Kill Christopher Biggins

It became necessary to assassinate Christopher Biggins, and so the celebrated murderer Richard Higginbottom was employed for the task. He went about the job in his usual professional way, disguising himself as a librarian in order to research Biggins' life and establish important facts such as how tall he was, whether he was bulletproof and how often he checks his food for poison before eating. Many murderers skimp on this kind of preparation and just end up making fools of themselves. In this case, Higginbottom discovered that Christopher Biggins is immune to all conventional forms of assassination unless he is in an unusually distracted state of mind.

Accordingly, Richard Higginbottom set about constructing an elaborate scenario to mentally disorient his victim. Disguising himself as a schoolteacher, he recreated the most traumatic event of Christopher Biggins's past - the time when as a five-year-old he had successfully persuaded his primary school's board of governors to allow a ravenous Bengal tiger to wander freely around the school, with the result that several dozen children were severely upset. Higginbottom ensured that his reconstruction of the events was accurate in every way and issued a press release alleging that the whole incident was Biggins's fault. Unfortunately, however, Christopher Biggins was at that time on holiday in Barbados and didn't hear about it.

Disguising himself as a man, Richard Higginbottom travelled to Barbados armed with several tons of explosives and a seahorse with extensive psychological problems. Obviously the plan was to stuff the latter with the former and introduce it to Christopher Biggins at a party. From that point onwards, things should have flowed automatically - Biggins would offer the seahorse a cigarette to take its mind off its problems, it would light it and explode in a cataclysmic conflagration, Biggins would be momentarily perturbed by the possibility that he had provoked a suicide, and Higginbottom would be able to run up and hit him over the head with a sledgehammer.

Unfortunately, however, Christopher Biggins died of natural causes immediately after Higginbottom's plane touched down in Barbados, obliging him to murder Ringo Starr instead. The worldwide outpouring of grief at this tragedy forced the laws on murder to be changed, several pantomimes to be cancelled and a horse to survive a heart attack that would otherwise have killed it. If there's a moral to all this, then I sure as heck don't know what it is.

Freshwater perils

I've just seen a trailer for Happy Feet, which I might possibly go and see if I can summon the energy, that warns that it contains 'very mild danger'. Don't they rate films by the levels of peril any more? I always appreciated the enormously weird use of the word 'peril'.

Other things in peril at the moment are this alleged novel I've been trying to write. I need to do another nearly 2000 words today if I'm going to stay on schedule. And I can tell you now, I'm not going to. I'm sorry I've been writing about writing so much just lately, by the way. It's just that I really haven't been doing much else this week apart from writing and finding excuses not to write. Mainly the latter.

I have set foot out of doors once or twice, though, and I'm quite infuriated by the fact that the Eagle centre seem not to have got the singing tree this year. They've got Santa's grotto instead, which I think is a disgrace. What's more Christmassy, Santa Claus or a singing deciduous tree with an inexplicable raccoon sticking its head out the top and joining in with high-pitched harmonies? There should be a petition. I'd write to my MP, only it was probably her idea to get rid of the tree in the first place.

Man of the year

I looked up in the city centre today, and noticed a little statue in an alcove on the exterior wall of a shop, up on the first floor level. It's of a guy called Jedediah Strutt. So I researched him on the internet, and it turns out he was an 18th-century inventor who made an improvement to the process of stocking manufacture, and owned a lot of cotton mills in Belper. They'll build statues of anyone nowadays. His grandson was an MP and became the first Baron Belper, a title that apparently still exists - I should pay more attention to the local aristocracy in case I ever need to line them up against a wall when the revolution comes.

But then, there are statues of all kinds of weird people. Back in Boston, in the market place there was a great big statue of Herbert Ingram, who founded the Illustrated London News. And later drowned in the Lady Elgin disaster while on a trip to America, although that part wasn't mentioned on the statue. Which is a shame, because it's the most interesting thing he ever did. Absolutely nobody in Boston ever so much as noticed that the statue even existed, let alone knew who was on it. That's how I'd like to be immortalised - on a statue somewhere out of the way that nobody pays any attention to. That'd be cool.

Tappity tap

And as the bleak hopelessness and futility of Lavinia's life overwhelms her one cold, rainy night in a waiting room at Grantham train station, the author wonders why he didn't pick a more cheerful kind of book to write.

