Memories are made of this

Okay, no Memoriad for me. But my feelings of guilt about dropping out at the last minute are assuaged by the glorious prospect of four more whole days of rest and relaxation. I can't remember the last time I had that (yes, I've only been employed again for three and a half months, but my memory has trouble stretching back that far).

So let's stretch my memory back a week or so and remember the World Memory Championship, Bahrain 2008. It all started, for me at least, on the Tuesday night - having realised at the last minute that it's not actually possible to get a train from Beeston to Manchester Airport early enough in the morning to catch the flight I'd booked, I realised I was going to have to spend the night in a hotel. A little bit more internet research revealed that every hotel in Manchester and the surrounding area was fully occupied (that was the night of the Man Utd/Celtic game), and eventually the closest place I could find was an expensive suite in the Novotel in Sheffield, which was at least half way there and allowed me an early-morning train to the airport.

I've never stayed in a suite before - I don't see the point, personally. Surely the fun of a hotel room is getting to lie in bed watching the telly? Why would you want an extra little room with a settee? Inviting other people to come and hang out with you, you say? Sit on the bed, the floor, any chairs/desks etc provided! Sheesh, what kind of people book suites in hotels? Anyway, I resolutely ignored the suite part of it (and the hundred-and-something-quid cost), lay in bed watching Man U thrash Celtic, and got a good night's sleep. After a quick call to Etihad Airways, anyway, having just noticed in the small print on my e-tickets that they have a policy of cancelling bookings that aren't reconfirmed three days before departure. Still, the person on the phone put my mind at ease on that point quickly enough.

Next morning, I got the train to the airport without incident (except for a surprising announcement on the platform at Manchester Piccadilly station that the train to the airport, which I and my fellow passengers were already sitting on, had been cancelled. Someone had pressed the wrong button on the hi-tech announcements system, apparently, and the staff had to go around assuring people that yes, the train did in fact exist and was about to depart) and had time to hang around the airport and find another book to read on the journey (picked Animal Farm, seeing as I don't own a copy, to go along with the ones I'd brought along, Frankenstein and William Sleator's Singularity).

As for the flight, I think it deserves a quick glowing recommendation/advert: Fly Etihad - the airline of the United Arab Emirates! They have the best range of in-flight entertainment of any airline I've flown with! Lots of good films old and new, and a huge choice of sitcom episodes, plus a few decent cartoons. Also, they give you free socks (possibly they're special socks that prevent deep vein thrombosis, but I don't really care. I approve of people giving me free socks, and immediately swapped my holey ones for these intact (if a little small) ones) and a good meal.

Got off the plane in Abu Dhabi, which was extremely hot, and bumped into James Ponder (how typical, you go all the way to Abu Dhabi and the first person you see is someone you know) who'd just come in on a similar flight from London to catch the same plane out to Bahrain. Realised that I'd left my hole-filled original pair of socks on the plane. We flew into Bahrain, which was also baking hot, although it was after dark (the idea of holding the WMC later in the year was to make the temperature less uncomfortable for us poor Europeans, but I didn't notice any difference from last August. Still unbelievably hot and humid!) and my big rucksack was the first bit of baggage on the carousel! This is a very good sign - I'm always the last to get my bag, I think the workers in airports around the world see it coming and decide to hang onto it just for a laugh. Or maybe to ransack it for memory-champion souvenirs, I don't know.

Anyway, we split up again to get taxis to our respective hotels in different parts of Manama. James warned me in advance that there's a current scandal of taxi drivers ripping off tourists, and mine did indeed refrain from using the meter and try (and succeed) to charge me more than James said was the going rate - but since it was still less than you'd expect to pay a taxi over here for the same distance, I didn't mind too much. I was staying in the Ramada Palace Hotel, which was very nice, fancy-looking, not too expensive and air-conditioned. They didn't have a single room available for the first night, so put me in another big posh suite. I'm turning into a suite kind of person, I can tell.

So then it was Thursday morning, the day allotted in the schedule for press conferences, competitor briefing, arbiter training and a posh opening ceremony/dinner. I hadn't brought a copy of the schedule with me, so wasn't sure when exactly these things were supposed to happen, and hadn't brought a map or the address of the competition venue (the Gulf Hotel/Conference Centre) with me, so I decided that a good strategy was to just go out, walk around the city and see if I stumbled across the right hotel.

I walked out into the sweltering heat (it was just about bearable if you stayed in the shade, so I spent the morning dashing from shadow to shadow) and pointed myself in the general direction of a big pointy building that looked like it might be the Gulf Hotel. Actually, as it turns out, most of the big, glassy, expensive-looking buildings in Manama aren't hotels (I've possibly been conditioned to assume that by visiting Las Vegas), they're offices - lots of big companies have their Middle East headquarters there. I'm still not sure what the big pointy building I was aiming for is, since I got distracted on the way there, but I'm pretty sure it's an office of some kind. It certainly turned out to be in the opposite direction to the Gulf Hotel, as I found out later.

I really do love walking the back streets of an extremely foreign city, and I spent a good couple of hours seeing the sights, while still keeping an eye out for anything that might be a Gulf Hotel. Had an expensive can of coke in a rather cool and crowded market place (it's hard to pretend you're not a clueless tourist when you're the only white person to be seen and don't speak a word of Arabic) and an extremely cheap one in the cool shopping centre, then I wandered all the way down to the Diplomatic Quarter, where last year's hotel was, just to prove that I can still find my way to places and to have a drink in their nice Harvester's pub (just coke again - championship the next day, and going to an Islamic country and having a beer in a British-style pub by yourself is a bit sad) before setting out back to the city. Eventually giving up on the chance of finding the venue by random wandering (or, indeed, of finding my own hotel ever again) and went into the Sheraton, pretended I was staying there and asked for directions. It turned out that the Gulf Hotel was right out over the other side of the city, and the doorman recommended that I take a taxi, but I explained that I disapprove of taxis and would rather walk, and anyway I was already as hot, tired and sweaty as it's possible for a human being to get. So he gave me a map and I successfully followed it for what must have been about an hour's further walking to the Gulf Hotel, out near the big fancy palace.

The hotel is surrounded by a big stone wall with only one opening, and I managed to walk around three and a half sides of the complex before finding the entrance, but I eventually made my way into the conference centre. I was warmly greeted by Chris Day and the good people of MICE Management (which, incidentally, is the best-named company in the universe, especially when they're organising a memory championship and thus enable Tony to make a convoluted joke about elephants, memory and mice) who appreciated the way I'd arrived at exactly the right kind of time, about fifteen minutes before registration officially started, so as to avoid the rush. I didn't mention that it was equally possible for me to arrive six hours early or not at all, and just cheerfully took the credit.

I love the feeling of a memory championship just starting to happen - all the memory people you know and don't know gradually arriving, all the organisers running around trying to make things happen the way they should (Phil Chambers, as ever, was non-stop all weekend, much appreciated by everyone, Dominic O'Brien was always doing something and Jennifer Goddard had the job of shepherding a small army of arbiters around the place, telling them where to go and what to do). It's always fun to guess who's going to turn up and how many competitors we're going to get - reports of Astrid's return turned out to be greatly exaggerated, but Andi had definitely been seen (not at the briefing, of course, he never comes to those, but at the airport), and Ed, who wasn't on the list although he'd told me a month before that he was coming, had showed up assuming nobody was going to tell him he couldn't compete just because he hadn't filled in a registration form. The Chinese arrived in a big mass as usual, all dressed in identical Team China jackets - I can proudly report that I can now pick most or all of the top Chinese competitors out of a lineup and even have a vague idea of some of their individual personality traits; it's still a bit them-and-us, but I think we intermingled a little bit more this year. The presence of Hugh (despite the name, he's Chinese) the official Team China translator, helped with that somewhat. They want to invite me to China to give talks and things, but I don't think I can any time soon - I've only got three days of holiday left at work to last me till the end of March.

Daren and newcomer Heidi, not to be outdone, sported Team South Africa T-shirts. It's a little bit harder to be a team when there's only two of you, but they managed it. Idriz, the only Swedish competitor, was wearing his zogaj.se cap and shirt. Chester Santos, who finally won the US Championship back in March, came along to his first World Championship, we had Dagfinn from Norway, Dr Yip from Malaysia and the usual crowd of Germans were joined by junior champion Dorothea Seitz, who I decided after a moment's consideration to talk to as if we'd spoken before - I know we were in the same building at the 2007 German championship, but I couldn't be sure whether we'd actually properly met. She seemed to think we had too, so it was okay. Also there was nine-year-old Konstantin Skudler, German Kids Champion, who had written to a TV company telling them he wanted to go to Bahrain but couldn't afford it and got a free trip with accompanying camera crew following him around (as were his parents, who by all accounts he'd dragged along to the competition entirely of his own volition, rather than being pressured at all by them to compete). The Chinese team had the similarly-aged Zhang Dianshuo, who made a point of saying hi to me whenever he saw me. Since his English ran to three or four words, and my Chinese vocabulary consists of no words whatsoever, our conversations weren't very in-depth, but he still seems fun.

