Nats

Not the annoying flying insects, the not at all annoying national othello championship. Sorry I didn't post anything yesterday, but Geoff and Michael were staying over and I still don't like blogging when someone's watching me. I don't know why, seeing as I'm aware that people are going read what I'm writing anyway. Still, I'm not sure I was a perfect host, as shown by the following conversation when Michael asked for black coffee:

Me: Oh, there isn't any. I normally keep some in the house for guests, but I took it down to the community centre so we'd have something to drink at the tournament, and it's still there. Ditto milk, sugar and tea.
Michael: What is there to drink, then?
Me: Water.
Michael: Fine. (going to the sink)
Me: Oh, also, the cold tap doesn't work.

Well, I never claimed this was the Ritz. Anyway, the competition all went fine - I had been worried that the venue, a cheap and somewhat shabby but extremely nice community centre not too far from the city centre, would have cancelled my booking, even though I called on Friday to confirm that it was still happening, or would otherwise take exception to us, but no, it was all okay. I must be a great organiser after all. We had the AGM before the championship started, which was as exciting as usual. Graham filled in as chairman while Aubrey's busy in America promoting his new book (just for a change - I think this is the fifth year in a row that we've called on Graham's services as official Acting Something-Or-Other).

By the time the competition was ready to start, we had a whopping 18 competitors. This forced me to cycle home and get another board, but we didn't start too late - luckily, really, since we only had the room till six before we had to make way for a live 'guitar vocalist'. Among the 18, just for maximum confusion value, were two Davids, two Jeremys, two Roberts and two Ians (well, one Ian and one Iain, but that's not a big help when you're reading out names). I think some othello players need to splash out on a name change to something more exotic and unique, like Imre or Aubrey.

I lost to Imre in round one, disappointingly enough - three wins in a row against him would have been something to really boast about - but made up for it with a really cool win against Michael in the third round. I've never done that before. Now I just need to work out how to beat Graham some time. Geoff's got the knack of that - he beat Graham in round two, while Iain beat Imre. That pretty much set the standard for the tournament as a whole - it really wasn't one of those championships where the highest-rated players beat everyone below them on the rating list, there were upsets and surprises all over the place. Iain drew with David Hand in round three, so at the end of the first day David Beck was on his own at the top of the table with three wins.

We went to a Thai restaurant in the evening, it being the first place we could find that wasn't full up. Actually, it was nearly empty when we all piled in. The food was good, though, but the service wasn't what you would call exceptional. A surprisingly extensive discussion about coca-cola led to Jeremy Dyer learning that they do in fact still make cans of cherry coke, and my revelation that in Bahrain, the coke cans still have old-fashioned ringpulls.

Today, I didn't manage to follow up that win over Michael with any more impressive results, unless you count winning on time against Ian when I was well and truly dead on the board. Graham also beat me 63-1, just to teach me not to get too cocky. Elsewhere, David Hand rather impressively made it two draws in a row with his first game of the day against David Beck, who then beat Graham but lost to Iain, who took the lead after five rounds but then lost to Imre and Graham, Geoff and Jeremy Das. Geoff was in contention for the lead all the way through, as were both Davids and Michael. It was anyone's guess who would end up in the final, but normality reasserted itself at the last, and it ended up being Graham versus Imre, for about the 73rd time. Imre won for the (genuinely) ninth time. Congratulations to him!

We had lunch in the Dunkirk Tavern down the road from the venue. Their food selection turned out to be rather less extensive than I'd assumed it would be from the sign outside promising inexpensive Sunday roasts - it didn't add "and no other kinds of food" - but it was very nice. All in all, the whole thing went really well, and a fun time was had by all! So I needn't have worried about it all going wrong and me getting the blame.

I'm gonna live forever

Okay, next Wednesday you all have to skive off work and/or come to Britain to see me on This Morning. They're even putting me up in a hotel in London on Tuesday night! And, in a shining example of effective time management, I've arranged a job interview at DHL at East Midlands Airport for late Wednesday afternoon. Although to be honest I'm not over-enthusiastic about the job.

But that's all for next Wednesday, and as the old saying goes, next Wednesday never comes. Tomorrow, on the other hand, we have the othello nationals! I would really like to do well in it, although as I've hardly played the game for months now, it's unlikely that I will. Still, it's my dream that one day my page on the othello wiki will mention something about my othello-playing ability.

TMWRNJ!

Okay, this is cool - This Morning want me on the show! I get to hang out on national TV with whoever hosts This Morning these days, possibly Phillip Schofield! Don't know what day yet, but I'll keep you informed. Also, I've just been talking to someone over the internet who didn't know my real name, and when I told him he said "You're Ben Pridmore? Wow!" I never meet people who've actually heard of me without being told! I'm really turning into a global celebrity! I'll have paparazzi going through my bins before you know it!

I also did that interview with the Rheinische Post today, so if you're a devoted reader, stay tuned. Alexei the UK correspondent says that he might be able to write the article some time soon if the paper stop insisting he write about Madeleine McCann and nothing else. So don't hold your breath.

It's that time of year again

It seems I'm probably going to have a big birthday party again this year. I always thought of myself as the type not to have a big bash, what with it being so depressing being as old and ancient as I am (I CAN'T be 31 next month, can I?), but after the last two years of having a get-together with all the gang, it's become one of those annual traditions. The plan is to try to find an apartment to rent for the weekend somewhere nice, like Manchester.

But 31? I don't know how that happened.

Holy Pillow Talk, Batman!

Ahh, bliss! BBC4 are repeating the sixties Batman series. Which, although I wasn't around in the sixties to watch, I have fond memories of thanks to the repeats on early-morning ITV in the eighties. Those were the days. And being on that channel and not bothering to turn the telly off led me to another interesting discovery - did you know Doris Day was still alive? It's news to me. I don't know why, but I'd just automatically assumed that she was dead. I'm going to have to look up all the other people I've been assuming were no longer with us now, just to make sure they're not going to be turning up unexpectedly on my doorstep. I'll start with Julius Caesar.

The documentary, which I turned off after five minutes despite being vaguely interested in Doris Day and her continued existence, was one of those horribly badly made ones with sort of semi-dramatisations of what the narrator is saying in the background, so that when it recounts how she was hit by a train at the age of thirteen we hear train sounds, clanging bells and a scream. Yuck. If the documentary about me contains anything even vaguely like that, I'm going to sue somebody. Or at least decry it in public as loudly as possible. The filming's finished now, I don't know if I mentioned that - Nick is now busy editing it into some kind of coherent whole (I don't envy him), and it'll be out either late this year or early next, I forget which. So mark your diaries.

It took me years to write, will you take a look?

Okay, I've decided I need to get on with writing this book of mine. I don't even care about getting it published, I'm just sick of "How To Be Clever" sitting there in absentia and mocking me with its non-written-ness. Enough of this talking to people about it, composing chapters in my head, vaguely assuming it'll get done one of these days. It's been a good four years now since I started "writing" it, it's just silly now. So from now on, I'm really, properly going to work at it. And everybody reading this has to constantly pester me about it and complain that it's not on the shelves of Waterstone's yet. Okay?

Hanjie!

I seem to have got addicted to hanjie puzzles - those Japanese ones with the grid where you colour in squares according to the numbers at the sides. I've been doing them for years, since they first started appearing in Tough Puzzles magazine (called 'Tsunami' in those days, until they changed the name after the big real tsunami), but to pass the time on the way to Bahrain I bought a book of puzzles that had lots of hanjies in, and now I can't get enough of the things. I suppose there are worse things I could be addicted to. Like sudoku. That would just be weird.

They really are getting earlier every year!

The great thing about writing a trivial and pointless blog entry every night is that you can check back on the dates when I noticed the 2008 comic annuals were in the shops in the previous two years - September 10th in 2005, September 23rd last year (although they might have been out for a couple of weeks before that without me noticing) and September 8th this year! I really need to write about something more, well, pointful. But I think it's funny that as with the last revamp of the Dandy, the annual hasn't kept pace with developments. Do they really make these changes at the last minute? Or write the annuals so far in advance that changes to the lineup and style of strips in the weekly (or now fortnightly) comic don't get reflected in the annuals for another year? The Beano book has a rather good Billy-the-Cat-fights-General-Jumbo story that almost makes it worth buying, but not quite. And the latest nostalgia book gives a deserved namecheck to the artist who did those wonderful Baby-Face Finlayson strips in the eighties (although I didn't buy the book and now I can't remember his name, so I'll have to flick through it again in another shop. Or buy it, but we don't want to go mad here).

I did my flicking-through-annuals in Stoke-on-Trent today. I decided to spend the day browsing shops in a town I've never been to before, as an alternative to all the hustle and bustle of the previous couple of months (or as a way to stop myself doing nothing but play on the internet all day, as has been my habit much too much of late), so I went to the train station and picked the nearest town that was a shortish and cheapish train journey away. That turned out to be Doncaster, but then although the train arrived on time, it was announced that it would be staying in Derby for the foreseeable future because of signal problems, so I got off again, found the nearest and cheapest place in the other direction that I hadn't been to before, and splashed out on another £6.60 to go to Stoke. It's an unexceptional place, with a city centre even farther away from the train station than Cambridge. But at least now I can say I've been there!

The 8:15 From Manchester

Somewhere between the hour cards in Bahrain and getting back home, I've lost two of my good packs of cards. Numbers 8 and 15, to be precise (the boxes have numbers on, but I don't memorise them in fixed order outside memory competitions. That would be slightly more obsessive than I normally am). So I'll need to get some more if I want to attempt 36 packs again (and who knows, next year, if I've done enough practice, I might). I might get them from Manchester, to justify using the title of a Saturday morning children's show that few of my readers will remember, as my subject line tonight. But I'll probably get them from Derby instead, it's a lot more convenient.

Ooh, but I'll tell you what I have bought from Derby - a new black hat! From a market stall that was absolutely crawling with black hats! Why have I never noticed it before? Possibly it didn't exist before, but I have a feeling it did, and I just didn't pay attention to it. Still, this is a cool one. There's a feather in the hatband.