But at least I'm nicely ahead of schedule still. All I have to worry about as the story thunders towards the half-way point is that it's going to finish before 50,000 words at this rate. It might not, though, we'll see how it goes over the next week or so. And I can always go back and add a few more scenes here and there without it looking too much like blatant padding to my inner editor and critics.

I'm re-watching this week's Torchwood ("Countrycide") at the moment - it was a very good one. The plot doesn't come close to standing up to any kind of scrutiny, but the atmosphere it creates is so brilliant that you barely notice. It's tense and scary and full of nice character interaction between the five leads. Big thumbs-up from me, anyway.

The sweet smell of success

Fond as I am of this little flat, I had come to the inescapable conclusion that it pongs a bit. So, taking matters firmly in hand, I decided to get some more air freshener and today, about a year after running out, got some. I also on a whim decided to get one of those things that you plug into the socket and it spreads smelly stuff around the room. The end result is that the flat still stinks, but in a different kind of way. I'm undecided as to whether this new stench is an improvement, but we'll see what someone less numbed to unpleasant odours thinks when they next set foot inside the place.

Anyway, I don't care because for once I'm satisfied with my NaNoWriMo output for the day. After all that slacking off over the first twenty days, I was left needing to write 3500 words a day for the last ten. Well, day one and I've managed that and a little bit more on top, so I'm delighted! It's utter drivel, obviously, but I don't care. I've got forty minutes till Torchwood comes on, I'm going to do a bit more now and get nicely ahead of myself in anticipation of a creative slump in the next few days.

The really cool part is that I'm not at all sick of Lavinia, Jake, Mike and all the rest of my cast yet, even though I've been writing about them long after the initial burst of excitement has worn off. Yay!

La di da di dum, la di da di dum, what's the name of that song?

I had an email today to say that the Chinese Memory Championships will happen in Shanghai on December 23rd, and asking me if I want to come. Christmas in China - the idea is eccentric enough that I'd seriously consider it. But is it possible to arrange a trip to China in a month, or do you have to mess about with getting visas and immunizations and things in advance?

Anyway, have you see the TV show "Raven"? It's a brilliant children's adventure game show, sort of along the lines of Knightmare or The Crystal Maze, except that the six competitors are all competing against each other. It's set in some very scenic forest surroundings, with a wide range of physical and mental challenges, all hosted by Raven - a man who turns into a bird occasionally, complete with feathery cloak and hair done to make it look like feathers. James Mackenzie, in the title role, is fantastic, he's got real presence. And the whole production has some very nice special effects that don't get in the way but do add to the air of magic in the whole thing. I love it, and I'm going to have to add it to the list of cool children's game shows that I never got to go on (Knightmare, Funhouse, etc). I bet I'm the only person in the world who's still accumulating childhood traumas at the age of thirty.

Oh, and while we're talking about people who've spent years of their lives entertaining children, let's hear it for John "T-Shirt" Hasler. He's great, and needs to be on TV more than he is, if any producers are reading this.

One more link, and then I'll stop it and go back to just wittering on about whatever comes into my head for the future. This is the theme tune for today's blog. It's stuck in my head, despite my best efforts to mentally transmogrify it into the strangely-similar-when-you-think-about-it Chelsea Daggers. Enjoy!

So, plans

I don't have to go back into work until December 1st (although I might go in one day before that so as not to be unduly stressed when I'm there), and I need to get on with things. I'm a quarter of the way through my fifty thousand words, so there's a lot of scribbling needs doing over the next eleven days. There's memory training to catch up on, because I need to stay in mental shape over the winter even if there aren't any competitions, and over the next fortnight I want to properly plan out "How To Be Clever" and get some kind of schedule sorted out for writing it.

Or I might just stay in bed the whole time. I'll see how I feel. It's November, after all, and kind of gloomy outside.

The Elves and the Zoomy

Someone's fixed my bike! The rear brake was broken, and I was going to take it to get it fixed this morning, but someone has rather ingeniously cobbled it back together while it was sitting in the front hall. I have no idea who - I haven't seen any of my neighbours or landlord around today to ask them, so I can safely assume it was a roving gang of magic pixies. It really does give you a warm fuzzy feeling to be on the receiving end of a Random Act Of Kindness, though - I'm going to have to be more assiduous about performing them every Friday like I'm supposed to.