The introduction and briefing followed the same kind of format as usual, with a couple of additions - an extra-long speech from Tony emphasising how much work the arbiter/organiser team do for no money and out of the goodness of their hearts, and a long speech from Dominic about sportsmanship, fair play and how cheating is bad. The first of these was a deliberate attempt to forestall any protests about the last-minute schedule changes - the original schedule called for the prizegiving dinner not to take place until Monday evening, despite the event finishing at Sunday lunchtime, and despite loud protests that this meant everyone would have to spend at least one extra night in an expensive hotel, they'd insisted that it was necessary to do it that way. Then, five days before the competition, they'd been forced to reschedule the prizegiving to Sunday night when the convention centre told them they couldn't have the room on Monday after all, and had rearranged the competition timetable in an attempt to leave more time between the finish and the awards, thus proving that they could have done it that way in the first place if they'd really wanted to. Despite this, I don't think anybody was planning to complain at the briefing anyway - these things do happen, and the revised schedule was by no means unacceptable in and of itself, and anyway everybody had already complained over email in the days before the competition.

The cheating speech was to highlight that Dominic, in his capacity of chairman of the Ethics Committee, or whatever his latest title is (great job though the WMSC do, they have an amazing talent for forming new committees and sub-committees and giving themselves official titles, considering there's only half a dozen of them) was going to come down like a ton of bricks on anybody who showed the slightest inclination to look at the memorisation papers after they'd been told to stop, kept writing after the time was up, or made any attempt to cheat in any way. They even had two CCTV cameras, which he promised could pick up any unethical activity of any kind. I don't know if they actually worked or if they were just there to scare people, but I'm all in favour of making it clear that cheating isn't acceptable, even if we haven't really had any problem with it in the past (I heard rumours, possibly made up, that someone had been caught communicating with a hidden microphone up her sleeve - it all seems a bit far-fetched and unlikely to me, but perhaps some people really do think you can gain fame, fortune and glory by cheating your way to an above-average score at the world memory championships?)

I had a splitting headache by this point, possibly from sunstroke, so decided to skip the posh dinner (I really dislike posh dinners, although as it turned out this one was a non-posh, no-waiting-around-between-courses buffet which I would have really enjoyed, but never mind) and went back to my hotel for a room service snack (I also, generally, disapprove of room service as being unnecessarily extravagant, but the Ramada Palace has a really nice choice of inexpensive meals). Or at least I eventually went back to my hotel - not remembering how to get there, I walked right past it and all the way back to the Sheraton, where I asked the same helpful doorman how to find the hotel I was actually staying at, still without giving away the fact that I wasn't staying at the Sheraton. Having eventually got to my posh suite, I had a very early night and woke up bright and refreshed at exactly the right kind of time in the morning. Interestingly, while I often feel headachey or unwell immediately before a memory competition, I'm always 100% fighting-fit on the day itself, and this year was no exception. But I'll pause this account here, and tell you about the actual competition just a little bit later. Thanks for your patience and thank you for choosing Zoomy's Thing; we know there are other blogs out there and we value our loyal customers.

Pros and Constantinople

Sorry about not doing the promised memory-writing last night. I was so tired that I went to bed at half past seven, and then woke up at half past three this morning (possibly posessed by the spirit of my late father, who always slept those kinds of hours, probably as some kind of revenge for writing yesterday about wearing my old coat instead of the leather jacket that he bought me). I got up, had a bath, had breakfast, checked my emails, went back to bed and slept again for another few hours. And I've spent most of the day lounging around doing nothing, which was great.

You've probably noticed I'm not in Istanbul. I spent quite some time weighing up the good and bad points of going or not going, and ultimately the option that involved not getting out of bed won. And so then I did get out of bed and went to Nottingham, just so that the world wouldn't think I'm lazy. But I only spent a couple of hours there, before coming home and changing into my pyjamas again - it sounds weird, I know, but I really DO need to spend a day in bed after a memory championship (which I didn't do yesterday, because I went out to do an interview with Radio Derby and spent most of the day hanging around in the city). Sitting around for three days remembering numbers physically exhausts me.

I might still find the best last-minute price and fly out there tomorrow - tomorrow is just the optional sight-seeing tour of Istanbul, the competition's on Saturday and Sunday - but I think it's more likely that I won't. Haven't completely decided yet, but here's my thinking behind it at the moment:

It occurred to me today that my number one reason for going there is because there's a pretty good chance that I would win $4,500. And if I'm doing something mainly because it would involve getting money... it just offends my sensibilities somehow. I got lots of money from the World Championship, enough to pay off those credit cards that keep sending me rude letters and have a bit to spare for future credit card splurges, so I don't need an extra two or three grand. And I'm very much not a professional memory man. Sure, there's also the hanging out with people aspect, but it's only Gunther, Andi and Boris from the memory world, and I saw them last weekend, plus the mental calculation people, who I mostly don't know all that well. And there are people right here (okay, mostly on the internet), who I haven't hung out enough with over the last couple of months. And then there's the wanting-the-Memoriad-to-be-a-big-success aspect, but I don't really think my presence or otherwise is going to make an impact. It's always going to get a lot more coverage in Germany than over here, so it'd probably be a good thing if Gunther or Boris win gold medals. Besides, I took too much of the prize fund at the WMC, it'd be greedy not to let them have a share.

And there's the rather embarrassing reason not to go - I find that I genuinely care about my job. And if I fly back from Istanbul on Monday and go into the office on Tuesday, I will be rubbish for the rest of the week. I will make a horrible mess of the monthly wastage analysis, which I care about even if nobody else does, and I'll be falling asleep at my desk and wishing I was at home. Whereas if I spend the next four days lounging around, I'll be fed up with being at home and positively delighted to be at the office!

So, it's about 75% probable that I won't go to the Memoriad after all. We'll see how I feel tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I really, really will write about the World Memory Championship! At great length! Tonight, or tomorrow, or both!

And it's cold, cold, cold, and we'll soon be old

Naturally, the British weather decides to punish me for going away to sweltering-hot Bahrain by being horrifically cold when I get back. But I found it quite a pleasant change to go out early this morning (I'm still three hours ahead of GMT) in the chill. Besides, I wore my old coat that I haven't worn for years, and was amazed by how warm, cosy and snuggly it is! Why did I stop wearing it? I've always worn my leather jacket in winter, and many years ago I realised that I just had this coat lying around but never did anything with it, and resolved to give it away to someone at work who was collecting winter clothes for the homeless. I put the coat in a safe place so I'd remember it, and like many other things I've put in a safe place over the years, never saw it again until I moved house. But now I think I'm going to start wearing it again, it's great! And it's reversible, so if I ever become a criminal and stop being a nationally-famous memory man, I'll have a perfect disguise!

Still, I imagine most of my readers didn't tune in to this blog to read about my coat (it really is a great coat), so don't worry, memory talk coming later tonight. I just wanted to record that I'm wavering about my decision to fly to Turkey tomorrow. I'm utterly exhausted, and another weekend of travelling and memorising followed by going back to the office the day after I return will literally kill me. I really do want to go along and support the Memoriad, but it's not going to do my mental and physical health any good at all. I think I'll just see whether I can get out of bed tomorrow morning, and if I can't, send my apologies.

Brief trailer

I've just got back, I've got squillions of emails and messages to read through, and it's after midnight, Bahrain time. Tomorrow, assuming I get out of bed at any point during the day, you can expect a full travelogue!

Blogging temporarily suspended

Well, I probably won't have internet access while I'm away in Bahrain, so you might have to wait until next week for an update from me. I got told off last year for not going into enough detail about the world championships, so even if I can't get online, I'll make notes and write about the whole thing at excessive length when I return. So that's something to look forward to!

Mindwipe

Woo! This has been one excellent weekend's training for the world championship! I feel fully prepared for the rigours of competition! The only thing that worries me is that I might have crammed this final practice in a little too close to the championship itself - I really needed the training, so I'm still pretty sure this was best in the long run, but there's always a problem of my journeys not being fresh enough next Friday when I need them again.

So what I need to do now is blank out my brain completely. Not memorise a single thing between now and the competition. In fact, not even THINK about remembering anything, at all! That might cause a problem or two at work and in any social situations where remembering to wear clothes is a requirement, but I think it'll be worth it in the end. Just as long as while I'm remembering not to remember anything, I do remember to go to Bahrain.

We be bad!

Today I've done a final practice run of 30-minute binary and hour numbers, had a haircut, done some shopping and won an Online Memory Challenge, and it's only seven o'clock!

Let's talk about the OMC first, because we haven't had one for a while, and it's returned, better than ever, thanks to that statistics whiz and website-creating genius, Simon Orton. The website now has an excellent training system as well as regular online competitions, so it's well worth checking out - you need to email Simon to register, so check out this page for the details. There's another Challenge tomorrow morning at 11:00 British time!

And now let's talk about hour numbers, because I'm feeling very happy about that all of a sudden. Last year I didn't train on the final weekend before the WMC, because I had an annoying TV crew following me around, but that's not a problem this year - the BBC are safely packed off to America, filming somebody else, and I've only had one late-night phone call from Michael with a query about memory techniques (he really is enthusiastic about it, it's great! He can memorise a pack of cards already!) - and I'm very confident that it's going well this time round. I got a 3630in binary this morning, which isn't bad because it could have been much better with a little more effective time management and fewer silly mistakes, and then this afternoon a whopping 1960 in hour numbers. Would have been a nice round 2000 if not for a stupid error on the penultimate line - I memorised the right image but somehow wrote down the wrong numbers and didn't notice (I did go through and double-check what I'd written at the end, but my mind had obviously started to wander a little after 58 rows of numbers).

