (Clemens is definitely coming, and loads of Americans promised at the weekend to make an effort to come over, which is great!), lots of book-writing. I'm really going to try to do something about How To Be Clever. I realised the other day that it's been in the planning stages for a good three years now, which is just ridiculous.

I wonder how long this resolve will last before I spend the rest of the weekend slumped in a chair watching telly?

Gentile Ben

Sometimes in this world of blogging, a subject just pops into my head and I just have to write about it. And then again there are times when a brilliant title for a blog post comes into my head and I have to contrive something to fit it. Luckily, these are few and far between, but this afternoon at work a strange train of thought led me to think "If I wrote in my blog about someone mistakenly thinking I'm Jewish, I could call it 'Gentile Ben'!"

You know, like the TV series 'Gentle Ben', about the bear, that most of my readers probably won't have even heard of. Maybe it isn't so brilliant after all. But it's too late to stop now. Anyway, it has happened to me on a couple of occasions, for whatever reason. Possibly my insistence on wearing a black hat and beard, although you'd have to be kind of short-sighted or ignorant to mistake that for a Hassidic getup. The last time I can remember was in a pub with my brother some time last year - we were loudly trying to remember the lyrics to all the Don Williams songs our father always used to force us to listen to on car journeys. Unusually, rather than clearing the room like it usually does, this motivated a guy to come and join us, and the drunken conversation went on for some time until he mentioned that he was assuming we were Jewish. Apart from the vaguely semitic appearance, he pointed out that we're called Ben and Joseph, which had never occurred to me before. It comes from our mother being a fan of 'Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat', believe it or not.

Another occasion, because I'm determined to pad this ill-advised contrived theme out to a full blog entry, was at the World Memory Championship in Malaysia in 2003. In fact, twice over the weekend. One of the organisers asked me on the Friday night whether I observe the shabbat, and offered to try to arrange things around that for me. I'm not sure what that would have involved, exactly, since the competition runs over three days, one of which was a Saturday, and I'm pretty sure any strictly orthodox Jew would consider taking part in the competition at all to constitute work. And Jan Formann also mentioned that Jewish people have a great sense of humour, which I tried to take as a compliment anyway despite the misunderstanding.

Change of career

Going back to work after a memory competition is always a drag. Particularly when on my first day back I'm dragged into a meeting with my boss, and her boss, and his boss - a whole food chain of accountants with me at the bottom explaining why the figures look like they do. I suppose I could have got my own assistant in and blamed him, but I don't expect it would have worked. Still, I more or less managed to give the impression I knew what I was talking about, as usual. It's a gift.

It does make me think I should take all these people seriously when they say I should write books and things - it would probably be less stressful all round. But as soon as I click back into accountant mode, I don't want to leave it and look for something new and scary...

Sunday

Realising that I was leaving, the temperature dropped sharply and it rained all day. When I went up to McDonald's for breakfast, I got soaked, particularly in the feet (those holes in the shoes are a bit of an inconvenience, I realise whenever it's wet). A very fat man was berating two people carrying goods into a shop for working on a Sunday. I did a bit of last-minute sightseeing before having to check out of the hotel, came back and let James interview me at length about memory and film me memorising a pack, then turned back fully into a tourist rather than a semi-celebrity. Tomorrow, of course, I've got to turn back into an accountant, which is a much worse thing to be.

I went up to Grand Central Station to admire the architecture (not really - to get lunch and go to Midtown Comics which is right next to it). The pizza there was delicious - for some reason they're all named after movie characters and celebrities, I had a Mr Pink, which is basically garlic chicken and tomatoes. Maybe there is something in this New York pizza idea after all. At the comic shop I got Squadron Supreme: Death Of A Universe, the new trade paperback collection, which I've been looking for for a while. It reprints the Death Of A Universe story first published as a graphic novel in 1989 and for some reason never reprinted, Mark Gruenwald's sequel to his acclaimed original Squadron Supreme series, and his last SS work before he died. It's a classic that I've really resented not being able to read, over the years, and I'm delighted to have got it now. Also included in the new collection are a smattering of other comics featuring the Squadron - the absolutely awful Thor #280, which should have been left to gather dust in limbo somewhere; the excellent Kurt Busiek issues of Avengers starring the Squadron; the less excellent sequel to those stories from the Avengers annual in 1999, which involves the mass ranks of the two superhero teams joining forces to act monumentally stupidly and fail to beat a single, non-super-powered man; and the Squadron Supreme: New World Order one-shot by Len Kaminski, which I criticised very harshly when it first came out and never re-read, but now find to have actually been rather good. My main complaint - that it very contrivedly regresses the Squadron to a straight copy of the JLA - is still entirely valid, but the writing is in fact very nice, and it's a good story if you overlook that detail.