I do still need to get the bike fixed professionally, of course, the repair job is only a temporary kind of affair, but since I could ride down the hill without dying today I didn't bother, and went to Nottingham instead. While there, I was grabbed by someone conducting market research and, being in the mood to do someone else a favour, agreed to it. It involved going to a room nearby, watching adverts on a computer screen and saying whether they were effective or not. So if a hopeless Bradford & Bingley advert ever makes it to the screen it won't be my fault - I gave it a real critical panning.

But what if the advertising executives who produced this advert are the same people who fixed my bike? I'd feel like a real heel.

And there's more

Okay, I was just going to do a quick cloak-related blog entry tonight and get back to writing "Sympathy", but then I felt I had to say something about the sheer silliness of the situation I find myself in. Why am I writing about my characters having an eventful day trip to Bath to watch a rugby match in 1981 when I know little or nothing about the town, the game or the year? Yes, writing a thinly-veiled autobiography is probably the worst thing you can possibly do for a first "novel", but I could have stuck to what I know just a little bit more. Ah well, that's where inspiration has led me, we'll just have to see what happens...

Cloak and dagger

It occurs to me that since bringing my black cloak back from Brazil in July, I haven't found a single appropriate occasion for wearing it. The poor thing's been lying on my bedroom floor, buried under the rest of my junk, all this time. You'd think there would be plenty of events for which you'd want to dress up in a big black cloak. I'm going to have to start wearing it to go out to the shops, although it'll get caught up in the wheels of my bike if I'm not careful with it.

A soap impression

I stayed up late last night to listen to Virgin Radio playing the "new Beatles album" Love, in full. Now, as I've mentioned here before, I'm a very big fan of the Beatles, and listening to them for an hour and a half last night was a wonderful experience, but I don't honestly think I'm going to buy this album. I have trouble seeing what the point of it is, other than making another pile of money for everyone involved (does Paul McCartney hate it so much when his bank balance drops below a billion pounds?)

If you're not up to date with what the middle-aged kids are listening to these days, "Love" is basically George Martin and his son rummaging through all the old Beatles master tapes and putting them together in new and exciting ways. It's a strange selection - some songs sound identical to the originals, some are enhanced by funny noises in the background. Most have intros composed of patched-together snippets of intros from four or five other Beatles songs. The highlight is George Harrison's unspeakably beautiful acoustic demo version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", but there are other little-known bits and pieces in the mix too. But really, who is this aimed at? Ardent fans like me who've got the albums and Anthologies already? There's a bit of fun to be had in spotting which tracks each little bit of sound or music comes from, but personally I prefer to listen to them as they were originally created. Yet the whole project is too fanboyish to be of much interest to non-fans. And I honestly don't think the new mixes have any objective artistic merit.

Which segues nicely into another topic - I'm really stalled on this "novel" of mine. I just find it very, very difficult to write something over a long period of time. I have the attention span of a hyperactive butterfly when it comes to writing - if I can churn something out over one writing session, two at most, I'm fine with it, but having to work on something piece by piece, a thousand words or so at a time, really snags my creative impulses somehow. After the initial burst of creativity, what I'm writing gets ever more dull and uninspired. Even when I know what's meant to happen in the bit I'm writing about (I do have the whole structure of the book at least vaguely sketched out in my head), it's hard to put it down on paper without it seeming forced and flat.

This is, of course, exactly the kind of problem this whole exercise was designed to force me to get my head round, so I'm certainly not giving up on it. And I still think I can manage 50,000 words by the end of the month - it's just going to be hard, and it's most definitely not going to be pretty. That said, I've been lazy today and done nothing at all, unless you count going out to the corner shop for some sweets. It counts as a legitimate writer's expense, because I thought a sugar rush might stimulate me a bit. Either that or it was a medical necessity on account of the diabetes.

So sweet I'd kill a diabetic

I had a phone call from the head HR person at the office this morning - "Hi Ben, just a quick question, hope you don't mind. Do you take insulin for diabetes?"

Me: "...No."