I credit this better-than-usual score (it'd be a world record, just barely, if I did it in the competition, although I'm expecting Gunther/Andi/Dr Yip/someone to beat that record by a bigger margin next week) to a slight change in technique. After reading through each journey's worth of digits (234) once, I normally whizz through them very quickly again, but this time I closed my eyes and went through what I'd memorised carefully in my head, only looking at the paper when I couldn't remember an image. It was quite a bit slower (4 minutes per journey instead of 2½), meaning I only went through the digits three times, but my recall was a lot more accurate. I think I'm slowing down in my old age, but that seems to not necessarily be a bad thing.

If tomorrow I manage to do another OMC plus an hour cards, and maybe a bit of spoken numbers, I will be fighting-fit for the world championship. I'm on form and (fingers crossed, touch wood) hopeful of winning!

Bahrainy sports

I notice that there's a new snooker ranking tournament in Bahrain in November, just a couple of weeks after the world memory championships, but several of the world's top snooker players can't be there because of a clash with that stupid Premier League Snooker thing that nobody cares about. Insane though it is that something like this might happen, it makes me wonder just how long it'll be before the same thing happens in the memory world. We've had a near miss this year with the Memoriad the week after - what do you bet that next year someone'll organise a competition in Europe at the same time as the world championship in Bahrain?

I'm not ready!

I'm jetting off to Bahrain next Wednesday and I'm struggling to get everything done at work before I go. I'm having two whole weeks off, rather than go back there for the brief couple of days between returning from Bahrain and jetting off to Turkey (which would kill me - I'll need to catch up on my sleep), so I'm stressed and working too hard right now. Which, of course, is exactly the right frame of mind to be in for a World Memory Championships, so I'm quite hopeful that it'll do me some good!

See Zoomy Play!

Click here! Click here! (only one clicky-thing, I'm just so excited I had to say it twice)

It's the video of our day at Alton Towers! And here's a viewer's guide for the benefit of those who want to know who's who. All the bright-sunshine scenes are of some other day, all the gloomy-and-cloudy scenes are real footage of yesterday.

At the 40-second mark it's me on the right in the hat, Jabba on the left in the groovy shirt and then Ace comes round the corner dressed in black. At about 1:25 you can see Argo front-and-centre with the greenish shirt and black jacket, and Crispy at the front on the right looking at him, then behind them it's me with jumper tied around my waist, Kitty level with me with the long hair and groovy black outfit, Gilly in front of him with long black coat, and it's hard to tell for sure, but I think it's Sleepy just behind my left shoulder, and Jabba peeping out over Kitty's.

On the rapids, clockwise from me it's Sleepy, Crispy (in matching raincoats), Jabba and Gilly. The others didn't want to do the water rides, but they missed a lot of fun. I stayed almost completely dry on the rapids, while the others all got soaked.

On Rita, it's Jabba next to me, Kitty behind me and I think the others except Ace and Mik went on the previous one. Fast! Zoomy! Scary! The Flume is, front to back, me, Gilly, Crispy and Sleepy. With five grown-ups in a tub and it spitting with rain, we got splashed LOTS more than the sunny stock footage shows. And Spinball Whizzer has Kitty next to me, and Jabba and Ace behind. I'm still terrified of that thing, and I've been on it twice now. My ambition is to open my eyes a crack next time.

Best birthday ever!

And even though Jabba's still here, I'm going to do a blog tonight to talk about it!

Nine of us on the Big Zoomy's Birthday Alton Towers trip - Me, Jabba, Kitty, Crispy, Sleepy, Gilly, Argo, Ace and Ace's new guy Mik (who seemed surprisingly undisturbed by our eccentric gang). It being Tuesday, and a school day, and mid-October, and cloudy, the place was pretty empty and the queues were non-existent. But the park was still populated enough to have three different people recognising me and saying hello, which was very cool because it's the first time that's happened while I've been in the company of VPS people. Crispy said to the first of these fans "Do you mean you know who he is, or do you just want to shake hands with people with hats and beards?"

Although I'm something of a feardy-gowk, the only rides I was too scared to go on were Corkscrew, Oblivion, Nemesis and Air - I did go on lots of other scary things, and spent the entire time screaming loudly with eyes firmly closed. That's just how I like to do roller-coasters, although Kitty, who was sitting next to me on Spinball Whizzer, didn't seem to enjoy it so much.

And, thanks to the absence of people and Crispy sweet-talking the guy on the control booth, we got to go round Runaway Mine Train (admittedly a roller-coaster for babies, but I still liked it) five times!

Even coolest, I wore one of those magic bracelets that makes cameras point at you all day, and got a fantastic DVD of our adventures! And not just clips of us on the rides (stock footage of the ride, filmed in bright sunshine, edited rather awkwardly together with scenes of us whenever we went past a camera), but a couple of clips of us walking around too! It's brilliant, and I'm currently trying to put it up on YouTube - if I succeed, I'll share it with you.

Ooh, also, Jabba got me a chemistry set and Kitty got me a magic trick! And Ace got me a hand-made glittery card made by Mik's sister!

Okay, I was wrong

Quick bit of bloggery before Jabba arrives to spend the night before our trip to Alton Towers (woo!) tomorrow for my birthday (woo!) to say that, despite my expectations, filming with the BBC today was a LOT of fun! Mainly thanks to the presenter Michael Mosley, who proved an enthusiastic and extremely talented pupil at memorising cards. I'm thinking he's going to turn into a memory star in the future. We did lots of fun stuff in a refreshingly short six-hour session, and I think it's going to be good to watch (won't be on telly till April, but I'll remind you in good time).

Also, it's my birthday tomorrow! Woo!

Oh well

There are times when you feel all motivated and keen to achieve things, and then there are days when you feel it's more important to sit around doing nothing, and cheerfully give in to notions like "You know, I've never actually played original Donkey Kong, ever. I'd better download it and see what it's like." You just have to take days like this as they come and not worry about them too much.

Anyway, tomorrow it's the bleeding BBC coming round to film me. I'm supposed to teach the presenter, whose name I've forgotten, how to remember people's names. Even though I've told the person I think is the director, whose name I've also forgotten, and the other person who might be the director, who's probably called Catherine something (something that begins with W) that I'm not good at remembering names. And that's not not-good-compared-to-certain-other-superhuman-geniuses, that's not-good-compared-to-certain-unusually-intelligent-bricks. But people never take me seriously when I say I've got a bad memory, they assume it's my adorable putting-myself-down act.

Also, they want me to memorise barcodes in the supermarket again. And since I haven't yet signed anything promising confidentiality and not being downright rude about this latest documentary... I'm not overwhelmed with enthusiasm about this one.

A successful but unconvincing display

I think my memory performance in all aspects of my life today mirrors England's performance on the football pitch - it got the job done, but it could have been better. It suddenly occurred to me in the bath this morning that I'd completely forgotten on Friday afternoon to email some figures to my boss, who needs them for a meeting at 7am on Monday. So I sneaked into the office for five minutes (remembering to put on some clothes first), printed them out and put them on his desk in a probably futile attempt to pretend they were there all along and avoid all the memory jokes.

With that out of the way, I checked the Radio Times to see if the England game was on proper telly, saw that it wasn't on BBC1 and concluded that it must be on Sky. I considered going to a pub to watch it, but you can't really watch a game in the pub without drinking a couple of pints of lager, and I do need to memorise stuff tomorrow, so I decided to stay at home and memorise some binary digits instead.

Having done that (a pretty decent result, but still not up to my absolute best), I came back into the living room, glanced at the Radio Times again and thought "D'oh! Of course, ITV have the rights to England games these days! I did know that, I'd just forgotten!" And sure enough, they were showing the game. As luck would have it, though, I only missed the first half, which by all accounts was dull and goalless, and saw the second, which was fast-paced, exciting and had six goals, five of them scored by England.

So, all in all, a pretty good day, memory-wise, but not one that's going to win me the World Cup. Sorry, World Championship.

The Man Who Wouldn't Be King

Thanks for the interested comments about me becoming King, but I'm pretty certain I haven't got a drop of blue blood in my veins. Nothing but working-class Yorkshire folk in my family tree, I'm afraid, so you'd basically have to kill everybody else in the world, probably including yourselves, if you wanted me to end up on the throne. And I'd only abdicate and give all the money to charity anyway.

Still, it's the weekend, and that means it's memory time! All work and no play makes Zoomy a world champion, fingers crossed, touch wood.

Seriously?

There's an advert on telly in between all the cartoons I watch for a Fisher Price pink fantasy castle kind of thing, and the narrator enthuses that "Princess Sarah-Lynn and Prince Andrew are getting ready for the party!" or something along those lines. Princess Sarah and Prince Andrew? Do they expect small girls to re-enact a thrilling fairytale divorce hearing?

Actually, is Prince Andrew even still alive? I don't seem to have heard anything about him for decades. If he is still alive and just not being in the newspapers, I approve wholeheartedly and think that the rest of the royals should follow his example. Especially if he's quietly doing some kind of charitable work instead of sitting around watching telly all day. Hey, maybe he's also a fan of Ben 10 and also giggles at that fairy castle Prince Andrew!

First, a couple of adverts

Co-op own brand mint humbugs are delicious! Possibly the best humbugs I've ever tasted! Go and buy some, and share them with me!