By that time, it was about time to head back to the airport (or, as I called it in conversation with James earlier, the... plane... station... what's it called... airport. Probably dented my image as a master of memory there). Changed my socks a couple of times in an attempt to dry my feet out a bit, with minimal success as the boots were soaked through.

The flight back went by in no time. In economy class this time, I was absorbed in the lives of Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay, with occasional pauses for a doze (I can't sleep on planes, but I was too tired to keep my eyes open either, so lay there with them closed for a while before I couldn't resist going back to the book). The temperature back in England hit me like a very cold hammer - it was freezing compared to what I'd been enjoying in New York!

And so that was the end of the latest American adventure. It was a lot of fun for me. If only I was independently wealthy enough to do it all the time...

Further Saturday thoughts

So, was the TV-style competition a good thing, and what does the future hold for US memorisers?

I liked the championship a lot. It was fun to watch, and hopefully would make very compelling TV (it's going to be broadcast in April, on a very obscure channel). I'd like to take part in a championship run along those lines. I emphatically don't want to change the world championship in any way to make it more TV friendly - as I told Giles the reporter and he repeated in his article, my ideal for a memory competition involves a lot of people in a room staring at a piece of paper for hours on end - but I would like to see these more flashy tournaments becoming a regular part of the schedule too. The two different styles can co-exist perfectly happily, I'm sure.

But there are problems. Firstly, the standard of information recalled was not high. A lot of people watching at home would be thinking that the achievements demonstrated was unexceptional. Whether that's such a bad thing, I'm not sure - the aim of this is surely to entertain and get people interested in the subject, not to make them think memorisers are a world apart from them. But shouldn't a memory championship be a real test of memory, rather than relying very much on luck and sitting in the right seat in the final?

Also, as Maurice and others pointed out, it could have been a lot less impressive than it was. The format could easily have left two people with no card-memorising ability at all in the final. How impressed would viewers have been with two people who could barely remember half a dozen cards contesting the grand final of a national memory championship?

As for the future, Josh is the new champion and I'm sure he'll be a worthy one. Asked if he thought he had a chance in Malaysia (he won two tickets courtesy of British Airways, longtime sponsors of the US Championships - I don't know why they're still involved now the WMC isn't in Britain, but I'm very grateful), he replied that he had none whatsoever, categorising the top competitors as 'extraterrestrials'. Thanks, Josh! But I was impressed with his performance, considering how short a time he's been training, and I think he might just be the person who takes American memory competitions to new heights. He's learned his techniques from Europeans, he's been to the competitions over here, and he's not restricted like the others by the low standards necessary to make it big in America. He's got a genuine passion for the 'sport', and I think he could go on to be not just a grandmaster, but maybe the first American to get into the top echelon of memory competitors. And when he does, no doubt his countrymen will up their game to keep up with him. It only takes one person to inspire others.

I've been looking back at how well I did when I'd been learning memory for as long as Josh, maybe a little longer, in the MSO competition 2001. I tried to memorise a pack of cards in just over a minute, but failed. I seem to recall that I rarely managed to do a complete pack at that time. I managed 750 in hour numbers, which isn't at all bad, and something poor in the binaries (which I hadn't really practiced at all), but did well enough at the poem and words to end up in third place in a five-discipline competition. I was still very much a beginner, and somewhere around the level Josh is now.

So I think the future looks bright for memory in America. If only we could say the same for Britain!

Saturday

The big day of the competition was even hotter than the day before, but the auditorium on the 19th floor of the ConEdison building (where the US Championships have been held for years and years) was nice and air-conditioned. The building's on Irving Place, just south of Union Square, in a very scenic part of town.

I got there a bit early, with the day's events scheduled to start at 8:30, and there weren't many people there yet. Maurice Stoll was already on the scene though, and greeted me as I came in. I've known Maurice since the World Cup in Weinheim in 2004, he's a German-born American from Texas and very keen to be the US Champion some day. He also competed in the world championship that year, and going into the competition held the national record in the two US championship events that involve actual memory techniques, speed numbers and speed cards. Both these records were set in 2004, when he narrowly lost to Scott Hagwood - in the 2005 championship, a low-scoring competition, he was very disappointed with his performance, attributing it to lack of sleep and too much beer. He was very fired-up about the 2006 event.