Her: "Oh, sorry, I must have been misinformed. Bye."

Now, obviously it's part of some nefarious plot against me that someone is spreading rumours about me being an insulin-dependent diabetic, but I can't quite work out what the plan would involve. I suppose I'll just have to wait until it runs its course and ends up with someone taking over the world.

Vile acts of base treason!

There are three flagpoles out the front of our office building. I assume they're relics of the car dealership days. But rather than letting them go to waste, we have a Union Jack on one of them, and at the moment a Chinese flag on another, to celebrate our latest big deal involving schools in China. But I just noticed this morning that the Union Jack is upside-down. I don't know if it's always been like that, or if someone's just done it today - probably the latter, because I always check flags to see if they're the right way up. I pride myself on knowing how to spot an upside-down Union Jack, and you'd be surprised how few of them you see.

I didn't tell anyone about it, because it never really came up in the conversation. I think I'll leave it till the Queen next comes to visit and is mortally offended, and has the chairman's head chopped off.

Life is hard

I find myself in the rare situation of not having the faintest idea what to write about tonight. Nothing really new or exciting has happened in any of my favourite subjects, as far as I can recall. Am I being unreasonable in feeling hard-done-by because the universe hasn't thrown anything more spectacular than a dull day at work at me?

Never mind, I'm just working till Friday, and then I've got very nearly two weeks of freedom before I have to go back again. I think I'm going to need all that free time to write this "novel" (it really needs the quotation marks right now) that I'm grinding out slowly but surely. Not to mention I need to do some solid, lengthy memory training sessions. Just to get back into the swing of things and keep my eye in before I get distracted by December and Christmassy things...

In his fancy chapeau, he's a leader with taste

I've got a new hat! I saw it in M&S and quite liked the look of it, so I thought I might as well give it a try and see how it works. It's a bit different from the old one, it's a fedora, made of pure wool apparently (seems like a strange thing to make a hat out of, but that's what the label says), and it's black, of course. The brim isn't as wide as the old one's, so we'll have to see just how well it works at hiding my eyes while playing othello. It works fine in the important function of propping up my stopwatch on my desk.

Rather than doing anything useful this afternoon, I've been reading guides to Pacman. It fascinates me that people have gone into such depth analysing how the ghosts move, planning the optimum routes to run around each level and relentlessly playing it for hours and hours to get all the way to the end. And what reward do you get for all this effort? A bug in the program means that it crashes when it gets to level 256. And all the levels from 21 to 255 are identical. This is a task that takes real dedication and resistance to boredom. Possibly even more so than winning a memory competition!

Did you know there's a little spot in the maze where you can 'park' Pacman so that the ghosts just leave him alone? Top players use it to take a break now and then during marathon sessions. If I had unlimited money and space, I'd track down and buy as many old arcade games as I could and keep them all in my own private arcade. And by 'private' I mean inviting everybody to come and play on them as much as they like, obviously. Modern arcades aren't a patch on the way they used to be.

3706 down, 46294 to go

And I worked that out in my head, too. And then corrected it when I realised I'd got it wrong. Anyway, I promise that this is the only time I'll start a blog post with "x down, y to go", seeing as everyone else who's doing NaNoWriMo is doubtless doing exactly the same thing in their own blogs (all of which are no doubt much more worth reading than mine). But anyway, I've got started. Not a huge amount, but enough for me to be happy with.

I'm not saying it's good writing, but I am secretly thinking it. It's not as bad as I thought it would be, anyway. And I think I have cracked the whole writer's block thing, anyway (thanks Josh for the advice!)

I'm still not going to let anybody read the finished product, though. It's not THAT good.

Act Naturally

Okay, check THIS out! "Paramount Pictures has acquired screen rights to the Joshua Foer book "Moonwalking With Einstein" in a preemptive deal and will develop it as a potential directing vehicle for Nacho Libre scribe Mike White.

Variety says the book is set for publication by Penguin in late 2009, and the rights to it were auctioned on the basis of a proposal.

Foer is writing his own story. A young journalist who discovered there was a world of competitive memorizers, Foer spent a year learning the techniques and became a competitor who won both the U.S. and World Memory Championships."