Secondly, go and watch channel 4 tomorrow (Thursday) night at 9pm - a Cutting Edge documentary about narcoleptics, directed by Nick "The Mentalists" Holt.

And now our feature presentation - let's talk about the World Memory Championship! The "official" list of registered competitors now stands at 63 people (33 of them Chinese), which even if the usual 50% of those are no-shows would be a decent turnout. Who knows, if Team China really is that big, it might even do what the press releases inaccurately promise every year and have the most competitors ever! (Despite annual 'biggest ever' claims, the record still stands at 46 entrants in 2003 - and even then the press releases after the event claimed it was 53.)

So let's have a look at a few of the names that stand out on that list of 63. And let's start with Astrid Plessl, returning to competition for the first time since November 2004! She's still ranked number 5 in the world, it's just a question of how much she's been practicing since all those years ago. She came within a whisker of winning the world championship in 2003, really deserved to win it in 2004 instead of me, and was for a couple of years one of the absolute best. She always merited more than that lengthy list of second places in competitions (just one win to her name - Austrian championship 2003, in the middle of four runner-up medals, each one behind a different winner! Andi in the WMC 2003, Gunther in Prague 2003, me in the WMC 2004 and then Clemens in Austria!) and it'll be great to see her back again.

And to forestall the many queries I always used to get on the subject, I don't know if she's seeing anyone right now, but I doubt I would be able to set you up on a date with her. Of course, I haven't seen her for four years, she might be a hideous toothless crone by now.

Let's move on. Also registered is good old Andi Bell, three times former champion, unquestionably the best in the world in 2002-2003, but not quite able to keep up the championship temperament since then. I'm hoping that if he's prepared to travel all the way to Bahrain (an idea that he scoffed at the last time I spoke to him), he's planning to win. I don't think he'd make the trip if he didn't believe he could end up on top, it's just a question of whether he really is as prepared as he thinks he is. If he's on form, and doesn't give up half way when things aren't going well, you'd have to bet on him for a top three position (something he achieved for nine consecutive years from 1995 to 2003). If he's really at his optimum performance level, you'd bet on him to win.

Running down the list from top to bottom, we see Ronnie White, the American who, not aware that anybody had ever set a world record for memorising numbers before, claimed on national TV to have broken a record by memorising something like 23 digits. Since being enlightened as to the existence of memory championships, he's been promising to come to one for quite a while now. I'd say there's a sporting chance he'll be a no-show again, but I'm still hoping to meet him. He sounds like a nice guy.

A strong German team includes reigning champion (but how out of practice is he, and how's his motivation to try to win it again now that he's finally achieved it?) Gunther, German Champion Johannes (who I'm still extremely worried about, since he seems to have improved hugely since last year, and he was pretty good to start with), Boris (always hovering somewhere near the top of the scoreboard) and many more - Germany are my bet for team champions this year again.

Dai Griffiths and James Paterson are listed as representing 'Wales', while the rest of the British competitors are down as 'UK'. Well, if they've seceded, then I'm jolly well going to be Team England this year, and squish them like... I want to say Edward I, but whichever king it was who particularly squished the Welsh.

Yip Swe Chooi (the venerable Dr Yip - memory sports is a first-name-terms kind of thing, but there's something about Dr Yip that just demands the title) will be there again, I'm glad to see, although he doesn't seem to have an accompanying entourage of little students any more. He's capable of blowing anyone away when he's at his best, despite the comparatively lowly world ranking of 17th. One of these days it'll all come together for him and he'll be the shock world champion.

And now we're into that list of Chinese names. I don't know any of these people, and we really need to rectify that this year. Liu Ping was the pick of the bunch last year, with Guo Chuanwei not far behind, but I couldn't even tell you which ones they were if I was confronted by the whole Chinese team (admittedly this is more because of my difficulty with names and faces than because I've never spoken to them - we did hang out a little bit last year). But, the need for more international socialising aside, either one of them could be a winner this time round with only a little improvement on their 2007 results.

And let's mention Chen Yu Juan. She has been 'officially' stripped of her time in the speed cards last year (or at least it's been taken off the statistics website) after the widespread accusations of cheating, and it'll be interesting to see how she does this time round. Personally, I'm hoping she can prove her detractors wrong and do something amazing.

I think the top ten this year, in no particular order, will be made up of me, Andi, Astrid, Gunther, Hannes, Boris, Ping, Chuanwei, Lukas and Ed. But I'm rather hoping that someone I haven't even considered will come through and amaze the world. It's always great to see a new superstar!

Oops, nearly forgot to blog

That doesn't bode well for the memory championships, does it? Well, since I haven't left myself enough time to write about it tonight, here's a quick trailer: tomorrow I'm planning to talk about all the people who are apparently going to the WMC! Astrid! Andi! Gunther! And many more!

It's derived from the English words "MENtal math", "MEMORy", "ReaD" and "olympIAD"

At least that's what the website says. Personally, I suspect the name "Memoriad" is just derived from "memory" and "olympiad", like it was when other people coined the name years ago. Apart from that, though, I'm all in favour of the Memoriad, which happens in Istanbul on the 1st and 2nd of November, practically as soon as we get back from the WMC.

The coolest part of the Memoriad, which also involves a mental calculations competition identical to the world cup, which will nicely make up for me missing that earlier this year, is that everything's going to be done on computer. And they've got a software available for download which is very, very good indeed! Better, I would go so far as to say, than anything anyone has created before. Apart from a couple of little bugs, it works perfectly, and I think this is the future of the memory championships.

Distant future, of course. There's always the question of being able to arrange the necessary computer technology in large enough quantities for all the competitors to use, and I can't see that happening at the world championships for some time. But, barring software errors, this will make arbiting a lot quicker, easier and less prone to mistakes.

I objected to the idea of computerised memory competitions when they were first suggested to me, long ago, and I'm still not really comfortable with the idea of forcing competitors to stare at a screen constantly for an hour, but I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works. And that software is extremely nifty. Go and download it, even if you're not planning on going to Istanbul!

Also, go to Istanbul. There's prize money!

Memory, memory, memory!

I am so completely in the memory competition mood right now, it's fantastic! I've just finished an hour cards practice, without even caring that I was missing the first ten minutes of Match Of The Day, and I'd go and memorise something else afterwards if I wasn't aware I've got to go to work tomorrow. This is the first time I've done what I used to call 'a full weekend' of training (30-min binary, hour numbers and hour cards, all in one weekend) for I don't know how long. And I'm buzzing with things to write about the WMC and the Memoriad. I think I might devote the whole of next week's blogging to memory talk. Unless something else comes up.

I should also apologise for the way I'm neglecting the people I regularly talk to/hang out with, but I am really hitting the right frame of mind at exactly the right time this year, and it's exciting me. I'm starting to feel like I might win the world championship if I keep this up. Woohoo!

I forgot Blue Peter, and also that Canadian thing

If the Canadian thing was ever on telly - they didn't tell me about it or send me a DVD if it was. I think they probably told me the name of the show at one point, but I don't remember it.

Anyway, I've done a healthy load of memorising today, and if I do the same kind of amount of work tomorrow, I might just start to think I'm in with a chance of winning the world memory championship. I'm still very much not up to speed - I did an hour numbers today and only got 900, which isn't even up to grandmaster standard, let alone the sort of super-ultra-grandmaster standard I expect of myself, but I was deliberately attempting more than I know my brain is capable of, just to see what my limits are and whether I can keep that concentration going for a three-hour period. And it all went pretty well. Also did a 30-minute binary and got the kind of score that would beat everyone except possibly Gunther if he's at his very best, so I was happy with that.

Of course, my trouble this year is that I don't know which of my main rivals are going to be at their best. I'm assuming Gunther won't be, just because I wasn't the year after I won the world championship, and he hasn't competed at all since then, and he hopefully won't be thinking he can beat me again (and positive thinking is 90% of memory competitions). What's Andi going to do? I'm thinking maybe something exceptional. Just how good is Hannes these days? He's the dark horse that's scaring me the most, after the German championship. And what about all these Chinese people I don't know? We really need to spend more time hanging out with the Chinese competitors, exchanging emails, chatting on forums and so on. The only one I'm in any kind of contact with is Haizhan, and he's not even coming this year. The memory world is seriously in danger of turning into an 'us and them' kind of situation. Maybe I'll learn mandarin and go to the next Chinese championship. If they let me in the country after my previous joke on this blog about overthrowing the government.

And speaking of jokes and governments... I know I have a rule about not talking politics on here, and I know I have another rule about not quoting news stories and commenting on them, and I know I'm nearly thirty-two years old and shouldn't giggle at things like this... but I love the headline "Mandelson Return 'A Risk' - Balls"

What TV shows have I been on?

I always seem to forget that episode of Child Of Our Time. I just remembered today that I was on it, and I never include that in the list whenever someone asks me which TV shows I've been on. Which doesn't happen as much as it should, incidentally. What's the point of being a star of probably more than ten obscure TV shows if people don't ask you to list them? So, I figured that since I must have fans out there who keep detailed notes about my celebrity exploits, I'd see if there's anything else I've forgotten. By my current reckoning, the list goes:

Central Tonight (a couple of times)
East Midlands Today (possibly only once)
Weakest Link
Child Of Our Time
This Morning
Richard and Judy
The Mentalists
Extraordinary Animals
Superhuman: Genius
The Panel (Ireland)
Caldeirão do Huck (Brazil)

Eleven of them! Are there any others? I have a feeling there might be, but my memory's letting me down...