Other people I knew arrived in short order - Ram Kolli, who won the 2005 championship and came to the worlds in Oxford, Emmanuel Mercado who competed in the world cup too but had disappeared from memory competitions since then, unable to fit one into his busy schedule, Josh Foer, worried that despite my advice he'd taken something to get him to sleep the night before and pessimistic about his chances, and Scott Hagwood, unbeaten four-times champion who I first met at that most memorable world championship in 2003. Scott wasn't competing this year, he was the 'color commentator' for the TV people covering the event. He's a very good choice for the role - as well as his acknowledged status as the USA's only grandmaster of memory and a multiple former champion, he's big, handsome and just oozes charisma. If you want to convey the message that memory competitions aren't just for geeks, Scott is the best man for the job. He was also promoting his new book - I got a copy autographed with a very flattering message about how great I am.

There were also people there with names I knew well but who I'd never met - Chester Santos, third place in the previous two years, Mykie Pidor, who came to the world championships the year I missed it, in 2001, and whose name is memorable enough for me to remember that fact when I came to actually meet him, Tony Dottino the organiser, who's the American equivalent of Tony Buzan (who normally comes to the US Championship but didn't this year) and Frank Felberbaum, memory trainer, author and coach of several of the young competitors. Frank is particularly famous for entering the world championship one year and doing so spectacularly badly that people have been known to suggest he hasn't the faintest idea about memory techniques, but his students seem to do all right for themselves, and he turns out to be a nice, friendly guy in real life.

And there was a large contingent of people I'd never heard of but had the pleasure of meeting over the course of the day - Marshall Tarley, who doesn't ever seem to get mentioned in writing about the championship but is Tony Dottino's loyal sidekick, Karen and Ed Pinson, who were in charge of the judges (all of whom were very well-organised and knew what they were doing - not something you could say about a few other memory championships in the past) and a whole bunch of other competitors, some old hands at it, some brand-new memory enthusiasts. As is always the case at the US championships, a good number of the 37 participants were high school students, but this year three schools had sent teams - one from the weirdly-named Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania joining the fun along with the two New York-based regular entrants. But a good dozen of the people taking part were just regular American people interested in testing their memory in competition. It's been a long time since Britain managed to produce so many.

Other notable competitors included T Michael Harty, a Lutheran minister, Paul Mellor, professional memory trainer who competed in a suit and tie rather than everyone else's T-shirts and jeans and 12-year-old Christian Kalinowski, whose older brother had competed in previous years but wasn't there this time round because, as Tony Dottino put it, "he has a girlfriend now." When the laughter at this had died down, Tony continued with the explanation that it was her birthday on that day - he wasn't really meaning to imply that only those with no girlfriend would take part in something like this.

The format, as I've mentioned here before, was very different this year. The morning was more familiar-looking, though. People sat at desks, memorising the information put in front of them and recalled it by writing it down, just as normal. But this was qualifying for the afternoon's TV-friendly finals, not the whole competition. First off we had names and faces. It's the first time I've been to a memory competition I wasn't actually competing in, and I was expecting to be bored. But it's actually quite fun to sit in silence for 15 minutes, watching the looks of concentration on everyone's faces. After the recall, it took a long, long time to mark the papers and announce the results, but the organisers insisted on doing that before the second round. The time-filling exercise of having people stand up and talk about why they were taking part was good fun, though, even if it did mean falling about an hour behind schedule after round one.

When the results finally came out, the winner of the discipline was Erin Hope Luley, a seventeen-year-old swimmer and member of the Mechanicsburg High School team. Josh had the second-best score and Maurice the third. Erin has a natural knack for memory, it seems, but no real techniques for things like numbers and cards. This prompts a lot of discussion about the specialists in names and faces, the poem and words, because these people seem to be invariably female - Tatiana Cooley, the multiple American champion of years gone by, was in very much the same mould, and so was Astrid Plessl before she got good at everything else, too. Erin's score of 120 was a new US record, and one that would put you high up the rankings at a world championship too.

But the real tests of memory skill would be the next two disciplines. Speed numbers was first - two attempts of it, and with things being so far behind the timetable already, no announcement of the first trial's results before the second. But Maurice won the event, beating his own record by four extra digits, with 148. Chester was the only other competitor to top 100 (a very low score by world standards - the Americans are still quite a way behind us here), and Paul Mellor had the third-best, with 89, just ahead of Josh.

On to the speed cards. Only a few years ago, it was unheard of for anyone to be able to memorise a whole pack of cards at the US Championships. Things have turned around a bit since then, and times of under two minutes were expected. Watching this one from the sidelines was a lot of fun! Josh stopped his clock at 1:40, and then Chester at around 2:15, and Maurice at 3:15. Josh's recall was all correct, making a new US record again, but Chester's had errors. Maurice was correct, but disgusted with how long it had taken him. Ram, I noticed, had spent the whole five minutes looking at his pack, which would leave him out of contention for the first three qualifying places (which went to the three highest total scores after this round). On the second trial, Josh didn't touch the cards, happy with his first time. Chester did a more cautious 3:04 and got it correct, and Maurice, who had been complaining about being distracted by people moving around him, tried for a faster time but didn't get it.