All the cool people read the Rheinische Post and Rapport

Hmm. Since coming second in the world memory championship, the only publications to ask me for an interview are the foreign correspondent of the Rheinische Post in Düsseldorf and Rapport magazine, a high-production glossy A4 that goes out to all UK Peugeot owners. I suppose that's the best I can hope for.

Anyway, there's been too much memory stuff taking over my life lately. I need to get on with the other things I waste time with - the othello nationals the weekend after next, for example. I've hardly played for the last two months, I really need to get some practice in. Not to mention do my treasurer's report for the AGM (not that anyone really cares about it, of course...)

Aorta

I had a quick interview on Radio Derby again this morning, and in the waiting room there was a copy of the latest newsletter of AORTA - the Allenton, Alvaston and Osmaston Residents Together Association. This is, I'm fairly certain, the worst acronym ever invented. Firstly, it should be AAORTA or even AAAORTA, depending on whether you count the 'and'. Secondly, "Residents Together Association" sounds like a horribly contrived way to make a word out of the initials. Thirdly, why in the name of sanity would you want a residents' association to be called Aorta? Okay, they were always going to be struggling for a name when they decided to form an association spanning three districts of Derby that all start with a vowel, but there's no law saying you HAVE to make an acronym out of the association's name.

The brains in Bahrain fail mainly on the cards-based disciplines

"Names" would have worked better in the subject line, but I did okay in that one this time round. I did miss not doing daily blogged updates of the world championships like last year, but there wasn't internet access from the hotel. So that leaves me having to sum up the whole of the last week in one entry tonight before moving onto whatever I feel like writing tomorrow. Or maybe I'll spread it over a few days. There's a lot to write, anyway.

I got into the Bahrain International Airport at about 8:30pm local time - night falls there earlier than it does here, and it was already fully dark by the time I was leaving the airport. But even so, stepping outside I was knocked off my feet by the staggering heat - it was well over thirty degrees celsius and humid with it, so that you're soaked in sweat almost instantly. But the hotel was pleasantly air-conditioned (a bit too much so at times, in fact - on the first day the competition room was freezing, and thereafter it varied from too cold to too hot as people tried to grapple with the air con controls) and very swanky-looking. Most of the other competitors and organisers were staying there too, except the ones who couldn't afford it and had to make do with one of the cheaper ones down the road, and Tony Buzan and Ray Keene who were staying in a posher place, which gave the whole event a more social, friendly kind of feel. The hotel had a seafood restaurant where I ate the first night with an assortment of other memorisers (from memory I think it was Boris, Simon, Hannes, Ed, Lukas and somebody else who has slipped out of my brain right at this moment. Idriz. Sorry.)

Which reminds me that I shared my shuttle-bus to the hotel from the airport with a retired Swedish-American couple who were touring the middle east and were thrilled to learn that the World Memory Championship was happening in their hotel. They were only there for the first day, but they came along to see what it was like in the morning, even though I'd told them it wasn't much fun for spectators.

Anyway, the hotel also had a Harvesters pub which served excellent food, and we had lunches provided during the competition, so there was no shortage of decent grub. Which maybe explains why we didn't all lose weight like the Sunday Times promised we would. I only had the one day for sightseeing, and I had Nick following me around with the camera, but I did my best to see some interesting sights around Manama. Going outside in the daytime was practically lethal - the temperature got up to about forty degrees and it was a case of having to scamper between patches of shade and try not to look too much like a tourist (kind of a wasted effort, seeing as we were conspicuously white, sweating like the Halal equivalent of pigs and carrying a big TV camera). The coolest bit was seeing the multiple giant billboards advertising the WMC and the "Festival of the Mind" that accompanied it. This isn't something that's ever happened before, as far as I know. There was plenty of media coverage too - we got full-page spreads in the local newspapers every day ("Mind Wizard Pridmore In Race For Title") was my favourite headline.

We only managed 32 competitors, which is rather a step down from the last couple of years, but only to be expected because of the exotic location. And there were plenty of good ones among that lot, including a gang from China, competing in the WMC for the first time. The competition itself started off with some entertaining bickering over the rules - Gunther had asked for an extra page of abstract images, Ed took exception, and they first decided not to allow it, then changed their minds back again in the end. And then the abstract images sheets turned out to have been very badly photocopied (the printer the organisers had arranged turned out not to come with toner), making them much harder to memorise and making the extra page unnecessary after all. It's all part of the fun of the championships.

I got a passable score in that, then broke my world record in the binary digits again, with 4140. Woo! I got an entirely acceptable score in hour numbers too, the second-best after Wu Tiansheng, and was about neck-and-neck with Gunther after the first day, even though day one has his three best disciplines.

Day two was less successful - I honestly don't think I was really up to match fitness, not having practised as much as I should, and by the end of the day (we ran three or four hours behind schedule every day, as is traditional), I was tired and not concentrating properly. But I got a reasonable score in names and faces, a pretty cool 365 in speed numbers, and an 86 in historic dates. But in this one Hannes stole the show, with the only other world record of this year's WMC - 99, beating my old record of 96 that I thought was safe as houses. And then in the hour cards I had a total disaster. Like I said, I wasn't concentrating properly, but I nonetheless decided to go for 33, and my recall was horrific. I filled in 22 complete packs on the recall papers, but a lot of them involved educated and uneducated guesses, so I wasn't at all surprised to see a score of 10.5 packs (you get a half if there's one card wrong in the recall - seems I wrote the king of diamonds down twice without noticing) the next morning.

That put me fractionally in the lead after day two, but then I'm always in the lead after day two. I think I have been in every WMC since 2003, oh, except 2005 when I was leading after historic dates but then fell behind. But I generally find a way to mess things up on the final day. I ended up with 159 on words, with several annoying mistakes when I was convinced I had it nearly perfect. Spoken numbers was again entertaining - the playback stuttered at a couple of points and ran some numbers together instead of playing them at one per second. Lots of people protested that we should do the third trial again, Ed again complained loudly that we shouldn't, largely on the grounds that he had the highest score as things should. I also said that we shouldn't, mainly because I thought Gunther would get a better score if we did it again, and we were still neck-and-neck as it was. Then I changed my mind, realising that that wasn't much of a reason, and Ed also backed down, having been convinced by Lukas that he could improve his own score still further and break the world record.

And in the end, the only one to improve his score was me, with a new personal best 129. Which was cool, and put me once again, fractionally in the lead going into the speed cards.

Remembering last year, when I tried two fast times and failed them both, I decided to be sensible and go for a slow and safe one first time round so as to make sure Simon couldn't steal second place from me. Well, there was a lot of money in it this time, not just pride. I was thrilled to see that the timer I was randomly given (one of the 35 they had there - my ten and the 25 that the WMSC had bought) was the one I used for the world record in Highley in July - it hadn't been used since, and the time came up on the screen when I turned it on. What a good omen, I thought!

I did my safe time of 57.8 seconds, and the recall was perfect. Not a single card I had to think about, it reeled out of my brain flawlessly. I should have gone for a fast one, I thought, irritated. Gunther did 57.1 seconds. That left him needing 50 seconds or so on the second trial to beat me, if I didn't improve at all.

Now, I should clarify something here about the way I memorise cards. I can NOT do a pack in 45 seconds and make it safe. I can go through the pack once (thirty seconds or so) and make it risky, or twice (one minute or so) and make it safe. If I try to go through once, slowly, it makes no difference at all. It's still risky. It's even more risky, in fact, because my brain isn't used to the change in tempo, and my mind starts wandering. I did take my time, knowing Gunther can't do below 40 seconds, and recorded a time of 32 or thereabouts, but in the recall I switched a couple of images around and got it wrong. Gunther got his pack right in a just-fast-enough 47, and won the championship. Drattles.

Still, never mind, eh? Next year. Yes, I'm seriously annoyed with myself. I really, really wanted to win this one. But it really is great that Gunther's finally got a world title under his belt, after all those second and third places over the years and all the work he's done in making 'memory sports' the thing it is today. He gave a great speech at the prizegiving ceremony, praising me in a very flattering kind of way. The prizegiving was a little excessively long, as usual, with the top three in each discipline coming up onto the stage one at a time to get their medals and cheques and rounds of applause, and that was only after the same had been done for all the sponsors and arbiters and helpers (all of whom very much deserve applause and rewards, of course!). Then we had the announcements of the team results, in which the scores were wrong again - they were probably using the same software as last year without having noticed - but the positions were right. Germany won, naturally, and they announced the top three Germans as Gunther, Simon and Hannes, instead of Gunther, Simon and Boris, meaning that Boris had to stay down in the audience taking pictures and Hannes had to limp over to the stage and be helped up the stairs one more time than was strictly necessary. Then we all came up one last time for the prizes for the top ten - I'm now the proud owner of another rather nice glass trophy, not as stylish as the UK championship one but still a lot better than a tin cup, and cheques totalling $6,050, which I'll have to pay into the bank as soon as I can find my chequebook.

My business cards ("Ben Pridmore, idiot") caused quite a stir this year - everybody wanted one, and I soon gave away the ten or so I had left. I'll have to get more printed on the machine at the train station. And I'm not going to say anything about the allegations of cheating against one competitor in the speed cards event (no, not Gunther), without knowing every side of the story. I'm sure I'll think of more important reminiscences about the long weekend over the course of the next few days, and I'll be sure to share them with you.

I'm back!

Wow, it's a while since I've been away from the internet for practically a whole week, there's a lot to catch up on when you come back. Plus I'm worn out by the mental exertions of the last few days (although my swanky hotel room came complete with weighing scales, so I can confirm that I didn't lose between four and nine pounds a day. What a swizz). I'll do a proper blog tomorrow about everything that's happened (and thus keep those of you who weren't following the results on the internet in suspense a bit longer, or else leave you confidently believing that I won...)

Who will play me in the movie of my life?

In the Sunday Times article about the World Memory Championship yesterday, I'm described as "a bespectacled, slightly plumper version of the actor Rick Moranis". The writer of the article, who also believes that all memory competitors use a memory method called "mind mapping", has never met me (we talked on the phone for five minutes), and so I'm surprised to find that he thinks I'm plump. Or more so than Rick Moranis, anyway. Okay, I probably am, but how dare he conclude that I'm plump just based on the pictures of me that appeared in the Telegraph and the Mail? Everyone knows that their cameras add ten pounds and an opinion about illegal immigrants.