(Note: tomorrow's blog entry will contain less boasting about how famous I am and more of 'that self-deprecating thing you do, you know, your usual patter', as the BBC documentary person I've been talking to kindly described it)

Ooh, ooh, that thing on Current TV, "He's The Memory Man"! Twelve!

Multiple subjects

I don't think I really plugged Ed's book as much as I should have done yesterday. Rather than sort of mentioning it in passing, I could have pointed you to the website and told you all to check it out. Now that I've heard a little bit more about what it's about, I think I can safely guarantee that it's worth buying. As anyone who saw The Mentalists (and that's all of you, right?) knows, Ed is tremendous fun, and this book is going to be a great read for anyone, whether they're interested in memory matters or not!

You can listen in to what Ed and I had to say on Radio Derby today, here if you click on "listen again" and find the Aleena Naylor show for today (Thursday) and fast-forward to about 1 hour 25 minutes into the show. It was good fun, although taking time off work was inconvenient - busy there at the moment.

Which is particularly annoying when Harry Hill wants you to make a cameo in a sketch on his show, but they want to film it next Thursday, which is a day when I really can't not be in the office, because my boss is on holiday and there's stuff that needs doing that only I can do. Hilarious-sounding sketch, though. I'm really going to hate not to do it, if I end up missing out. And I'll tell you this, if I don't get to be on Harry Hill, which I would love, I'm not going to do this BBC documentary thing they want to do with me next week, which I'll dislike.

But anyway, I'm finally catching up with some of those moving-house tasks I've neglected in the nearly-a-month since I've been here. The gas here is supplied by eon, and the electric is supplied by edf, so I decided to play the field a little before putting them both under the same supplier so I can get some kind of discount. And I was expecting to end up ditching eon, because they supplied me at my last place and I had no end of hassle with them. eon now think I'm called Benjimin, and had my address slightly wrong, while edf just call me B Pridmore, and have the address slightly wrong in a different way.

But in the calling-to-set-up-a-direct-debit stakes tonight, with eon the phone was answered immediately by a friendly and helpful operator, who took all my details, fixed the address, would probably have fixed the name had I remembered to mention it, and sorted out all the technicalities without any hassle. Rather strangely interrupted the proceedings to tell me I was speaking to Janice halfway through the conversation, but otherwise a perfect example of customer service. edf, on the other hand, I gave up on after ten minutes of an endlessly-looped weird cover of "It's not easy being green" interrupted every thirty seconds by an assurance that my call will be answered.

It's good to be home!

It's weird, but having two days in Sheffield immediately followed by two days in Birmingham feels like being away from home for much longer than when I go away to one place for a week. I feel like I haven't set foot in my flat for years! Maybe it's having gone to Paris the weekend before, and being at work all the time I've been at home...

Anyway, it's going to be extremely nice to have a weekend off. Or a weekend of memory training, as it should hopefully be. And also a weekend of catching up with all the other things I've been needing to do for weeks now. I definitely have to get a haircut, because it just looks stupid when it gets to this length, and the three hairs on top of my head are long enough that you really notice them (and point and giggle).

But before any of that, I'm dashing away from work for a couple of hours tomorrow for an interview on Radio Derby. 11:30-ish, if you want to tune in. Ed Cooke's promoting his book on local radio stations, and Derby thought they'd have a word with their more-or-less-still-local memory man while they were on the subject.

Expectations

If I don't perfectly remember something I've made an effort to memorise, like for example a store's credit claim values, I'm annoyed with myself. The people I'm showing off to, however, are usually just as impressed by an imperfect recall as they are by a perfect one. It's rather irritating, really. I'd like to raise public expectation of memory performers, so that they won't be satisfied with mediocre achievements. We need a nationwide media campaign, with the message "If someone doesn't memorise every single thing they said they would, throw rotten vegetables at them!" That way I'll feel properly appreciated if I do get things right.

Incidentally, my memory stuff today mostly did go perfectly. And it's nearly done with now!

Making an exhibition of myself

Well, here I am at the Hilton in Birmingham, being a professional memory man for the next two days. Ahh, only 48 hours until I can go back to being a professional analyst with a weird hobby. Still undecided what to wear at our stand at the healthcare exhibition - business suit with hat and enormous red tie, probably, although I did bring the Brazilian Mystery Cloak and I might try that out if I'm feeling adventurous. I can't wear my normal office uniform, because I can't memorise when I'm dressed like an accountant. It's a strange psychological hangup of mine...

A weekend's othelloing

Sheffield is just far enough away that there isn't a train early enough on Sunday mornings for me to come home half way through a two-day othello tournament, but close enough that I didn't have to get up too early on Saturday morning to get down there, which was nice. Also nice was the fact that a whole three people recognised me from the telly and said hi while I was on my way from Beeston to Sheffield - the woman serving baguettes at the Upper Crust at Derby station, a man on the platform at Derby where I was waiting for my delayed connection, and a boy on the train itself. I'm getting quite a bit of "my kids saw you and thought you were great" lately - surprising though it is that children would want to watch a documentary like Superhuman Genius, maybe we've encouraged a whole new generation to get interested in memory!

Although to be honest, I was more impressed when the aforementioned boy's younger brother, who didn't recognise me from the telly, asked if he could try on my hat. I'd rather inspire a new generation to start wearing hats than to enter memory competitions. Just imagine, a whole country full of hat-wearers, and all thanks to me! Wouldn't that be groovy?

Anyway, I eventually arrived at Sheffield and found my way to the Heeley Institute, where I've been once before, many years ago, and didn't arrive more than fifteen minutes late (which in othello circles counts as being quite early). We had the AGM, which passed without memorable incident, and then launched into the 32nd British Othello Championship.

With Graham Brightwell being somewhere overseas, the chance of a final not contested between him and Imre Leader for a change was significantly improved. And with Joel Feinstein and Garry Edmead being more or less retired these days, Imre was the only representative of the four players who between them had won every British championship for the previous twenty years. Against him were an impressive lineup of fourteen other othelloists, many of them significantly better than me, so my hopes weren't high. But all in all, I played quite well. On the first day I lost to Davids Beck and Hand, but didn't feel like I did anything monumentally stupid. I probably did, but I didn't know about it, and that's the important thing. But I beat Yvette in between David-games, and in the fourth and final game of the day I took my revenge on nine-year-old Tani Turner, wiping her out in a brutal kind of way. I'm not proud of myself here, but it was kind of fun.

Then we went out for the traditional Saturday night meal, at an Indian restaurant where the highlight of the evening was probably Ali's anecdote about being taken to a similar place by an Indian colleague who picked out all the mildest things on the menu because he doesn't like spicy food. To which Tani replied, very loudly and while the waiter was collecting plates "What's the point of being Indian, then?"

Then back to the hotel (on the way, walking through the back streets of Sheffield, Imre asked if anyone knew where he could find a croissant shop), which was very nice - I got a room with three beds for the price of one, a TV that worked if you leaned the severed aerial cable against the socket it was supposed to go in and a skylight in the bathroom (which made me a little worried about passing balloonists ogling me in the shower). And a full English breakfast, which is a must for any hotel I stay at. And we all got back to the Institute in good time for the second day of competition.

I lost to Iain, beat Roy and lost to Guy, again without being under the impression that I was playing badly. Meanwhile, David Hand was beating everyone, Imre was doing exactly the same thing as last year (losing two of his first three games and then winning all the others) and Michael, Other David, Iain, Guy and Geoff were also fighting it out for a place in the final. There was quite a lot of excitement, all in all, and I'd write about it if I could remember who beat whom and how. But I can't, so you'll just have to wait until Geoff posts all the games on the forum, and play through them, and make your own deductions about which were the most interesting.

Anyway, being around the middle of the leaderboard, I got the bye in round eight, leaving me on four points with one game to go. David H had lost one game, to Iain, and was a clear point ahead of Imre and Michael, each on six, then David B and Iain on five. So with the top two going to the final, anything could still happen.

The final round had Michael playing Iain, the Davids each playing someone who wasn't mentioned in the list above, don't ask me who, and Imre against me. "You wouldn't be so nasty as to beat me, would you?" he asked. "That's the thing," I replied, "I was sort of rooting for you to get to the final, but now..."

But even though I have a startlingly good record against Imre, I didn't expect anything amazing. Still, the game started quite well for me, and then he played a move that was so very, extremely, obviously bad that I assumed I had completely missed some subtle point and was in fact about to lose horribly. But no, it turned out after the game that it was just a silly mistake. And then I thought I'd lost after all when he took the diagonal, but I managed to find the rather clever way to make sure I'd be able to cut it, and the rest was simple. 47-17 to me. That makes six times I've beaten Imre in competitions, which is probably a higher proportion of wins to losses than practically anyone.

The Davids both won, and we all crowded around the table where Michael and Iain were still finishing their game. It looked to me like Iain was on top, but either he went wrong somewhere or he'd never been on top after all, because Michael finally won. So Adelaide was spared the headache of working out a four-way tie-break for second place (she refuses to use a computer or even a calculator for this kind of thing, believing that it's more fun to do it by hand - this would doubtless have caused friction when David B and Roy, who both brought laptops with them, calculated the Brightwell Quotients themselves and got different figures) and the final was much more Handy than ever before, David Hand v Michael Handel.