But he'd still done enough to be top of the table after three events, with Josh and Chester behind him, so those three won the right to skip the poem competition and go straight to the afternoon's finals. I decided to get some lunch with them, rather than watch the final qualifying round, mindful that Nick wanted to film me and seemed determined to make me miss the most exciting bits.

Chester skipped lunch, due either to nerves or needing some last minute-preparation, I don't know. Nobody specifically said that spectators weren't supposed to help themselves to the buffet, so I did, and invited along a couple of other fans I'd just met - one of them was called Jim, but I can't for the life of me remember the woman's name. Nothing personal, if you're reading this! I really am that bad with names. They'd seen Josh's Discover article and decided to come along. Genuine spectators with no connection to the competitors! This is unheard-of at memory competitions!

In the cafeteria we met an enormous English reporter called Giles. I know I describe everyone taller than me as enormous, and I know that most of the world's population fit into that category, but this guy is very, very tall. When he stood next to me to talk later in the day, I had to crick my neck back at an alarming angle just to look up at his face. We talked shop enjoyably for a while, impressing Giles, Jim and friend with tales of memory competitions and techniques in general, until Nick turned up to take me away.

Out in Union Square and Park Avenue, we did some very brief and enjoyable filming in the sun, leaving me with plenty of time to get back to the competition and not miss a thing. This very much put Nick back on my good-people list. I even had time to wander into the Barnes & Noble, where I found a copy of the best book ever written, "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie", by Laura Joffe Numeroff and illustrated with genuine genius by Felicia Bond. This masterpiece and its sequels are quite popular in the USA, but for some reason don't seem to have been published in Britain. I discovered them on a previous American trip a few years ago, but had forgotten about them altogether. I bought a copy, to make sure I remembered them in future.

Back at Con Edison, it was time for the televised portion of events. The first three finalists had been joined by Erin (who had set another new US record in the poem), Ram and Paul, and they took their places at the six desks in front of the stage for "Words To Remember". All the afternoon's events had TV-friendly titles, but this was basically just the normal 'random words' event - they were given 15 minutes to remember as much of a list of random words as possible.

But the recall was different - sitting on six chairs on the stage in a random order, they had to take it in turns to name the next word on the list. For the first time, I really wished I was taking part - this looked like fun and I was pretty sure I'd be good at it. When I'm recalling random words, I tend to blank on a whole sequence, so if someone was saying the previous word before me, I'd be just fine up to about 180 words, I think. The first two to make a mistake were eliminated, and the first turned out, surprisingly, to be Erin. About twenty words in, she blanked on the word 'numb'. Shortly after that, Paul confidently announced 'operation', master of ceremonies said "Um, clarification, Ed?", Paul corrected himself "Operate!", but the judge was strict about it. So the round was over, without more than 30 words recalled in total. I thought to myself that this wasn't going to flabbergast TV viewers with the amazing achievements on show. But on the other hand, if it made people think "I can do that!", maybe they'd give it a try and take part next year?

On to the second championship round, and this one was all-new and a lot of fun. Now I really, really wanted to be up there - I genuinely wanted to test my abilities against the others on this one, and wasn't sure how well I'd do. It was called "Tea Party - 3 Strikes, You're Out". One at a time, five people came onto the stage and chatted about themselves, listing their name, date of birth, home town and zip code, work phone number, pet's name, species and colour, three hobbies, favourite car's colour, year and make, and three favourite foods. The memorisers had this information on pieces of paper in front of them, and had the choice of studying this paper of listening to and watching the person. Then they had 7.5 minutes of silently studying the paper. Then the four of them came back up on stage to recall, as the 'party guests' came back in a random order and had to be told their information one at a time. As the title suggested, you were allowed two mistakes, but the third put you out of the competition.