Well, according to the same article, we can expect to "temporarily lose between 4lb and 9lb of weight each day" we're out there, so when I come home three stone lighter, Rick Moranis will be the slightly plumper version of Ben Pridmore. Still, he's not the only person I've been compared to lately - the woman who arranged the interview on Central News insisted (before meeting me) that I'm a dead ringer for David Gest. I don't see that at all (although I've admittedly only seen one photo of him, I had no idea who he was and had to pretend I knew what everyone was talking about and then look him up when I got home - I don't watch "I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here").

Another thing that Rick Moranis and David Gest have in common is that they're 54 years old. I'm thirty.

Just to make it clear

Last night's blog was genuinely written by my brother, it wasn't me being silly. Normal blogging service will resume tomorrow! And then stop a couple of days later, because I'm flying to Bahrain on Wednesday and I don't know whether I'll be able to keep in touch while I'm there...

I'm drunk. I agreed to let my brother write my blog tonight.

Yer is my turn ter write blog, am moderately drunk but w'd like ter make couple of points. Firstly, m' brother is splendid, with being the world champion and all. Second, watch our televison programme as will have us singing. We were splendid at that too. Forthly, I would just like to add to ALICIA that your unique flat-faced beatuy has quite won my heart, and though I will be leaving Blaze Publishing soon for life of penury I would like you to join me in it. If its a deal-breaker, would add that preferred Lucy in sales before yer started but have gone off that harridan in preference f'r y'r. Lastly, m'brother does good Cher impersonation and is not bad at puling youthful second vocal in Shoop Shoop Song either. That's it, am done. One more thing, has great falsetto voice and will do so in Bahrain.

Cleaning is bad

I might have mentioned that I tidied up my flat recently. This is, of course, a terrible thing to do, and only brings sadness and complications to everyone's life. The major complication here is that I lost a bit of paper with legs scribbled on it. I'm still trying to work on drawing when I have a spare moment, and recently in a spare moment I was trying to get the hang of drawing someone running. And one of these doodles looked EXACTLY right, so I thought "well, I'm keeping this, so that when I have a bit more spare time and feel like drawing the upper half of a running person, I'll just copy these legs and I'll be sorted". But now I've lost the bit of paper, so I'm back to square one. I'm never going to be an artist at this rate.

I really haven't done enough training

What with being ill and/or lazy, I've really skimped on the all-important last-week-before-the-world-championship memory practice. And with my brother and the TV people coming round this weekend, I'll have to be really disciplined on the bank holiday Monday and do a whole solid day of non-stop cramming numbers and cards and things into my brain, just to get myself up to match fitness. Then it's give-the-poor-brain-a-rest time until the competition starts next Friday. Woo! And by give the brain a rest, I mean maybe spend some time working on a better system for abstract images, because I can do that without cluttering up my memory banks and it really needs doing.

Wow, only a week and a bit, and this whole memory mania of the last couple of months will be all over. No more competitions planned for months and months and months. It's sad...

Sartorial elegance

I found my old leather waistcoat recently, and I think I'm going to have to start wearing it again. It always looked cool, and since I seem unlikely to find a new hat before the world championships, and the cloak is too big and bulky to cart to Bahrain with me, I need some item of stupid-looking clothing to make me stand out from the crowd.

I'm also being forced to the conclusion that I'm going to have to take my big rucksack to Bahrain. I hate travelling with a big bag, but I've got a lot of cards and clothes and things to ship over there, and there really is the possibility of me having to take a trophy home with me (although I hate to leave space for that, because it jinxes the whole thing), and there's no way I can manage it with my little bag. Drat.

Snotty follow-up

For some reason, last night's brief post got lots of comments that I wanted to reply to, so, as an alternative to thinking of something else to write, because I still feel rotten and I think I'm going to have an early night, I'll reply here.

Jemfy: Hugs!

Gregory: As I said in the comments section, you (and anyone else interested in learning about my memory systems or just wanting to chat with other memory competitors) should check out the memorysports yahoo group. I can't remember now why I called it memorysports, when I think the phrase 'memory sports' is silly and never use it myself, but I did, and it's too late to do anything about it now. You'll find answers to all your questions (or failing that, a place to ask your questions and subsequently get answers) there.

But in brief - I have a single object for each pair of two cards, I place three of these in each location, and thus use only nine locations for each pack of cards. I'm all in favour of squishing as much information as possible into each location, others aren't, I think everyone should use the system that works best for them. Play around and see what feels good. I go through the deck by turning over two cards at a time and putting them in a pile in front of me. This is monstrously inefficient, although I've practiced enough over the years that I can do it really, really, REALLY fast, and I'm planning after the WMC to switch to fanning through the pack with the whole thing in my hand. I think that'll be faster.

And when you say "I started doing this in July and I am completely stuck at 1:45", do you mean you're under two minutes for a pack of cards and you've only been doing it for a month? If so, that's pretty darn impressive and I don't think you've got anything to worry about. These things take time and practice. You'll get faster.

Anonymous person whose comment I deleted: I'm flattered that you think I deserve more publicity than another well-known memory man who's on TV a lot, but you could have conveyed the point without launching into a foul-mouthed tirade of personal abuse against this other guy, followed by a surprising and equally passionate digression on the subject of the media's anti-Serbian bias. This blog really isn't a place for insulting other people (unless I think they really deserve it), sexual swearwords (unless it's in a context that makes me giggle) or politics (unless I want to say nasty things about the Daily Mail in return for them giving me lots of free publicity - and the whole Daily Mail thing, I should make clear, is more of a private joke between me and a Mail-reading but otherwise sensible friend than something I deeply believe in).

Katy: Shnuzzles! And I postponed the interview on Friday, went to it on Monday morning instead when I was less busy at my current job. It went quite well, but I don't think they're going to offer me the job - mainly because it'll involve frequent trips to their other office in Windsor, and I don't drive. Shame, but such is life.

Simon: Did you tell me that you've started using a two-card-image system? If so, I forgot about it. Good luck with it! It's a lot of work to get it fixed in your head, but I really think it's worth it.

Everybody who couldn't be bothered to comment: Just to show there's no hard feelings, I'll answer an imaginary question of yours too. What's my favourite unusual snack that would make most people go yuck, you say? Well, I like cheese and jam sandwiches. It's something I picked up from my dad, it's a strange taste but I really like it. I just had one for tea, and while it's made me feel sick, that's probably more to do with me not being well than the sandwich itself.

Snotty

Ugh, I really am feeling rotten today. Just thought I should let you know, in case anyone wants to give me a hug to make me feel better, or something. Hope I get rid of this cold before the world championships. But speaking of which, the Sunday Times want to talk to me now! That's definitely a step in the right direction from the Daily Mail! Although what with work and needing some last-minute practice, I could do without the distraction...

Lemsip

I've got a bad cold, I haven't done nearly as much memory training as I intended to do this weekend, I'm fed up with it raining all the time and I think I'm getting arthritis in my right thumb. Also, I've got to go to work tomorrow. And I bought a lottery ticket yesterday and didn't get a single number.

Still, to look on the bright side, I can get Nick Jr 2 on my telly now, so I get to watch Maggie and the Ferocious Beast every evening!

Also, I currently hold seven of the seventeen memory competition world records (eighteen if you count the poem), including four of the ten world championship ones, and I'm wondering how many more I can get. I'd really like to have more than half of them some day - that'd be something cool to boast about to the general public, who wouldn't have a clue what I was on about. I can maybe get the speed numbers record back if it all goes well in Bahrain, hour numbers is a lot less likely (Gunther will probably beat his own record and go over 2000 this year), spoken numbers is within the realms of possibility, but only just. Words, names and abstract images, no chance at all. But on the other hand, I would hope that the four records I hold already are pretty safe, even if I don't beat them this time out.

Another claim to fame I'm after is winning the world championship more than three times in a row. I realised yesterday in the course of the Mail interview that nobody's ever done that before. Of course, that's a goal that it's going to take me until 2010 to achieve (by which time it will be the future and we'll be holding the space world memory championships on the moon), so we're talking long-term ambitions here. So that ought to keep me still interested, even if I do win it again this time!

I'm gonna live forever

I now get 185 pages on a google search for my name, and most of them are about me. Now that's fame.

I did the interview with the Mail this morning - they also wanted to photograph me in the Brazilian Mystery Cloak, which is going to become more famous than the hat at this rate (assuming I find a new hat). I can envisage my clothing having fights and not speaking to one another.

Weekend plans

Memory, memory and more memory, with a bit of being interviewed and a bit of cleaning up the flat if I'm good. I've made significant strides in cleaning up the living room tonight, after a good solid chunk of memory practice, so who knows what I might achieve if I keep this up?

Two weeks till the world championships! Woo!

I don't care if it's technically summer!

All the shops that might be expected to sell me a new black fedora or similar are only selling 'summer hats' - either straw hats or floppy cloth ones. This is disgraceful. Yes, wearing a big black hat in the summer sun is uncomfortable and not something that any sane person would do, but why are the shops so prejudiced against the insane? I'm going to have to go to Bahrain wearing one of the straw cowboy hats I've had sitting in my flat since that cowboy murder party years ago (the straw hat I bought in Stuttgart got ruined last Sunday when the TV people decided it would be cool to film me cycling in the rain). I'm not sure the straw cowboy hats are good memory hats - I can prop my stopwatch up on them, but it sometimes falls over. It doesn't do that with a good hat. I need a big black hat. Maybe someone else will leave one on a train so I can steal it?

I've forgotten something

I was going to write something specific tonight, and I'm pretty sure it was going to be about memory. But I've forgotten what it was.

So instead, I'd like to make a job offer - I would gladly pay someone to say no to other people on my behalf. I didn't manage to turn down the Daily Mail - I explained that I'm very busy lately what with work and the world championships coming up, but it ended up with me cheerfully agreeing that the writer can come round on Saturday morning to talk to me. And I really need to be training all weekend too, since next weekend I've agreed to parade in front of the TV cameras again even though that's the last weekend before the WMC and I really, really, really need to be training all that weekend.