I left before the game in order to memorise the wastage figures for all of Boots's Scottish and Irish stores that'll be coming to the conference on Tuesday, but I hear that David won. Congratulations! A new name on the back of the permanent trophy! (the name of each winner is on a little metal shield stuck to the big wooden shield, and they ran out of room on the front of the trophy in the late eighties. At the present rate, we will also be out of space on the back in another ten years or so)

David also won the third-place play-off - Other David, that is, who beat Imre - and I ended up joint fifth with Roy, Iain, Geoff and Guy. Which is a definitely cool kind of position to end up in. That means the British team for the world championships in Oslo will be David H, Michael and British Grand Prix winner Iain. One of these days, with a few more flukey results going my way, I might end up there too, who knows?

But one world championship I will be going to is the memory one, of course. And, I hear, so will Andi! Fantastic news! Last year's was the first Andi-free WMC since 1994, so it'll be good to see him there again. And if he's shelling out for a trip to Bahrain, it seems to me there's a good chance that he's been practicing and is really going to try to win. Also, Gunther will definitely be there, it seems, so it's going to be a good competition. If only I can find the time for a little bit of training...

One final memory note, hot off the presses (thanks, Dai) - congratulations to Tansel on winning the Australian Memory Championship!

If I had the time and energy to think of something else to write, I would

The council estate on Bumblebee Road has been controversial from the start. While the project was still in its planning stages, Porr-Lon, the god of housing developments, manifested himself nearby and played a melody on his pewter bassoon which all those who heard it agreed meant that he felt the estate should be built on the other side of the river. The council considered re-siting the planned estate, but eventually concluded that the additional expense of drawing new blueprints, the difficulty of aligning the houses with the constellation of Aries on the other side of the river and the fact that Porr-Lon is one of the less important gods made it impractical to change the location of the estate.

Immediately after it was built, there was a space adventure involving Martians, and after that had been dealt with there were complaints from local residents that crime levels had risen and there was an unpleasant smell coming from certain of the buildings. These allegations were inaccurate - crime had in fact been completely and totally eliminated in the entire county the day after the council estate was built, and in fact in some regions the number of reported crimes fell as low as minus seventeen every day. And while there was indeed an unpleasant smell coming from certain of the buildings, who are we to criticise unpleasant smells? After all, most people smell quite unpleasant, if you come to think about it.

Nonetheless, the controversy reached such a level that the leader of the council, Bog Myrtle Sutherland, signed an emergency decree banning the estate from ever having been built in the first place. When it comes into effect, next Tuesday, the whole estate and everyone who lives on or near it will be wiped out of existence entirely and this whole article will never have been written. Which is a shame, but that's Bog Myrtle Sutherland for you. She's always overreacting to things. There was a time when she overreacted to a horse, and that didn't end well for anyone, except the jockey.

Not quite so panicky

Did a 30-minute binary tonight and it went quite well. Low score, but no concentration problems. If I can do a few hour cards and numbers in the evenings, I'll be fine for the world championship. Doesn't leave me much time for blogging, though...

Just starting to panic a little bit now

The World Memory Championship is a month away, and I'm nowhere NEAR match-fitness. It's infuriating - on one level I can't stand the idea of losing the world championship yet again, but on another I can't really summon the enthusiasm to go all-out for the win. And circumstances have kept me from getting into any kind of training schedule lately, so I think I've already left it too late to get back into top form before the competition, even with some excessively draining training over the next few weeks. We'll just have to see what happens.

A healthy memory

Well, the not-blogging-about-work-in-case-I-get-in-trouble rule lasted for two months, more or less, which is pretty good going. But I can't resist this one tonight. The worlds of work and memory are sort of merging, you see, and the people who read this blog for the memory technique insights might be interested in this.

As I might have mentioned before, it's the Boots Healthcare Conference in Birmingham next week, woo, and I've been asked to go along to our department's stand (it's all about store-controllable wastage) and persuade attendees to come and look at this not terribly compelling-sounding display by performing a memory stunt. I'm not 100% comfortable with being an Official Boots Memory Man as opposed to a Boots Profit Protection Analyst, but as long as it's only once in a while, I don't really mind.

So what I've done is taken a list of all the stores which will be represented at the convention, which each have a number from 5 (Beeston) to 6526 (Glasgow Fort) and the value of their healthcare-department credit claim values for this year to date and last year in three different categories (out of date, damaged and theft), all of which are a one-to-five-digit number, and when somebody tells me their store number, I'll be able to reel off the six figures for their store, and amaze and astound them. Then I suppose I'll order them to make an effort to reduce their wastage if they want to see more memory feats, or something like that.

Having played around with techniques for memorising these slightly tricky numbers (when you have a 3-digit-image system like me, memorising a 4-digit number is inconvenient), I decided to memorise them as eight three-digit numbers, by taking off the first digits of each and combining them into one number. So for example, if store 27's [there is no store 27 in the Boots world at the moment, and the following numbers are entirely fictional] six numbers are 1425, 684, 9723, 226, 8821 and 23, I remember it as 027-109-425-684-723-080-226-821-023. See what I'm doing there? The 027 is the store [I forget where store 27 used to be, but it closed down last year. I reiterate, I'm not quoting real figures here], the 109 is the thousands figure from the first three numbers and the 080 is the thousands figure from the last three.

I tried memorising a scene of these nine images in isolation for each of the 192 stores that'll have representatives at the conference, but they just wouldn't stay in my memory. So I used journeys instead, and placed nine images in each location, and somehow that works a great deal better. Now when someone says 'store 27' to me, I have to run through my journeys and work out where it is, but when I find it, I can remember the images perfectly.

I don't know why that's so much better than doing it without a journey. Maybe my mind is just used to journeys and now I can't survive without them. Anyway, it's been fun to be working from home this afternoon, memorising numbers and getting paid for it, although I still feel guilty because I can't quite mentally accept that memorising is part of my job at the moment.

Speaking of memory, you can check out Gaby's pictures of Maisons-Laffitte here!

And the BBC were speaking of memory today to me, too, asking questions like "when you talk about memorising a pack of cards, do you mean a 52-card pack or a 36-card pack?" I suppose you have to check everything, but that's one I've never been asked before. They want to film me on October 7th.

Wait, I forgot to mention the interesting technical bits of the healthcare memory thing. Some stores have a four-digit store number - ones that start with 1 I remember which journeys they were on and just memorise them as a 3-digit number without the 1, and the handful that start with 20 or 50 or 64 or 65 I use others of my images that I don't usually use with numbers, so store 2053 becomes store h-5-3, a hummingbird, in my head.

And for the stores whose credit claims in a category are over 9999, I use another consonant or vowel for the 10, 11, 15 or whatever thousands figure - no number is over 16000, luckily. Creating systems is about 75% of the fun of doing something like this.

Old fellow

It's othello in my dad's ancestral home of Sheffield this weekend. I've played a couple of games on playok in some kind of preparation, conscious that I haven't looked at an othello board for months now (except in the course of moving mine to the new flat and dumping them in the corner of my living room - they're among the things I haven't found a place for yet). I also haven't done my treasurer's report for the AGM... come to think of it, where did I put my box of othello paperwork? I'm pretty certain I brought it with me, but I don't think I've seen it since. Ah well, there's days before I need it.

With this kind of advance preparation, I think I'm a dead cert to win the nationals this year!

Hooray, I'm home!

Despite a slightly awkward moment going through security at Charles de Gaulle airport when the machine picked up an undeclared bottle of liquid, an unidentifiable big heavy object and lots of sophisticated-looking timing devices in my rucksack. But I managed to explain without too much difficulty that the timers are used for timing memorisation of cards in memory competitions, that the big thing was the trophy I won at the UK Memory Championship and that despite the above I had put a half-drunk bottle of coke in my bag and completely forgotten it was there. I drank the coke without exploding and the security people seemed satisfied.

As for the competition itself, I won't say much except that I was rubbish. I still won, so obviously I wasn't all that rubbish, but it definitely showed that I hadn't done any training. Got to get on with it now for the next month.

Good food, though - at lunch, we had a waiter who bravely attempted to talk with us in French, English and German, as necessary, which led to a fun multilingual bacon/Schinken/chicken confusion. And in the evening we had crepes, in the proper French style. And I got to see lots of sights in Paris!

Well, I did it.

I bought a new rucksack. I hated to do it, but I had to face facts - my beloved old rucksack is now essentially just a scrap of cloth that, at best, can be wrapped around things and carried in my arms without dropping too much stuff from it. It's not actually going to be possible to take my clothes, cards, toothbrush and other memorisation accessories on the plane to Paris in my old rucksack.

This is terribly sad, but I suppose I have had fourteen years of loyal service from my rucksack, and before that it put in a good three or four years carrying my brother's PE kit to school. Maybe I'll give it back to him now, seeing as I borrowed it temporarily from him in autumn 1994, or maybe just keep it in my box of treasured memories.

Apart from buying a rucksack, incidentally, I am completely and totally unprepared for the French Memory Open, or whatever it's called. I've done no training, I haven't planned out what journeys I'm going to use or how much I'm going to attempt in each discipline, I haven't even printed out my e-ticket details, map to the hotel in Maisons-Laffitte and useful stuff like that. I don't really feel like I'm going to be getting up early tomorrow to get the train down to Birmingham airport, then spending a day in Paris. I'm sure I will, but I'm surprisingly underprepared. We'll just have to see what happens.