The guys struggled with it. Maurice especially, who had been practicing with photos on top of the printed page of information, found that his preparation wasn't as helpful as he'd thought. Josh, who still struggles with memorising numbers, had decided to ignore the difficult phone numbers and trust to luck that he wouldn't get asked too many of them. The first phone number to come up, in fact, stumped Chester, Maurice and Josh in turn, but Ram got it. Ram was in fact the star of this round - while the others built up multiple strikes with little details on the first guest, he sailed through with ease. When we went onto the second guest, Maurice got his third strike on her birthday and was eliminated. It worked out so that again Chester was the first one to be asked her work phone number. "Oh man, why do I always get the work numbers?! That's the hardest part!" He scribbled on his pad for a moment and confidently announced "148..." "No, it starts 323," said Tony. Chester, who had memorised all the numbers in a long string, had forgotten to cross off the zip code that Ram had just said, but he'd got the phone number written down perfectly after it. But that was his third and final strike, and Josh, who wouldn't have had a clue about the number, thanked his lucky stars. He and Ram were through to the final and Chester had to be consent with a third consecutive third place in the US Championship.

Again, we'd only recalled one-and-a-bit of the five guests' information. But it was compelling viewing! I went up to Josh in the few minutes' break before the grand final and assured him that he'd got it in the bag now, Ram wasn't much good with the cards. He raged at me for saying something like that - I was trying to improve his mental attitude, but he saw it more as bringing down some seriously bad karma. I apologised and wished him luck, and did the same for Ram. Nick had reappeared to film me watching the last bit of the competition, and positioned me at the front of the spectators, rather than at the back where I'd been hanging out with Michael Harty, Aaron O'Brien, James Jorasch and other competitors.

The final competition started - "Double Deck'r Bust". They had five minutes to memorise two packs of cards, and then they would recall them, taking it in turns to say one card at a time (order to be decided by the toss of a coin). In a last minute clarification of the rules, Josh was alarmed to be told they had to memorise the pack from the top card down - he memorises from the bottom up. When the memorising time started, he turned the pack over a couple of times, racked with indecision, before memorising it bottom-up in his usual way and deciding to reverse the order in the recall. I had a tap on my shoulder - Nick, positioning himself where he could get me, Josh and Ram in shot, was getting in the way of the real camera crew and they wanted him moved. I tried to convey this to him with gestures, without success, and had to tiptoe over to him and drag him away. He came and sat next to me, right behind the memorisers, and asked me to whisper to him what was going on. I tried to do so as quietly as possible, until Tony Dottino waved to me to shut up. I hate people who whisper during memorisation, I don't know what I was thinking.

Anyway, the memorisation came to an end and the two of them went back onstage for the final time. At the all-important coin toss, Ram called tails and it came down heads. Josh thus got to choose who would name the first card. It took a long time and a lot of very visible mental cogitation, before he said "I will. No, wait! He can." It turned out later that he'd realised he couldn't remember the last card in the pack, and wanted to arrange it so that Ram would have to say it. Then at the last moment, he realised he didn't know the first card either, so changed his mind hastily.

They got about twelve cards into the deck before Ram couldn't remember one. A little anticlimactic, but Josh was the new US Memory Champion! With the pressure off, Tony invited him to try to recall the rest of the pack, which he reluctantly did. It was very entertaining for the crowd - at one point he got going so quickly that Tony couldn't keep up with turning the cards over, and a couple of times Ram helped him out when he got stuck, but they got through the whole first pack in some style. It did make good TV, I'm sure.

And with that, it was just time for the prizegiving, some more general chit-chat with the competitors and the dinner in a Chinese restaurant over the road. To which I also came along, still not sure whether I was technically invited, but nobody seemed to mind. I should say that I was very conscious all day that I didn't want to say or do anything that looked like showing-off - I had come there at least partly because I knew everyone there would think I'm great and tell me so at length, and I would have hated anyone to realise that, and think "look at him, thinking he's so great because he was the world memory champion and we're all a bunch of schmoes." Americans, as I understand it, say 'schmoes'. Actually, nobody gave me the slightest hint that they thought this, so maybe I was just paranoid, but as I say, I was very careful to play down any achievements of my own when someone else mentioned them, and never to mention them myself. But everyone there told me I should write a book, that they'd buy it if I did, and I really should try to make a living out of it.

At dinner, James Jorasch expounded at length on the many ways in which I could help him make millions or maybe billions of dollars from various schemes involving basically being paid for being clever. He seems to be a multipurpose businessman, who's involved in practically everything. In the other ear, Aaron O'Brien was regaling me with his unusual theories about memorising pi, which I was doing my best to explain just wouldn't work, but couldn't put my finger on exactly what was wrong with them. I should introduce him to Mike Curtis, whose theories make my head spin round in exactly the same way - their minds are obviously on the same wavelength. All in all, it was a very enjoyable meal, although the food was pretty unpleasant. I said my goodbyes and congratulations to everyone, agreed to let James film me memorising cards for some website - either the US Championship one or his own one, whoever wanted it - the next morning, and went back to the hotel. It was still hot outside, even late-ish at night.