Also, I have neither cancelled the interview on Friday nor asked my current employers for the morning off. I like to adopt the attitude that if I don't do anything, the whole situation will sort itself out to my satisfaction somehow anyway. Strangely enough, it usually does, too.

What to do?

I've been offered an interview for a rather cool job in Burton-on-Trent on Friday morning. It's something that's been in the pipeline since before I started the job I'm at now in Nottingham - they wanted to interview me while I was in Germany, then the boss went on holiday and now they still want to see me. So they're at least a little bit impressed by my CV. Which is weird, really, since they job spec asks for a graduate, with experience of the strange accounting software they use (which I've never even heard of before now). But like I say, it sounds like a good job, and it pays rather significantly more than the one I'm doing right now.

On the other hand, the one I'm doing right now is a nice enough job, pays enough to keep me going and they've been very generous in letting me take time off to go to Bahrain right in the middle of when I should be producing the year end accounts (as an aside, I have to stop getting jobs with companies with a financial year end in July and August - it's always going to clash with the WMC), and I'd feel bad about taking Friday morning off to go to an interview for another job.

I've already said yes to the interview, because as you might remember I find it impossible to say no to people, so I'm going to let somebody down one way or the other. Maybe I'll hire an actor to impersonate me at either the interview or the job. Or two actors, to do both! Then I can stay at home and watch cartoons all day! Or ooh, even better, I'll hire a third actor to stay at home and watch cartoons all day, while I go out and rob banks, safe in the knowledge that I have three cast-iron alibis!

Some forever, not for better

I've said it before, but it bears saying again - the old house looks so SMALL! I still can't get over the whole perspective issue. The whole of Tumby Woodside seems to have shrunk, in fact (and it was never exactly big in the first place). But number 2, Chapel Road, especially.

The place has changed completely since I last saw it - the front hedge is three times as tall, so you can't see the house from the road. There's a new fence that stops you seeing through to the back garden, there's a new brick porch around the front door, and what used to be the lawn is now all gravel. And TINY! It's a few steps from one end to the other of what used to be the lawn - it used to be big enough for a full-scale football game (if I could bully my brother into playing football with me). While Nick was talking to the current owner's father and preparing to film me going into the house for the first time, I was picking out the few bits and pieces that are still the same - the bit of concrete marking one side of the driveway, the cherry blossom tree (now surrounded by other plants rather than standing on its own), the little hole at the corner of the hedge that you can hide in if you're small enough, the old roof tiles that don't match the newer ones on the other houses in the row (my dad didn't want to waste the money on getting them replaced - a decision vindicated by the fact that apparently they've just started leaking in the last couple of months). There wasn't much, and it was all too small, but it was good to see the few little familiar bits.

The house has just been bought by a London policewoman called Alex. She's still in London until she gets promoted to sergeant, when she'll be able to relocate to Lincolnshire. And judging by the dumbbells in the bedroom, you won't want to tangle with her when she does - I couldn't life them with both hands! So the house is pretty much empty right now, just a few bits of furniture, all the wallpaper's stripped off and it's waiting to be redecorated all over. It was Alex's father, Ron, who let us in and obligingly waited in his car while the TV crew did all the filming. She also has a brother who was in The Boot Street Band. The pictures and knick-knacks that are in the house already are all police-themed.

But the previous owners have done a heck of a lot of things to the inside of the house - for some reason they've blocked off the door between the lounge and dining room and knocked another one through at the other end of the wall. The fireplace that my dad built himself is all gone, and there's just a few scraps of the old wallpaper on the lounge walls. What used to be the dining room is now a kitchen, and what used to be the tiny kitchen is now a sort of study. They've moved the back door along the wall too, and replaced it with French windows. The bathroom's still the bathroom, but the fixtures have all been replaced. I was just marvelling at how small the rooms were - how did we fit the piano, record player, sofas, armchair, TV, shelves and things into the lounge and still have so much space? How did we enact so many epic Action Force adventures in the minimal floor space of the dining room? And yes, the kitchen was always cramped, but it doesn't look like it could ever have fitted the sink, wasing machine, cooker, fridge, freezer and a bit of space to walk between them.

And upstairs, my bedroom looked like a cupboard! No furniture in it at all, but it's so tiny now, I couldn't believe it. Likewise my brother's room, although the view out to the kitchen roof is familiar - nobody's replaced the tiles there, either, even the couple that are broken or the wrong shape. Funnily enough, the only room I didn't get the shrinking feeling is my dad's room - obviously, because that's the one room in the house I didn't spend much time in when I was little. It's weird, but that room is still the size I remember.

And as for the garden - there's a wooden summer-house out on the front, the old brick shed is still there but the garage and bike shed are gone. The grass is neatly cut and flat, there's no blackberry bushes. The hedges there are also ten feet high - the previous owners really liked their privacy - and there's a new row of tall trees hiding the back garden from anyone in the fields behind. But duck behind the trees and there's a couple of feet of the garden I remember, overgrown and wild, before the wooden fence which, wonderfully, still has the rusty metal pole tied to it. I never knew what that pole was for, but you could hold onto it and stand on top of the fence in the corner of the garden where we had our base (Bjorn House, with "Bjorn" pronounced in a strictly English way). I looked for the old wooden flooring, but it's either gone or overgrown.

It was a strange experience - tiny bits of the house are still the same, the rest is so different it's scary. I still sort of think of it as the place where my dad's living, and I can pop down to see him any time. It's weird to see that it hasn't just stayed the same all these years...

This old house once rang with laughter, this old house heard many shouts

Actually, I'm too tired and headachy to write at length about my trip to my old house tonight - I've only just got home and I've got to be up early tomorrow for work. So I'll leave it till tomorrow except to say that it genuinely looks so much smaller now, I was amazed! Especially since I lived there till I was twenty, brief dalliances with university aside, and visited it frequently until I was 23. I haven't grown significantly since then, as far as I know, so why do I remember the place being so much bigger?

Instead, I'll post tonight that the prize fund for the World Memory Championship has just been announced (woo!) and there are very nice prizes for the top ten competitors (double woo!). I quote:

The total prize fund will be US$ 30,000.

This will be divided in the following way.



The World Memory Champion 2007 will receive US$10,000

The Silver Medallist will receive US$ 5,000

The Bronze Medallist will receive US$ 3,000



Competitors achieving 4th to 10th place in the competition with each

receive US$1,000



I am sure you will agree that this exciting news will dramatically raise the profile

of the Mind Sport of Memory and contribute to making the 2007 World Championships

in Bahrain the best yet.



Our grateful thanks go to Shaikh Hamad and Intelnacom for their tremendous support

Presumably the remaining $5,000 will be embezzled by someone in a position of power. But even if the prize fund is actually only $25,000, that still makes it the biggest ever by a long way! And since so few of the world's best memorisers will be turning up, anyone who can scrape together the cash for a flight to Bahrain stands a very good chance of making back a good part of the cost. Hopefully this'll inspire a few last-minute entries (and hopefully the WMSC don't really mean it when they say registrations close a month before the competition, because that's just silly).

It'd take a dozen skivvies, his clothes to wash and scrub

Woo, the football season is back! And with it comes Match of the Day on the BBC on Saturday nights, coinciding nicely with the othello tournament on kurnik! I can get back to my usual Saturday routine of avoiding seeing the football results so I can be surprised when I watch the highlights. Which is going to be a bit harder this year, with Derby being back in the Premiership. I haven't heard any celebrating fans running through the streets this evening, so they probably lost.

Normally speaking, staying up till nearly midnight isn't a problem, it being Saturday, but tomorrow I need to be up at the crack of dawn to get a series of rail replacement buses down to Boston, so I can be filmed hanging out in Tumby Woodside. Times like this I need reminding why I agreed to this whole documentary idea. I'm still getting used to working five days a week again, I can do without giving up half of my weekend too. Moan, mutter, grumble...

I have GOT to learn to say no on the phone!

The Daily Mail phoned me tonight and I ended up agreeing to let them send someone round to interview me next Wednesday night. I should have said something along the lines of "Sorry, I don't really want to be interviewed", but as regular readers of my blog will know, I'm not good at that. So I said that I'm quite busy at the moment, and let myself be talked round.

Seriously, the Telegraph was bad enough, but the Daily Mail? I do have a strict rule in this blog of not talking politics, and I only break it very occasionally, but I do have quite extreme left-wing views, and it's not that much of a secret. So why is it only the right-wing papers that want to talk to me? I'm the kind of typical weirdo bearded lefty Guardian reader (except that I don't read the Guardian), aren't they curious about the world memory championships? Is the Mirror completely uninterested in the mechanics of memorising a pack of cards? Doesn't the Socialist Worker want to make me a pin-up of the week?

I'm going to get out of this, I can't actually appear in the Daily Mail.

The problem with working

Is that I go to work, juggle numbers, come home and do nothing exciting or blogworthy a lot of the time. And I'm in a bit of a lull between memory championships. I should be training in the evenings, but I haven't been in the mood this week. I'll try to do an hour numbers again on Saturday, and maybe hour cards too. But I need to get into the habit of doing some speed and spoken numbers in the evenings, because that's what I need to work on.

Who knows, maybe something interesting will happen to me tomorrow?

It was quite a day

Donald woke up on the morning of his thirty-seventh birthday to find himself not in his bed, but lying in the middle of a mini-roundabout, tied by the wrists and ankles to a tree trunk and blindfolded with what a quick probe with his unusually long tongue suggested was a medium-sized woman's handkerchief. "What's going on?" he asked.

A medium-sized woman took off the blindfold and started to untie him. "Surprise!" she said.

"Prudence?" said Donald, a little confused. "Why am I tied to a tree trunk in the middle of a mini-roundabout?"

"I wanted to bring you here as a birthday surprise, so I drugged you last night and dragged you here. I don't own a car, so I have to travel everywhere by dragging a tree trunk around."