Now, if we ignore for a moment the involvement of the Nacho Libre guy, who would presumably interpret it as a hilarious gross-out comedy subtitled "War of the Nerds", I think there's definitely potential in turning that (future bestselling) book into a movie. Obviously, as the paragraphs above suggest, we'd need to make a few alterations to the way things actually happened, such as changing things so that Josh in fact won the World Memory Championship last year, and to make it more realistic there'd have to be a bit of added action, drama and sex, of course. And I'd have to be the bad guy, because in American movies it's the law that the Englishman is the villain. So I think it would go something like this:

Intrepid reporter Joshua Foer (Brad Pitt) uncovers evidence of a major terrorist conspiracy within the World Memory Championship. To investigate, he enlists the help of eccentric scientist Edward Cooke (Eric Idle) and gorgeous Austrian memory expert, swimsuit model and part-time secret agent Astrid Plessl (Nicole Kidman) to train as a memory master. [I don't think Josh has ever met Astrid, but every movie needs a love interest] After a variety of high-speed car chases, naked wrestling and reciting pi to 100,000 places, it turns out that the villain isn't sinister cult leader Tony Buzan (Ian McKellen) or macho German mastermind Clemens Mayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), but snide nasty English memory man Ben Pridemore (Alan Rickman) who has memorised the zillion-figure code to hack into the world's nuclear arsenals and blow up the President of the USA. Fortunately, in a tense finale, Joshua recalls that during training he memorised the zillion-and-three-figure code to turn the nuclear missiles back off again. He recites it flawlessly, and in the process wins the World Memory Championships as well as saving the world.

I expect royalties for this.

I can't write!

Dagnabbit, this whole NaNoWriMo thing was meant to be a fun little exercise in breaking down my inhibitions and forcing myself to write a serious book, but I've got a terminal case of writer's block. Or do you have to actually have written something before it counts as writer's block? Okay, possibly I've got non-writer's block, but whatever the diagnosis, my muse is clammed up like... well, like a clam, I suppose. When did you last see a book written by a clam on the Sunday Times bestseller list? 1997, I think it was. And that was only at number six.

See, I can write things like that with no problem, but the idea here was to write something in a different kind of style, to broaden my interior horizons and make me a more well-rounded writer. And it's not working. Okay, technically it's only the 9th of November and I've got plenty of time to get cracking and still churn out the required word count, but the outlook is pretty bleak at the moment.

Other things I did on my holiday

I woke up on Monday morning realising that I'd composed a truly beautiful tribute song to Peter Cook, to the tune of "Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs" as background music for a dream. I should maybe record it and make millions, although the lyrics I can remember didn't actually make any sense and certainly didn't relate to Pete Cook's life in any way.

Also while I was in Germany, I found a couple of minutes to write a side and a half of A4 of my NaNoWriMo novel. Narrow ruled paper, and I write quite small, but it's still quite a way behind schedule, especially since I haven't written anything since I got back home. I'll start on it properly once I've written this blog entry, I promise.

What I did on my winter holidays

As best I can recall, the whole adventure started last Thursday. The flight was at 9:20, which meant getting up early in order to get down to Birmingham in good time, but not excessively so. For some reason, I was unusually nervous about getting on the plane, and I have no idea why. On the train, I was contemplating going back home until a magpie persuaded me otherwise (I'm superstitious about magpies in a way that I've made up myself - if I see a single magpie while I'm thinking of doing something, I don't do it. If I see two, I do it. You'd be surprised how many major decisions in my life have been influenced by magpies. But apart from that, I'm perfectly normal). At the airport, there seemed to be a lot of announcements calling for people who hadn't got on the planes and were about to have their luggage taken back out of the hold and dumped somewhere, so perhaps nerves about flying was being caused by a virus going around. Anyway, I did get on the plane and nothing happened, so nyah.