And you, blog readers, will just have to see me on Sunday, because I won't be blogging till then. Au revoir!

Get off your back, go into town, don't let them down

One thing they do at Boots is encourage head office staff to go out into real live stores and help out on occasion. So that's what I've been doing today, back in Derby. It's really groovy - in all my varied jobs over the years, I've never actually worked in a shop before, so this is all new and exciting.

Nobody in the store recognised me (my fame might just possibly be fading here) but when I went for lunch someone did ask me "Excuse me, are you off the telly?" I like that phrasing better than the more common "Did I see you on the telly?". Being 'off the telly' suggests that I'm a regular TV star, rather than a subject of a one-off documentary. It's a subtle point of linguistics, but very flattering.

(It occurs to me that any foreigners reading this could use it as a local-dialect lesson, if they ever come to this part of the world.)

I have this conversation a lot these days

"Ben!"

"Hello."

"Remember me?"

"Um... no."

"Steve Barker [or possibly Chris Barton, or something along those lines]. I was in your brother's year at school. How can you not remember me? You're a famous memory man, I've seen you on TV!"

See, the non-famous-memory-men-and-women of the world have me at a real disadvantage now. They know all about me from my many TV appearances, whereas I, with my famous inability to remember names and faces, know nothing about them. And yet it's me who ends up looking stupid! I tells ya, it's tough being a celebrity.

Anyway, I don't remember any Chris/Steve/something-similar Barker/Barton/something-like-that being friends with my brother. I didn't pay much attention to those little urchins in his year, but I knew all his closest friends, I thought. I should be at least vaguely aware of the existence of someone who, when told that our grandma lives in Chilwell like he does now, observes 'oh, is she still around? I remember Joe used to go to Chilwell to see her on his holidays...'

Perhaps he's some kind of conman. Or perhaps I'm just really, really bad at remembering names and faces.

We are the world

Following on from last night's entry, I also have the same kind of feelings about the world championship as I do about the French. Apart from the bit about how it hinders my training for the world championship, of course, because that would just be silly. But I'm not really all fired up about the WMC at the moment, and I haven't done anywhere near the amount of training that I should, with one thing and another. Turnout is going to be pretty low this year, with plenty of people who could just about afford one trip to Bahrain not being able to make it an annual holiday, and a probable lack of Gunther and all the other previous world champions. I'm told that there might be even more Chinese competitors this time round, but I haven't seen a list of names yet, and the one of them who I'm friends with isn't going to be there. I just worry that the whole thing's going to be a bit of a flop.

Still, this shouldn't stop me getting into some serious training. I need to knuckle down and get my brain in gear, quick. Shame I've got Paris this weekend, Sheffield next weekend for the othello, a brotherly visit the weekend after, and then we're practically in Bahrain already, even without the inevitable BBC-pestering that's also going to happen. I have a feeling I'm not going to win again this year.

So this is gay Paree, come on along with me!

It's the first ever French memory championship next weekend, in Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris. I'm going along, although to be perfectly honest I think I might prefer not to be - it's a very small competition that few people will be coming to, and it's actually more of a hindrance than a help to my preparations for the WMC next month, because I need to be practicing the long disciplines now, not the quick ones we'll be doing in this championship. But still, I said I'd go along, and it'll hopefully spread the word in a country that's remained bafflingly untouched by the spread of competitive memory in Britain, Germany and Austria. With the greatest of respect to Pierre, it would be nice if more than one French person had ever competed in a memory championship, and from the sound of it we might just double that figure next Saturday.

Still, Gaby and Idriz will be there, which will be fun, and I'm going to spend Friday seeing the sights in Paris, which I've never really done before (I've made two flying visits in the past, but never even been to the Eiffel Tower. I mean, I already know what it looks like, but it seems silly to have never been there in person.)

Sleep!

Right, I'm worn out after another Saturday of moving heavy objects from one place to another. I need a real weekend, the kind where you sit in front of the telly and do nothing, or maybe do some memory training if you're feeling conscientious. I'm going to bed. I'll make up for this skimpy blogging tomorrow.

Moving house again

Well, I know I've spent the last week talking about my new flat, and I'll stop now, but I really do like the place. I've very nearly got everything unpacked and put away, and I could maybe get back to some memory training if not for the fact that Grandma, that big copycat, is moving tomorrow, from an upstairs flat to a downstairs one in the same building, and I'm helping her out. I might become a removal man full-time, it might give me more free time to do other things.

Although writing this just reminds me that I need to email lots and lots of people about memory-related subjects. I'll have to spend the rest of tomorrow doing that, and then, maybe, spend Sunday actually memorising things.

Plant life

Another thing about this new flat is that it came with a couple of plants. There's a plastic flower thing, and a sort of big tall thing with leaves. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm pretty sure it's not plastic and so probably needs some kind of looking after if I don't want it to die. I'm not what you'd call an expert gardener, as you might have guessed from those first few sentences, and watering plants sounds so easy in principle, but gives rise to all sorts of complexities when you come to think about it. Is that too much water? Not enough? Is this one of those plants that dies if you put water on it? Is it likely to bite me if I get too close? Does it need sunlight? Fresh air? Music? Should I just get rid of the thing before I inevitably knock it over and get mud all over the nice new carpet?

Room to spare

There's a room in this flat that is either the guest bedroom or my study - it's got a bed, but now it's also got my desk and all my memorising paraphernalia too. I'll memorise in it when I haven't got someone staying here, and use it to accommodate guests if anyone ever wants to come and visit me. It's also got a little shelf, on which I've dumped a random selection of my books, for the education and enlightenment of my guests - I'll list them some time when I'm less lazy and see what that says about me - and also, serving as bookends, two of my memory trophies, so guests can recoil in amazement at the sight of the ugly great Memory World Cup 2004 (which used to be a silvery colour but has gone a fascinating array of tarnished shades, I can only guess at what the thing is made of), and the 3rd-place-in-the-world-championship trophy 2003, made of good Malaysian pewter and still the same colour it's always been. Although the little bit on top is about to break off if anyone touches it ever again.

This is a great flat, it really is.

Oh this rain it will continue...

Wow, serious downpour outside as I sit down to type this (laptop perched on a box full of comics I haven't put away yet). I'm trying to stretch my inadequate memory and recall whether this summer has been more or less rainy than last summer, but I can't be sure. And since I don't trust weather statistics quoted by any other source, I suppose I'll just have to never know.

Anyway, before it started raining, I was going to observe how cool it is that they're turning on this Large Hadron Collider thing in Geneva tomorrow. I really like the idea of a device costing billions of pounds that smashes things together harder than anything's ever been smashed together before. I especially like the name - I'm a big fan of the recent trend in science to give things simple names like the Very Large Telescope, and I hope to see a lot more similarly-named, vastly expensive and completely unnecessary devices being built in the future. After all, the money would only have gone to waste if they hadn't built these things, and it probably wouldn't have ended up going to the impoverished and needy anyway...

I'm back on the grid!

Woo! Yay! New swanky two-bedroomed, just-down-the-road-from-work, cable-phone-and-broadband-connected flat! If you're ever moving house, I recommend... well, I can't remember what they're called, but they're the first removals firm in the Derby Yellow Pages. And they're cheap, efficient, friendly and didn't lose, destroy or eat any of my posessions. And they were impressed by my trophies, even though the nice-looking ones were packed away in boxes and the only ones they saw were the big ugly metal ones that are awkwardly-shaped and wouldn't fit in anything.

During the excitement of moving, another man on the street recognised me from the telly and said hello. He then turned to his girlfriend and said "He can memorise a whole pack of cards." The girlfriend replied "Yeah, right," in a tone that made it clear she believed he was lying. I'm surprised by this. Is it so completely unbelievable that someone can memorise a pack of cards? Actually, there are quite a lot of people who can do that, you know.

Another suitcase in another hall...

Moving tomorrow, won't be back in internet land until Monday, still got to pack things, can't talk now, see you later, bye.

Gah!

Stupid cheap shoelaces! Bought them last weekend, one's broken already! I'd take them back to the shop if I could remember where I bought them and if they'd cost more than a pound. That does it, I'm going back to my bad habit of not untying my laces, ever, and just treating my shoes like slippers.

Also, I'm sorry if this blog has been unspeakably trivial just lately, but all I've been doing is working and packing. Not that that hasn't been fun - work is still going really well, and I've even been persuaded to use my memory skills for good rather than evil and perform memory tricks to attract people to our department's stand at the Boots Healthcare Conference at the end of the month. So make sure to book your tickets (if you're a Boots healthcare manager and have access to a time machine, since the registration deadline was three days ago). Funnily enough, shortly after agreeing to this, I had an email from a non-work person who wants me to perform memory tricks to attract people to his stand at some kind of computer retail exhibition, a week after the Boots thing. Something about me must just suggest 'corporate memory man'. There might be a career in this, if not for the minor stumbling block that I don't want one.

Boxes upon boxes

In early 1998, I moved from a rented attic room into a tiny little room in a shared house, and my friend Karen helped me move my stuff. She observed "Ben, for someone who's had a short little life like yours, you haven't half accumulated a lot of shit." I miss Karen and her colourful expressions, actually. I must look her up some time.