"But why a mini-roundabout? Many lazy drivers drive over the painted white circle over the edges of which your tree trunk is dangerously jutting. We're not entirely safe here."

"I had to stop here because I ran out of petrol. I was heading for the car park half a mile down the road."

"Wait a minute," said Donald, with a look of dread on his face. "A car park half a mile down the road from a mini-roundabout? There's only one place in the world where that occurs! We're in WELWYN GARDEN CITY!"

"Yep!" said Prudence, finally freeing Donald from the trunk. "Happy birthday! I knew you'd like it!"

"Like it?!" Donald screamed. "Like it? I hate Welwyn Garden City! You know I can't ever bring myself to go within fifty miles of the place! I've told you about it several times - when I was ten years old I was chased by a rabid pig through the streets of Welwyn Garden City for seventeen hours until it was finally killed by a white hunter! It left me permanently psychologically scarred!"

"Oh," said Prudence, frowning. "A pig? I thought it was a rabid horse."

"But you did know it was Welwyn Garden City? And still brought me here?"

"Well, yes, but I checked with the Lady Mayoress before we came that they weren't intending to have any rabid horses roaming the streets today. I didn't check for pigs, though."

"There might be rabid pigs? Seriously, what's wrong with you?"

Prudence sniffled and her lip wobbled. "I only wanted to give you a birthday surprise! I thought you'd like it!"

"I wanted to spend my birthday with my wife and children! It's not that I don't appreciate your gesture, but we just work together, we're not even particularly close friends. You could have just sent me a card. Oh heck, here comes a rabid horse!"

"It can't be! The Lady Mayoress promised me!" Prudence screamed as the horse bore down on them. Abandoning the tree trunk, which was subsequently towed away and crushed into a cube, the two of them ran headlong through the streets for eighteen hours until the horse was felled by a collapsing statue of Disraeli.

"Sorry the birthday surprise didn't work out quite the way I'd expected," Prudence gasped, lying down in the gutter to catch her breath.

"Don't worry about it," Donald smiled. "It was a surprisingly pleasant experience, all in all. Apart from the bit with the horse."

This has been a presentation of the Welwyn Garden City Tourist Board. Come to Welwyn Garden City. A great day out for all the family.

Vaše pravo na glasanje (Your Right To Vote)

Had my voter registration form in the post today along with a booklet explaining it in English, Albanian, Arabic, Bosnian, Chinese, Farsi, French, Hindi, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Punjabi, Somali, Turkish, Ukrainian and Urdu. I'm going to campaign to get German added to the list. Derby needs to become a worldwide capital of 'memory sports', and that'll mean there'll be a swarm of German immigrants coming and setting up home here.

Yes, I couldn't think of anything to write about tonight. Is that a crime?

Homeward bound

The TV people are taking me to my old house in Tumby Woodside on Sunday, presumably to wander around and point at things as if they hold some special significance to me. Which will be cool. I haven't been there since, ooh, probably more than five years ago, whenever it was that my dad moved out. When was that, anyway? See, this is why I'm famous for my bad memory. Now, hang on, association techniques ahoy, I remember talking on VPS about having to take all our old toys to my flat in Boston, and subsequently talking about it in real life at what was almost certainly the famous VPS Meet 7th April 2000. So it's probably more than seven years, if that's right. My passport has his original address in Huntingdon as my emergency contact details (I should probably change those some day - my emergency contacts are my late father and my brother at an address he left about two years ago), and I got the passport in June 2000. Although I might not have filled in the contacts bit for a year or two.

I can't imagine Tumby Woodside has changed very much since I was last there (come to think of it, I went down there on my motorbike once or twice to see what the new owners had done with the house, so it was well before I got rid of the bike in late 2002). There isn't much to change - it isn't so much a village as a road, about a mile long, with farmhouses here and there and a clump of four council houses incongruously dropped in the middle of nowhere, possibly due to a clerical error, in one of which I spent my halcyon days. The whole idea of going there has put me in a nostalgic kind of mood, though. Some time when I'm not being filmed, I'll take my bike down to Boston on the train and cycle out to Tumby Woodside, Coningsby and Tattershall and all the surrounding places. Maybe up to Horncastle too, although that would take a lot of cycling (ten miles from Boston to Tumby, and another ten from there to Horncastle, which involves cycling up the only hill in that part of Lincolnshire along the way). Yep, I really like this plan now. I'll have to see when I can fit it into my busy schedule...

Five Not Live

I know I said I wasn't going to write about memory-related stuff for a while, but I had to record that I've just done an interview over the phone for Radio Five Live, that's going to be broadcast some time around midnight tonight, under the pretence that it's a live chat with a 'fascinating person'. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the media are all a bunch of fakers. They did actually want me to do it live, at midnight, but I told them I've got to work tomorrow. And really, if I'm not important enough to be on the air at half past eight on a Sunday night, I'm not going to stay up late until we get to a timeslot with few enough listeners. I'm almost a celebrity, dagnabbit! I should be demanding all sorts of concessions for this kind of work! My own dressing room, and a box of really nice chocolates with no nuts in, brought to me by trained squirrels. And a Big Yellow Teapot.

Back in black and white

I've completely neglected the game of othello lately. I'm playing right now in a tournament on kurnik for the first time in I can't even remember how long. So many memory competitions and media nuisances and jobs and things getting in the way. But I'm not doing all that badly, considering.

I should really write more on the subject, to make this into a proper blog entry and not short-change my readers, but it's late and I'm going to bed as soon as the tournament finishes. So I'll just advise everyone to buy the Sunday Telegraph tomorrow, where somewhere among whatever rubbish the Sunday Telegraph usually contains (I've never read it, but I'm pretty sure it complies to the usual quantity-not-quality rule of Sunday newspapers) there should be a big article about the World Memory Championships.

Wheeee!

It's the weekend! This is the first full week's work I've done for a while, so it makes a couple of days off feel extra-special. I'm going to hopefully do some hour numbers and hour cards practice, possibly draw some pictures (remember that learning-to-draw intention I had? Still got it, just haven't had the time to doodle), maybe clean up my flat just in case I decide to move out (living in Nottingham would be a heck of a lot more convenient if I'm going to be working there). All in all, just relax. Yay!

Behind the door of the Big Yellow Teapot, there's a whole world of fun

Having a conversation at work today about children's toys, and the subject of the Big Yellow Teapot came up. I always wanted a Big Yellow Teapot, and I never got one! Admittedly by the time it came out I was a bit too old and a lot too male to be in their main target market, so I never really told anyone I wanted one, but someone should have realised and bought me one anyway. I had a Family Treehouse, also mentioned in the article linked above, but that was comparatively rubbish, and no substitute for a Big Yellow Teapot. It's not fair.

The railway and the telegraph

Two inventions of the Victorian age without which the world would be a much better place. Got up earlyish this morning and intended to catch the 7:22 to work, which gets me into the office a bit after eight, which lets me leave in time for the 5:00 train home. However, I missed it by about thirty seconds, and had to get the 8:03 instead. Which was cancelled. And then the 8:22 did turn up, but the electrics failed and it never left the station. So I had to get the 8:39, which was running late as well as being full of three trainloads of passengers, and didn't get to the office till gone half nine.

So I couldn't really justify leaving before five, so I got the 5:34 home, in time for the visit of a writer and photographer from the Sunday Telegraph, who conducted a surprisingly lengthy interview - more than three hours they were here! I taught him a basic card memory technique (which he seemed to pick up quite well), while the large photographer wandered around the room knocking every single one of my posessions over on his way. He also took photos of me in the hat and the Brazilian Mystery Cape, which should look good. Although they probably won't get into the paper - they've got enough writing and pictures there to fill a largish book, and they're only writing a little article for which they're also interviewing Tony tomorrow.

So I'm tired.

Zoom zoom zoom

Just as I was about to take my saucepan of spaghetti and my other saucepan of bolognese off the hob, my phone rang with one of those talking text message things. I've never had one of those before. It just said "zoom zoom zoom", from a phone number I didn't recognise.

The scary thing is that I have no end of friends who might have decided to send that message, so I have no idea who it could be from. I was going to call back, but I decided to have my tea first before it got cold. I'd just about got it onto the plate when the phone rang again, with another unrelated phone call. And then just after I'd finished, someone else rang up to talk to me. And bear in mind that I can go weeks on end without ever using the phone sometimes. So I forgot about the text message until right now, and now it'd just be silly to ring up. It made me giggle, and I imagine that was the only reason for the message. And I dare say whoever sent it will own up, right?

One last observation

I now hold the world records in all the memory championship disciplines involving cards and binary digits, and none of them in the ones involving decimal numbers. It's because I've got good systems for the cards and binaries, better than anyone else (I think so, anyway), but an unexceptional one for the numbers. I need some ideas for how to improve it, something that doesn't involve switching to a 10,000-image thing, because I just don't think that would work.

Okay, that's it. Memory competitions over for another month, British media blissfully unaware that there even was a competition last weekend, I don't need to talk about memory any more. In fact, I resolve to give the whole talking-about-memory thing a rest for, ooh, at least a fortnight. I think my loyal readers have had more than enough.

What did I talk about before this last month or so, anyway? How about work? I'm not technically really looking for a job, but I did agree that Hays could put my CV forward for three permanent jobs today - they sound a bit upset that I've taken a temp job (albeit a temp-leading-to-permanent-possibly job) with another agency, after telling them I didn't want one. I hate to upset anyone. One of these jobs is in Denby again - maybe I'll cycle if I get an interview.

No, work's too dull a subject. Cartoons! I haven't watched nearly enough cartoons lately. Apart from a couple of episodes of Thundercats. I really must do that proper Thundercats review blog thing I was talking about. I'm sure you'll all love to read it. I just want to get some kind of magic device that lets you put pictures from old videos on the internet. I'm sure such a thing exists, but I'm a bit ignorant when it comes to hardware.

Other things I should mention

Tuttlingen is noted for producing surgical implements - the top winners all got a special souvenir case of scalpels and things. Which is very nice, but I only had hand luggage, so I couldn't possibly take them home with me! I gave my set to Boris. I did manage to fit the trophy in my rucksack, although I can't think how since it was stuffed full to bursting on the way out too, and I didn't leave anything behind. Commendably, this year's best-foreigner trophy was only half the size of the one I got in 2005.