I travelled down to Gießen with no problems - as I've mentioned before, I love German trains, and especially the multilingual ticket machines that tell you not just which trains to get, but even which platform they'll all leave from. It's just so much cooler than the British system of just pulling into a random platform and leaving the passengers to guess. I had the afternoon to look around, and concluded that Gießen is a really great city. It's small but has a big university, which presumably accounts for the disporportionate number of bookshops. And yes, I like German bookshops. I can read the language quite well, I just can't speak it. Discovered the most absolutely hilarious series of books - "Nichtlustig", by Joscha Sauer. There's a website too. What there isn't, and really should be, is an English edition - I'm going to make it my mission to translate all the cartoons and try to get it published over here. It wouldn't be too difficult - only a handful of them are based on untranslatable plays on words, and I think people the world over need to be introduced to the stark raving mad Herr Riebmann and the unfortunate man whose wall he lives in, the mad scientists, the creatively suicidal lemmings, the yetis and Frank the octopus, the poodle of Death and the array of other characters who populate it.

But I was talking about what I did in Germany, rather than what I read. And I thought it was a lovely city, very pretty and scenic. I seem to be in the minority in this, because even the tour guide the next day seemed to think it was some kind of concrete nightmare. I obviously have no taste for architecture - I like Coventry too, if it comes to that. Anyway, I was staying in a pleasant hotel called the Hotel Köhler, as were pretty much all the other competitors in the Mental Calculation World Cup. Three of them said hello to me when they saw me, forcing me to have a cheerful conversation with them without giving away the fact that I couldn't remember their names. Things got a lot less socially awkward when we got to the Mathematikum and got our name badges.

The Mathematikum is something that the city of Gießen apparently takes great pride in - it's a mathemuseum, I suppose you'd call it, basically full of exhibits designed to persuade children that maths is fun. I liked it, but then I've always liked maths anyway (and a lot of the exhibits were only very tangentially related to anything mathematical). There's a very cool chaos pendulum. Also, there's a big conference room, where the World Cup was to take place. It started with a meal on the Thursday night, refreshingly not consisting entirely of potatoes this time, then a magical mystery tour of the city on Friday.

This tour was long and often surprisingly interesting. We circled the town centre a couple of times in the bus while the tour guide pointed out the few bits and pieces that weren't destroyed in the war (I felt like I should apologise on behalf of the Allies), then went out to the ruined monastery and castle on top of two of the surrounding hills. Those were extremely cool. Although the most entertaining part of the tour was Beate Bischler's guide dog, who is the work hard, play hard kind of working dog and spent the tour running wildly around with a stick the size of a small tree, daring people to try to take it from him.

Then it was back to the Mathematikum for Ralf Laue's lecture on memory techniques (preceded by me trying, and spectacularly failing, to memorise 270 binary digits in a minute), and then the Freestyle Show, where various brave competitors and visitors demonstrated a trick involving calculation or numbers. I had another go at the one minute binary, and didn't do any better this time round. There were about thirteen other performances, including Boris Konrad (who was there as a judge in between organising the memory competition for Sunday) doing speed stacking, Matthias Kesselschläger doing calendar calculations faster than is humanly possible, Ulrich Voight demonstrating pi memory and finishing with Rüdiger Gamm doing by far the most impressive act.

I've seen it before, at the last WCMC, but it's still darn cool. He asks the audience for a two-digit number and raises it to the tenth power. Then another one to the 13th, then another to the 20th, then another to the 50th. By which time we're talking dozens of digits in the answer. It always goes down well with the crowd. What's more, it's something I could do - and by that I mean it's something that I couldn't possibly do, but could do if I had the time, dedication and attitude you need for something like that, because it's not a calculation trick like it looks, it's memory. And it involves memorising fewer digits than I did of pi, it looks a lot more impressive, and it's the kind of thing I should look at doing when someone next asks me for a performance, rather than live memorisation in front of an audience, which I quite clearly can't do.

There was a prize for the best performance, based on audience applause. Rüdiger being there made it easy for the spectators - since everybody in the room was clearly in agreement that he was best, they could just give everybody a big hand and then double it for him.

That just left the actual competition to do, on the Saturday. I overslept and missed the photo session at the start, but got there in time to catch the first round. I wasn't the only memory guy competing this time - there was also Melik Duyar from Turkey, who competed in the WMC in 1994 and 1999, and Alexander Drygalla, who like me was doing the insane two competitions, two cities, two days thing. Also there were Robert Fountain, the only other British competitor (like last time - we really need to get more British people out to these things), plus Gert Mittring and Jan van Koningsveld, who between them are pretty much the elite of the mental calculation competition world. 26 competitors in all, which is a lot more than the first one. Hopefully it'll continue to grow.