On the train on the way to Zurich this morning, the passport inspectors inspected my passport to a quite scary extent, examining it through a magnifying glass, shining lights through the pages, practically taking it to pieces to examine the component molecules. I have no idea what they were looking for, but since I didn't get arrested, they presumably didn't find it.

There were no trains running from Birmingam airport train station today, as usual. I might have mentioned before that it's the only train station in the country that seems to be permanently served by nothing but rail replacement buses. A man at the station with such a strong Birmingham accent that I think he must have been faking it to sound cool said the current lot of maintenance work is going on until September the nointh, although that probably won't concern me, since I'm flying to Bahrain from London, and tragically I don't think I'm going to get the chance of any more foreign trips in the next couple of months. It's really not fair.

The brain's fine, the fingers need some help

First of all, it turned out not to be possible to find a big black hat for sale anywhere in Stuttgart. I'm horrified. But I suppose if they were easy to come by, everyone would wear them and they wouldn't look so cool any more. So I bought a straw hat instead, which looks quite cool and works as something to prop my stopwatch up on.

Anyway, the competition was great, the venue was excellent, lots of fuss being made over the whole thing by everyone at the Aesculap Akademie. All the competitors got an Aesculap Memo Masters '07 T-shirt, which everyone except Andi dutifully wore. Who needs a team uniform when the venue dress us? Sixteen competitors in the adult championship - twelve regulars and four eighteen-year-olds from the local grammar school who'd never heard of memory a couple of weeks ago and were having a competition among themselves to see who'd do best. Sabine Michelfelder won, for the record, just in case she goes on to be world champion in a few years' time.

Meanwhile, Gunther was on cracking form all weekend. Even better, so was I! After the first two events I mentioned yesterday, I ended up with 3915 in the binary digits, another world record, and 3000 points from the first three disciplines. Which is very cool. Cornelia was third-best in binary, like in the cards, Simon was fourth in all three events on the first day, and Boris, Johannes and Alisa were the chasing pack. Seriously tough competition.

For the second day, I did much better than I expected in the events where the German language got in the way a bit - an entirely respectable 62 in historic dates (Hannes got 79, and he's aiming to beat my record some time soon), 90 in spoken numbers, 81 in names (all German names, half of which I'd never heard of before), and 109 in words, which I'm extremely pleased with - attempting 110, so just one spelling mistake, and about 25% of the words were ones I didn't recognise. Boris set a new world record 227 in words, and Gunther beat his own world record in abstract images with 244.

In speed numbers, I did 360 in the second attempt (having made a bit of a mess of the first one), which would have been a new world record too if Andi, who skipped the morning's events, hadn't done 396 in the first go. So that's his revenge for me taking his speed cards record in Highley. I'll get it back in Bahrain.

At this point, I noticed that Gunther's consistently great scores in everything were not only giving him a safe lead over me (which didn't worry me, because what with the language barrier I didn't go there aiming to win), but also giving him a high enough score that a half-decent score in the final discipline, speed cards, would put him on top of the world ranking list, dislodging me! Unless I could do a very good time in the cards and beat him after all.

But I did a safe 55 seconds first time round, because this was practice for the world championship and I never practice slow-and-steady speed cards. Gunther did a safe time of one minute or so. Second time round, I did 27.44 seconds, but as I put the cards down, they slipped out of my hand and spread all over the table. I carefully put the pack back together, but there was one sticking out that I wasn't sure was the bottom one or another that had come out. And without looking at the face and thus invalidating my time, I couldn't be sure. So I tucked it into the bottom of the pack and hoped for the best. I got the recall right, but it turned out that the last two cards had got switched, so the time didn't count. Which is extremely annoying, but never mind.

Gunther did 47 seconds, and I've been trying to work out in my head whether my time on the second pack, if I'd got it right, would have put me narrowly ahead of him in the final table, or narrowly behind. Perhaps someone with the spreadsheet could save me the effort and work it out properly? Not that it matters - for one thing, I have the moral victory of knowing that but for that mishap I would have had a personal-best total score, despite the four disciplines in German; for another, honour was the only thing at stake anyway - only Germans can win the German championship, foreigners compete alongside them but fight for a different set of trophies. So Gunther was always going to win the big cup, the smaller cup he gets to keep and not return for the next champion and the complete ten-bulky-volumes encyclopaedia (of which he already has more than enough - that's always the prize at the German championships, and this was his eighth win), and I was always going to win the smaller best-foreigner trophy.

But that does put Gunther in the number one spot on the ranking list, that has been my personal property since August 2004! I always figured it'd be Clemens who knocked me off, but it just goes to show how Gunther's still improving steadily after all these years. He definitely deserves to finally be number one, and I'll just have to do something special in Bahrain to get it back.

Cornelia is also still improving at a rate of knots - she finished a bit behind me in the total rankings, to get the second place German trophy. She's now up to 5th in the world ranking, and Simon, who was third, moves up to number 8. It's quite staggering how the standard keeps rising at these things, and the scores get higher by so much every time.

There was a barbecue after the championship, and then the lavish prize-presentation ceremony, which goes on for hours but is always very entertaining - everyone gets medals, trophies, certificates and so on, there's a big screen display with the statistics, lots of applause and local dignitaries handing out the prizes, I love it. The world championships prizegiving ceremonies are always rather subdued in comparison to the German spectacle.

So, all in all, I'm delighted with the way I performed. I was good in EVERYTHING, no weak events, and that's exactly what I've been aiming for over the last year of practice. Bahrain's going to be fun - Gunther kindly, and inaccurately, said he wouldn't have a chance of beating me, but it's going to be a real challenge. As for who's going, that's the problem - Gunther will be there, the rest of the Germans aren't so sure - Cornelia and Hannes definitely can't, which is a real loss (we'll also be missing Joachim, who's currently in Costa Rica on his gap year and can't make it), Boris and Simon are thinking about it. Clemens, no idea, but I really hope he'll be there.

Boris explained to Tony Buzan that as a student, he might not be able to make the trip to Bahrain. Tony, who never really understands the concept of not having enough money for something, helpfully replied "You must!", but he did say that they'll be announcing the prize fund within the next week. In WMSC language, that generally means in the next two or three months, so we'll have to see, but if they did offer big prize money, and split it between, say, the top three in each discipline rather than giving it all to the overall winner, they would get more competitors.

Even so, I'm looking forward to it. If I can do this well there too, I'll win. Need to practice the hour numbers and cards over the next month, but otherwise just keep on form. I want it to be tomorrow, to be honest. I hate waiting for in a competition when I'm in the mood, and I've seldom been quite so in the mood as I am right now.

Scores on the videoprinter

Very quick post tonight, because I really should get some sleep (not to mention finish reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), and we start tomorrow morning at 8:30am (we finished today at around 8:30pm).

Clemens isn't there - he showed up briefly just to say he wasn't taking part, I don't know what the story is there - but we've got the full complement of the rest of the world's best Germans (unless Steffen Bütow or Jan Formann are still active enough and German enough to fall into that category). Andi is also half there, in his usual way - he doesn't want to get up early tomorrow, so he's going to skip half the disciplines. He says he's definitely not going to the world championships, but I'll believe that when I see it.

30-minute numbers didn't go quite as well as I'd hoped, but I ended up with a respectable 1000 exactly - Gunther got a new world record 1160, Cornelia 1016, Simon 985, Johannes 890, Andi 740, someone whose name I've written down on my piece of paper as "AK" got 700 (Alisa Kellner, of course - I knew it would come back to me eventually), and Boris 660. Going to be a tough competition, obviously.

But I did seriously well in 30-minute cards, with 16 packs - Gunther got 11 and an extra few cards, Cornelia nine and a half and Simon nine. Scores on the doors after two disciplines:

Me 2064.1
Gunther 1820.2
Cornelia 1570.0
Simon 1513.1
Andi 1078.2
Boris 1013.0
Johannes 1010.9

Binary went well too - with a bit of luck I've beaten my record there. Gunther no doubt did well too, so I should still be narrowly in the lead after day one. Tomorrow, of course, we have the untranslated German-language events, so expect me to drop down the rankings. I'd write more, but it's bedtime and Harry's in a tight spot.

And now for today's post

Hi! I'm in Stuttgart! No time to write anything else, but I thought you might like to know.

Blogging in an unusual location

I couldn't get on to Blogger last night, so I posted this on the LJ account I never use:

Having found an internet cafe in Tuttlingen, I'm darned if I'm going to let the fact that Blogger isn't working stop me from blogging. I'll do one here instead, and copy it over later. It'll be a short one, because German keyboards have the Y and Z in the wrong places and I can't type very quickly. But I had to record the fact that I left my hat on a train, again, on the way here from Zurich airport. It's getting a bit silly now.

I wouldn't have done it if I'd been travelling on my own, but I had the TV people with me, distracting me. It's quite definitely their fault, rather than mine. But never mind, I'll see if I can get a new hat when I go to Stuttgart tomorrow - I've got the whole day to myself for once, and plenty of time to get properly outfitted for the competition on Friday. Well, almost the whole day, they want to film me again tomorrow night - I might ditch them, depending on the mood I'm in, because I feel like I've hardly had a second to myself for the last couple of weeks.

The woman at the hotel complimented me on my German! She might have been jumping to conclusions a bit, because all I'd done at that point was nod while she rattled off explanations of where breakfast and the lift were. Although I did understand the breakfast thing, and it's in another building down the road, so I'm quite proud of myself there. Tuttlingen is a really nice town, by the way, a lot bigger than I'd expected. The venue for the championship looks nice too, from the outside. Looking forward to it!

Look North

"Look North" was the local counterpart of East Midlands Today that I got when I was living in Boston. I never really understood why it was called Look North. It covered Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, which is kind of up in the north, so why would the people watching it want to look north? The only thing up there is Newcastle and Scotland and the Arctic. There's more things to see if you look south, or east, or west.

Anyway, East Midlands Today was kind of like a dumbed-down version of the Central Tonight interview - they gave me the whole of the sports news to memorise a pack of cards, and then only had me recite precisely six of them before making impressed noises. Other than that it was just the usual questions, although at least this time the studio was just around the corner from work, rather than in Birmingham.

Speaking of Birmingham, tomorrow I'm flying from there to Zurich, and thence by train to Tuttlingen. Then a day's sightseeing in Stuttgart, assuming I can escape Nick and his camera, then two days of memorising against the world's best. Woohoo! See you (and by that I mean write a blog that you will subsequently read) on Sunday, unless I find a net cafe and the time to blog while I'm there.

Dance your cares away (clap-clap)!

Boomerang are showing Fraggle Rock! They started tonight with the first episode, and I found out about it fifteen minutes beforehand, so I was thrilled. I don't think I've ever seen the first one before, or at least it didn't ring any bells in my ever-unreliable memory. Strangely enough, they're showing the US version, even though the British version with Fulton Mackay is available on DVD (I've been sort of meaning to buy it for ages. Maybe I still will).

Oh, and I also started the new job today. It seems okay, although it's one of those companies with a lot of bureaucracy and lots of people to get to know from all the little departments I'll be doing the accounts for. Plus the commute to Nottingham is inconvenient. But it's still preferable, morally speaking, to staying at home doing nothing all day. And I only have one more day till I flounce off on my holidays. Yay!

Not more memory talk!

Sorry, I know I've been on about nothing else for the last week or so, but that's just because I've been doing nothing but talk memory 24 hours a day. Starting tomorrow, I'll shut up about it for a day or so.

But today I felt that I'd have to do some practice for Germany. All this media attention had completely knocked me out of the memory-competition frame of mind, I hadn't found the time for even a pack of cards except the one I did on the telly, and I'd completely forgotten exactly what I'd planned to do in Tuttlingen. I figured I needed to spend the day doing a lot of work, just to get me back in 'the zone'. I promise never to use that expression again.

Anyway, I did a 30-minute numbers, 30-minute cards and 30-minute binary, and got 1164, 18 packs and 3255 respectively. Which is extremely encouraging - if I could do that in the competition, it'd be two world records and a score that should beat everyone except Gunther in the other. Although doing it in the competition is a different kettle of fish altogether, obviously. And I would expect Clemens and Gunther to be somewhere around 1200 in the numbers too, because that record's ripe for the beating.

18 packs of cards is doubleplusgroovy, though - I attempted 18 and got them all flawlessly correct. And the binary isn't too disappointing, because I'm never going to be on top form after two other half-hour disciplines in a short period of time. So now I'm going to give my brain a rest until Friday (you know, except for the new job, I might use my brain a bit for that), and look forward to Tuttlingen! Historically, I always do terribly at the German championship, and I'd really like to break that pattern this time round.

Just another frantic Friday

Sooo, let’s see. I had to get out of bed at seven o’clock in the morning to get showered and dressed before Nick arrived to film my every movement. He got here about ten minutes earlier than promised, at 7:35, while I was still eating my bacon butty, and we discussed the fun-filled day ahead.

Caught the train to Nottingham at 8:39, where Nick got told off for filming on the station and the train without permission, arrived to find that the Bentinck hotel and pub next to the station was all cordoned off by police barrier tape. No time to really gawp at it, because I wanted to find the place I was going for an interview before having to talk about it for the cameras – it turns out that the New College offices are in a great location, right near the city centre and all the good shops. Nick wanted to film the interview, but I refused to let him anywhere within sight of the place, so as not to jeapordise my chances, and packed him off to a coffee shop.

The interview was fun – they had a half-hour written test first, giving me some paperwork and asking me to put together a month’s accounts, like an exam question. I haven’t done an exam for years, but I think I picked up on the bits you were supposed to pick up on, and provided a halfway decent set of answers. More companies should do this kind of thing, I’ve always felt interviews are a pretty rubbish way of picking an accountant. But we did have a conventional kind of interview afterwards, which also went well. I judged that professional-hardworking-type would go over better than eccentric-genius, so I didn’t mention the memory stuff except once in passing, and didn’t tell them I was on the local news that evening.

Interview done, and it took rather longer than planned, we then got the bus out to Chilwell to visit Grandma. She, of course, turned out to be a natural in front of the camera, and we got a heck of a lot of entertaining footage in the can (I think that’s the technical term). We went into Beeston for lunch, and came back to find my Central TV taxi waiting for me already. By this time, the constant filming of everything was starting to get on my wick, and it was pouring with rain again. Nick kept us standing outside while he filmed establishing shots of Grandma’s place, but eventually we got in the taxi and set off for Birmingham.

“It’ll be about 40 minutes,” said the taxi driver, inaccurately as it turned out. “How long do you want me to wait for you there?”

“Wait for us?” I said, surprised. It was about quarter to four, and the show didn’t start till six. The driver wasn’t at all happy to find that he’d been hired to wait around in Birmingham for anything up to three hours. He moaned that he wouldn’t have taken the job if he’d known that, because he had an important birthday party to go to and he’d have to miss it. He phoned his boss and complained to him too. Meanwhile, it was raining very heavily and there were roadworks and traffic jams all over the place. A tree had come down over the main entrance to the Central TV studios, so we had to drive around the back to try to find a way in.

When we arrived, I decided to perform my random act of kindness for the day, and told the driver to go. We were just down the road from the train station, so taking a taxi back to Derby offended my sensibilities on several levels – as a working class hero, I don’t like taxis anyway, and as an accountant I was appalled that Central were paying a taxi to sit outside the studio for hours, whereas as someone who appreciates the importance of this birthday party, I would have hated to be responsible for keeping him sitting around.

So, having saved the big TV company a bit of money and put a dent in the profits of a small taxi firm, possibly getting the driver in trouble for it, we went into the studio, which was a very cool place. Just about as soon as we got inside, someone mentioned in passing that the train station had closed down because of the weather, but I decided to cross that bridge when we came to it.

Probably worth mentioning at this point that it was in fact Central Tonight yesterday, and East Midlands Today on Tuesday. I had got them mixed up and told everyone it was the other way around, so I do apologise to anyone who wanted to watch it and missed it. If you did, you can see my performance here, if you select Central East, and evening bulletins, and Friday July 20th. My bit starts around the 22nd minute, if you don’t really want to watch the rest of the latest news in the east midlands.

It’s a lot of fun to see what goes into the making of a live local news show. The studio set is a lot smaller than you’d think, and it’s weird to see it all brightly lit, with cameras and autocues lurking in the darkness around it. And my bit went very smoothly – they gave me a pack of cards and thirty seconds or so to memorise it during a montage of people on the streets of Nottingham trying to remember cards too, then I recalled it afterwards. I knew we wouldn’t have the time to recite the whole pack, so I just concentrated on getting the first few flawless – I would probably have struggled if we’d got past halfway through the deck. Still, it looked great on the telly.

And I got to see all the behind-the-scenes stuff, like the story they had to drop when a breaking-news thing came up (it was just about the fact that it had been raining rather a lot, so not really news as such), and the story behind the Bentinck Hotel (someone threw a firebomb into it, apparently).

Then it was just a case of getting home, which promised to be an adventure. Strangely enough, though, I was feeling extremely cheerful by that point, after having been in an irritable kind of mood most of the afternoon, what with the constant filming and being rushed from place to place. I was quite looking forward to a lengthy rail-replacement bus ride in the still pouring rain. But it turned out that half the trains were still running from New Street station, which will teach me to believe any gossip I hear in a newsroom.

There was a lot of confusion at the station, of course, with half the trains being cancelled, and we eventually got on one that we were assured went to Derby, even though the electronic displays all said Weston-super-Mare. Fortunately enough, it did go to Derby, and we got away without buying tickets too.

So today I was planning to spend the whole day in bed, apart from Nick coming round for yet more filming for a couple of hours. But I also found that I’d got the job – starting Monday, for three months with the possibility of applying for the permanent job there afterwards, assuming I like it. I think I probably will, although I’m a bit concerned by the fact that they apparently requested that I should wear a more boring tie to the office than my playing-cards one…

As for tomorrow, a bit of final practice for Germany! I need to keep reminding myself that it’s Sunday tomorrow, because I was thinking all day yesterday that it was Saturday.

Hoo-boy!

I'm not even going to TRY to write about everything that I've been doing today. I've been on the go for the past fourteen hours and I need to sleep. Tomorrow I'll do some kind of epic-length blog and chronicle everything.

B-b-b-but I'm weary...

I think that's a Porky Pig quote from "The Ducksters", where he's a contestant on a radio quiz show hosted by Daffy Duck. But I have a nagging feeling that it's actually from a different cartoon, and therefore not at all relevant to what I'm about to write, even to the small minority of people who might be expected to recognise the quote in the first place.

Anyway, I had an interview today on the breakfast show for Radio Derby. My alarm went off at seven o'clock, and I thought "Hmm" and went back to sleep. Woke up a bit later, thinking "Wait, did my alarm go off back then? What time is it?" 7:50. Need to get to the radio station on the other side of the city centre for eight o'clock.

Skipping such unnecessaries as breakfast and showers and tooth-brushing, I made it in time for the 8:20 interview, where I talked nonsense about memorising and totally failed to memorise a pack of cards for them (I don't have a great track record for memory skills when I've just got out of bed, as anyone who was in Malaysia in 2003 will tell you). But the interview seems to have been popular - as soon as I got home the phone was ringing, with the Derbyshire Evening Telegraph and the two local TV stations demanding to talk to me.

The upshot of it is that I'm on East Midlands Today tomorrow, and Central News on Tues. Possibly the other way round, but whoever it is tomorrow is sending a car for me, so I don't need to worry. I also have a pre-arranged trip to see Grandma and a new job interview in Nottingham for the morning (temp job, acceptable pay, leading to possibility of permanent job, doesn't sound great but I'll probably end up taking it anyway), all of which Nick the Channel 5 director wants to film.