I did really badly, but then I hadn't been practising as much as I did in 2004, so I've got a sort of excuse. An interesting thing about mental calculation competitions like this one is that it's expected that there will be 'suprise' tasks, where you don't know what kind of mental calculation will be involved. Compare that to memory competitions, which always lay out in advance exactly what will be memorised, and in what format. The first surprise task this year was addition and subtraction of fractions (very uninspired - that's one of the examples of surprise tasks listed in the rules!), but the second was a cool idea - you're given random four-digit numbers and have to name the lowest prime number higher than each. I liked it, although I wasn't any good at it.

Mental calculators, much more than memorisers, like to wander around talking to each other about their own particular speciality, and can often be seen scribbling numbers on pieces of paper to illustrate their point. Everyone has a different area of interest, but there's enough overlap that everyone else finds it fascinating too. It's a very social kind of thing.

Anyway, I ended up 13th out of 26 - top half, which is the kind of thing I was aiming for. Alexander was 12th, Robert won again (and said he was just lucky, presumably for the second time in a row). So after the prizegiving it was straight down to Stuttgart for part two of the weekend's entertainment. Well, almost straight down - one of the trains was late by about ten minutes! I was horrified. The Holiday Inn is about fifteen minutes out of town by the local trains, in Weilimdorf. The S-Bahn ends in "Weil der Stadt", which makes me think "Because the town what?". I got there at a reasonable kind of time and got a good night's sleep.

The first MemoryXL Open Memory Championship, as opposed to the German Open Memory Championship which didn't happen this year (politics), had twenty competitors, including Clemens, Gunther, Boris, Cornelia and Johannes, which has to count as a world-class field. Also Corinna from Austria, and my regular blog-readers Mike Smauley and Simon Reinhard, among others. Actually, as it turned out practicallly all of the mental calculation and memory people are avid readers of this thing now. Fame at last.

Boris had set everything up, but because he was competing himself the task of creating the stuff to be memorised, and generally running the show, fell to Phil Chambers and Gabby Kappus, who did a fantastic job, aided and abetted by a team of volunteers. We had some major delays towards the end, just when I was thinking we were doing really well for being only an hour behind schedule, but nothing out of the ordinary. My performance was surprisingly awful. I was never really in contention, and ended up a long way behind the leaders. I don't seem to be able to bring out my best in a competition any more. That's something I'll go into more detail about at a later date, because I think it merits a whole post to itself (I like talking about myself, you see).

The real excitement of the competition was Cornelia versus Clemens - although in fact Johannes took the early lead in five minute words with 81, Cornelia had 80, which after she'd done a really impressive 751 in five-minute binary gave her a clear lead. Gunther wasn't on his best form either, but he did 726. Clemens struck back with names and faces, one of his specialist subjects, and a new world record of 71, followed by a 680 in 15-minute numbers. Cornelia was right behind him in both though, and still safely in the lead. This isn't the kind of thing Clemens is used to lately, and maybe the pressure affected him for once in ten-minute cards, when he only got two packs. In ten-minute cards I produced my only good score of the competition, doing six packs without any difficulty. That actually pushed me up to third place, but it didn't last. I had a disastrous 140 in speed numbers (Clemens got 260 and Cornelia 258, with Gunther top-scoring with 320), then Clemens had the top score in abstract images, and again outpointed Cornelia in historic dates (although Johannes notched up a fantastic 86 to steal the show), before getting the best result in spoken numbers, albeit with a low-by-his-standards 100. That left Cornelia a mere 50 points or so ahead with just speed cards to go.

While I was faffing about trying 33-second packs and making a mess of it both times, Clemens did 49.8 seconds to really throw down the gauntlet, and although Cornelia managed a one minute pack in the second attempt, it still wasn't quite enough to keep up with him. So Clemens's winning run continues unabated, Cornelia's second place suggests that she might be a candidate to finally end it next year, Gunther came third, Boris fourth and Johannes fifth. I was sixth, which gets me a medal with a 6 on it (there's always lots of prizes at German competitions), but not a trophy to squeeze into my rucksack. And Boris said they'd got small ones just for my benefit, too. Ah well. Simon was just fractionally behind me in seventh. It could have been worse, I suppose.