I refused to let him film the interview, but otherwise he'll be following me around all day, whoopee. Seriously, the phone's been ringing non-stop this week with one thing or another, it's tiresome and I want to become a hermit. Or better yet, an accountant. The kind who goes to the office and comes home at night and doesn't have to describe to anyone the process of memorising a pack of cards.

I think I'm safe

The publicity is dying down to acceptable levels now. My favourite request came from the "World Records Academy" who thought I might want to buy an 'official' certificate for $95 ("It's a great marketing tool!") documenting my world record. I decided to pass on that one.

Radio Derby tomorrow, Central News possibly next week. You can get tired of answering the same questions over and over again. Hopefully the German championship won't be covered by Tony's PR company, so I'll be back to my usual blissful state of the rest of the world being ignorant of what I've memorised or whether that's a good thing. And then maybe, if you're lucky, I'll be able to go back to writing about other stuff in this blog.

If you like pina coladas

My internet connection stopped working yesterday, and when I phoned them up they arranged for an engineer to come round this morning. Then a few hours later it started working again, and I told them about it, but nobody specifically said they'd cancelled the engineer, so I realised this morning there was a chance he'd still be coming round at some time between eight and twelve. So I had to get up early. Then I remembered that as well as the probability of the engineer, there was the certainty of the landlord coming round today to do the annual gas safety check. And the likelihood of people phoning me about the press release that went out yesterday describing the speed cards record. And the sporting chance of calls from three different accountancy recruitment agencies about job prospects. And the woman from Radio 4 who hasn't yet managed to talk to me despite our best efforts to arrange a mutually convenient time. And the TV documentary people who are determined to chronicle every slighest movement I make. All in all, it looked like being the kind of day when I'd constantly have people at the door, on the phone or emailing, and wouldn't be able to get anything done.

I'm not sure exactly what I was planning on 'getting done' today. But I would have been annoyed about not being able to do it, I'll assure you. So I decided to take the mature route to happiness, and run away. I went to Nottingham for the morning, and Peterborough for the afternoon, just to see if they'd changed since I last saw them. They hadn't, but I still had lots of fun browsing the shops and enjoying the feeling that people might be trying to contact me and wouldn't be able to find me. I bought a collection of James Kochalka's sketchbook diaries and two of his CDs, and admired his lifestyle, not for the first time - I'm only a memory champion because I can't draw, write children's books and cartoons and record songs with my band, you know.

Of course, when I got home, everyone was lying in wait for me. The engineer had indeed not been cancelled and had left a card, the landlord had let himself in and presumably found the flat not filled with carbon monoxide, I had oodles of emails to read through and the phone was ringing constantly - two job prospects, one of them sounding good and the other not, an interview on Radio Derby for Thursday morning (did I mention I did Radio Shropshire yesterday? I don't remember) and even a call from Tony Buzan to say congratulations.

The TV people want to film me at a job interview. This doesn't seem like a very good way to go about getting a job - if I was the financial controller of a company and wanted a new accountant, I'd go for one who didn't bring his own film crew to the interview. It kind of gives the impression that I care more about being on TV than I do about being an accountant (which, scarily, I really don't) and would be constantly dashing off to give interviews and autographs instead of preparing the monthly balance sheet reconciliations.

On the other hand, they also want to film me going to see Grandma on Friday, which might be fun. Hopefully they won't cancel it, because she's promised to beat me to death with her stick if it turns out that I'm just winding her up about the film crew. I think she's looking forward to being a TV star. She'd make a great one - there's nobody in the world who's a more natural talker, and she's got a heck of a lot of interesting stories to tell.

All in all, I find myself quite liking the idea of escaping from all the people who want to talk to me right now. Maybe I'll go into hiding somewhere until all the excitement has blown over.

Other things I forgot about Saturday

It was a lovely day! Boris commented "I thought this was England - where's the rain?". It had been pouring down constantly for the couple of months before the competition, and it started again on Sunday, but on Saturday we had baking hot summer sunshine. It was great! There was also sponsorship coming out of the wazoo - I won flights to and accommodation in Bahrain for the world championship, plus a bottle of champagne and a very nice trophy - a glass thing with blue coloured stuff inside, like a giant paperweight. Much better than a fake-metal trophy!

I also did an interview with Radio Shropshire today, and there's been a press release sent out by Tony Buzan's PR people urging all newshounds to call me. Maybe someone will, you never know. But I should probably get back to finding a job. I don't want to be sitting unemployed for too long. Well, maybe for the next two weeks so I don't have to use up holidays straight away to go to Tuttlingen.

BOOyeah!

"Booyeah" isn't a word I normally use, but I did find a good excuse to use it yesterday. The UK Open Memory Championship was great fun - what it lacked in competitors it more than made up for in entertainment value.

There turned out to be five of us taking part - me, James Ponder and James Kemp from Britain, Boris Konrad from Germany and Tomasz Krasinski from Poland. Idriz Zogaj was planning to come from Sweden, but didn't turn up, and there was a mystery new competitor who registered the day before but then changed her mind again at the last minute. So our five desks seemed a bit lonely in the middle of the very nice main hall in the very nice Severn Centre in Highley.

The Severn Centre is a bit of a mystery - it's a HUGE sports/leisure/everything else centre (it also contains a library and a police station and probably a small zoo somewhere among the masses of tennis courts, playgrounds, fields, badminton courts, large cafeteria and bar etc etc) in a village that, although apparently the largest village in Shropshire, is still a village. It's not a huge place, and you could probably fit the whole population of Highley into the Severn Centre without an overcrowding problem. But the facilities there were more than top-notch. We need to make memory competitions there a regular feature, however impossible to reach by public transport the place is. Hold the world championships there some time, and we'll car-pool.

Things went more or less well for me. I got quite respectable scores in nine disciplines out of ten, and the speed numbers wasn't my fault (this means it was my fault, but I'm making excuses) - the camera crew made a loud clanking noise early on in the memorisation time, just as I was fiercely concentrating and that put me in a bad mood throughout the five minutes, so that every muffled noise or movement seen out of the corner of my eye infuriated and distracted me. I had no end of gaps in the recall and ended up with one complete row and one row a bit further down (I think it was the fourth) with the only gap being the last four digits. So I crossed out everything below that and settled for a woeful score of 76.

In everything else, though, I was satisfied. I was generally a way below the scores I'd been getting in practice, with a slightly slower memorising speed than I'd expected, and a less efficient recall, but I was still getting scores that were more than acceptable. From memory, a decent 70 in five-minute words, a slightly-better-than-my-old-world-record 795 in five-minute binary, a thoroughly excellent 52.5 in five-min names and faces (I'm definitely getting better at that), 615 or so in fifteen-minute numbers, five packs in ten-minute cards, 99 in abstract images (getting there with that one, too, slowly), 84 in historic dates and 95 in spoken numbers. All of those, names and images aside, are scores that I know I can improve on, but which are more than enough to satisfy me, especially in my first competition for seven or eight months.

As for speed cards, well, that's the fun one. I was about 2000 points clear of Boris by that point, so no need to go for a safe first time. I decided to go all-out for that fabled 30-second barrier. The first time through, it didn't go so well, there were three or four images that didn't come instantly to mind and I had to drag them out of my brain kicking and screaming. The time was 29.16, but the recall was unexpectedly dreadful, and I didn't come anywhere close to getting it right.

So, second attempt, TV cameras on me, local newspaper reporter hanging around, Phil Chambers sitting to my right, Dominic O'Brien keeping an eye on me from across the room, last chance to break the record, and my brain obviously not fully up to speed, I didn't expect wonders. I sort of blanked my mind out, thought to myself "Come on, let's show them what I can do!" in a silly, macho style, giggled at myself silently, and started to memorise. "That's more like it!" I thought, realising I was seeing the images much more clearly. I focused on what I was doing, getting a good feeling all the way, and stopped the timer. 26.28 seconds. Damn, that would be something, I thought. That gave me four and a half minutes to sit and think before I could recall anything - running through the journey in my brain, I had the first three locations all there, just the first image of the fourth, all present and correct for the fifth and sixth, then a big gap and then the ninth location all present and correct. Drat, I thought, must have lost concentration towards the end there. Maybe I can work them out when I get to look at the unshuffled deck. That makes 16 cards I can't place, I've rescued packs with worse.

Then my mind wandered to other things, and suddenly locations seven and eight popped merrily back into my brain - tiny bit of doubt about the exact identity and order of the images at location eight, but not enough to worry me. By recall time, I was quietly confident. I worked out what the final two missing images were, sat indecisively for a moment trying to remember the order, and finally made an educated guess that I was about 90% sure of. Then I had to wait another two and a half minutes for the recall time to end before I could check them with Phil (and an interested crowd who had gathered to watch). Sure enough, they all came out correct, and I saw fit to shout "BOOyeah!", just to alert anyone who hadn't noticed that something interesting had happened.

That capped off a definitely enjoyable day. 26.28 - I'd like to see Andi beat THAT! Everyone involved has my deepest gratitude - Phil organised the tournament impeccably, as usual, assisted ably by Gaby Kappus and others. Everything worked the way it was supposed to, even the spoken numbers (more or less), we weren't more than half an hour behind schedule. Tony Buzan paid a flying visit before dashing off to see a sheikh from Bahrain, told us the story about how scientists once said that nobody would ever memorise a 30-digit spoken number (as I'd told the camera crew he would - I'm a psychic, aided by the fact that he says the same thing at every memory competition) and the one about his university teacher who memorised all the class's details (I hadn't heard that one before, but it's in at least two of his books). He also orchestrated a phone call to Jennifer over at the Australian championships in Melbourne (Simon Orton won, brilliantly) and generally inspired everyone with his unfailing enthusiasm for the world of memory. Dominic came by in the afternoon and did the same (in a slightly more low-key way), including very kindly describing me as the reason he isn't competing. He also said that he's working on training again, he's got a new system that he's breaking in, and while he won't be competing in Bahrain, he's 70% sure he'll take part in 2008. Which will be great.

But 26.28, baby. Booyeah.

I also wrote a pen-and-paper blog on Friday night, and when I find it, I'll probably transcribe it for the world to read. It's mostly about an anecdote told to me by a taxi driver, but you'll still want to see it, I'm sure.