Anyway, it's ten years later, and I would estimate that I've got about ten times as much junk piled up in cardboard boxes now. Moving house is a terrible inconvenience, especially if you find it impossible to throw anything away, ever. Half the stuff in these boxes is probably just going to be unpacked, put somewhere and never touched again until the next time I move. Maybe I should just dump it all outside the Oxfam shop and make a fresh start? But then what would happen if I find that I really need that half of an issue of Autosport magazine from 1997?

Warning!

I've got a new bike, did I mention that? Yes, I know it's no more than a couple of years since I last got a new bike, but it was falling to bits through lack of care and maintenance, and I felt like splashing out rather than keep fixing the thing. Anyway, it came with a little sticker on it that says "Warning: For safety reason. All bolts must be checked for tightness before every ride. Failure to do so could result in serious and/or/fatal injuries."

I ask you. I could nitpick the unusual punctuation and grammar, or wonder whether it really means to imply that you can have injuries that are fatal but not serious, but I'm more interested in the instruction that I have to test every bolt on the bike, every time I want to ride it anywhere. I mean, I'm all in favour of safety (except for wearing a silly-looking helmet, I'm still not going to do that), but that seems a little excessive. And does this mean that if the bike spontaneously falls apart, I can't sue whoever made it, because I didn't check all the bolts?

I suppose I could lie in court and claim that I had, but they're probably monitoring me with CCTV cameras, just in case. Or I could be honest and say that the sticker fell off, which it quite genuinely did on the way home tonight. I hadn't noticed it until then. I'll keep it and stick it onto something else, just to confuse everyone.

But wait, if I leave Derby...

I won't walk past that chip shop on my way home, the one with a sign saying "You are welcome to breastfeed here" on the door! I won't be able to quip "Well, thanks, but I think I'll stick with the haddock and chips..." and entertain whoever happens to be with me at the time!

And next door to it, I won't be able to giggle at the sandwich board outside the Discount Furniture Warehouse that says "BED'S FROM £79" on one side and "SOFA'S FROM £49" on the other. Some punctuation-conscious employee of the DFW sellotapes little bits of white paper over the unwanted apostrophes, but they keep blowing off or getting rained off and rendering the sign all ungrammatical again. Perhaps I'll buy them a bottle of tippex as a going-away present.

And a bit further down the road, in the somewhat more shabby furniture-and-miscellaneous-junk shop, I won't be able to admire the stuffed fox-with-rabbit-in-mouth tableau and wonder whether I admire the taxidermy skill and want it to decorate my living room or feel repulsed by the whole thing.

Nor will I walk past the most badly-planned traffic lights in the country, with a pedestrian crossing not synchronised with the traffic lights at the roundabout fifty yards away, so if someone presses the crossing button at the wrong time, no cars can get on to the roundabout ever, and the queue stretches back for miles.

Nor the corner of Hartington Street, next to where the Discount Furniture Warehouse people live and park their vans in an impossibly tight space, that serves as one of my memory locations and for some reason has a tree in my mental journey that isn't there in real life.

It's the little things I'll miss.

Match of the Day

It's nice that the football season's started again, but it would be nicer if they'd show the highlights of Sunday's games a bit earlier in the evening. Don't they realise I'm working now and have to get up early on a Monday morning?

Yes, I can't think of anything to write about tonight. It's been dull and rainy all day, just for a change, and I haven't really done anything worth mentioning.

Actually, it might have been a cheetah

Lord Aberystwyth rang the bell and called for his butler, Hopkinson. "Ah, Hopkinson, there you are," he said, as soon as the butler came into the drawing room. "How was your day at school?"

"I believe you're confusing me with your son, who is also named Hopkinson," said Hopkinson.

"That's the last impertinence I'm going to take from you, Hopkinson," said Lord Aberystwyth, sternly. "If I ask you how your day at school was, then by Brahma you will tell me how your day at school was."

"Very good, sir," said Hopkinson, respectfully. "My day at school was most pleasant. We learnt about fractions and Shakespeare."

"Splendid," said Lord Aberystwyth. "Now, I remember why I called you here. There's some kind of big cat, possibly a jaguar or maybe a leopard, eating me. Would you do something about it, please?"

"Very good, sir," said Hopkinson, picking up a poker and jabbing at the wild beast tentatively. It turned around briefly and gave Hopkinson a reproachful look, before turning back and continuing to devour Lord Aberystwyth's left arm.

"No, no, no," tutted this worthy peer. "You'll never do any good like that, Hopkinson. Grab the thing by its tail and pull it away."

"Very good, sir," said Hopkinson, attempting to catch the presumed jaguar's tail, which was flicking from side to side in a manner more reminiscent of a domestic cat than a member of the panthera genus. "It seems a little elusive, sir... ah, there we are," he said, seizing it and pulling the animal away.

"I don't need a running commentary, Hopkinson," said Lord Aberystwyth. "Now, get rid of the thing and then fetch a bandage. Maybe two bandages, it seems to have eaten most of my internal organs."

"It appears to be eating me now, sir," Hopkinson protested apologetically. "I'm afraid I'm not in a position to fetch bandages."

"Well, for Buddha's sake, if that doesn't just take the biscuit," snapped Lord Aberystwyth. "Honestly, I expect better service from you, Hopkinson. I hired you on the basis of the most impeccable references, and my wife was in labour for thirty-two minutes giving birth to you. If you can't do it yourself, ring for the first footman and have him bring me my bandages."

"Very good, sir," said what was left of Hopkinson. Unable to ring the bell owing to a shortage of remaining arms, he shouted "Ding-a-ling-a-ling!" at the top of his lungs, at the right pitch to indicate that the first footman and several bandages were required.

The footman, whose name was also Lord Aberystwyth, arrived promptly and bandaged his lordship deftly. "You've suffered extensive blood loss, sir, and your lungs, kidneys and appendix are absent, although it's possible that the last-named organ had already been removed prior to the cat incident. In my medical opinion, although I haven't been a practising doctor for three days now, you will pass away in another twenty seconds or so."

"I think I had my appendix taken out as a child," mused Lord Aberystwyth. "Although it may have been my tonsils. Go and consult my childhood diaries, Lord Aberystwyth, and let me know."

"Very good, sir," said the first footman, taking his leave. Lord Aberystwyth did indeed pass away exactly twenty seconds after Lord Aberystwyth had finished pronouncing the word 'twenty', which would have proved the footman right in a wager he had recently undertaken with another doctor-turned-domestic in the household regarding his diagnostic abilities, if only anybody had been present to witness the exact moment of the master's demise. However, Hopkinson had by that time been entirely devoured by the still-not-positively-identified animal and was unable to be of any use in the matter.

Of course, if he had been alive and had been an accessory to an unlicensed gamble among the servants of a peer of the realm, he would have been a disgrace to the world of butlering, so it's probably best for everyone concerned that he wasn't.

For those who are keeping track of my movements

I'm not moving this weekend. I'm moving next weekend, and to a different place from the place I was going to be moving to. I found a slightly nicer flat that costs the same, so I decided to take that one instead. So, unless I find a nicer flat still, it's next weekend for the big move to Beeston. Which is good, because I've still got a lot of packing to do...

Also, I need to do some memory training. I haven't done any for a while now, and I had a dream about abstract images last night. That's a sure sign my brain wants me to memorise things.

Largeness

The somewhat inaccurately named 99p Shop in Derby is selling 2-litre bottles of Pepsi for 79p. This is a bad thing for those who are trying to lose weight but can't resist a bargain or a sugary drink. I mean, diet Pepsi is the same price, but that tastes like wee, so I'm forced to buy the unhealthy stuff.

I really should be making an effort to be slender and beautiful right now, because I quite literally can't set foot out of doors at the moment without being recognised. Every time I go out in public, somebody is waiting to compliment me on my amazing memory abilities. Everybody seems very impressed by it, funnily enough, although I didn't think I came across as much of a genius. Nobody's stopped me in the street to say "Ha ha, you're the one who's got no job!" yet, either.

An open letter to the people of the world

Hi, people. I really am touched by your generosity, but I've got a job now, and don't have any money problems at all (well, I won't in a month or so, anyway). So there's really no need to offer me money or a way of using my amazing memory talents to earn money. By the way, this particularly applies if your plan involves card-counting in casinos with the aid of your cash investment. That really wouldn't work out well for you if we did try it, I promise. (Oh, and distinctively-voiced journalists whom I spoke to 18 months ago about a similar subject especially need not apply, using a fake name and claiming to be some vague kind of businessman).

On the other hand, a big thanks to all the people who've recognised me on the street or on the trains lately and complimented my amazing abilities! It's great being a celebrity.

Grab your coat, don't forget your hat

Moving house is a big inconvenience. You have to pack all your videos and books and comics into big cardboard boxes that are too heavy to carry, tell the cable, water, gas and electric people you're leaving, change your address with the bank and credit cards and everything, arrange for someone with a van to help you move, clean your current flat so it's a little less filthy when you leave... and probably a lot of other things that I can't think of right now.

And I bet I'm going to end up leaving something behind. The toys under my bed, or whatever I keep in my Forbidden Closet Of Mystery (the cupboard in my bedroom without a door handle so you can only open it by prying the door open with a knife. I don't use that cupboard very much). Or my toothbrush, like I do most times I go away for a night. But I do need a new toothbrush anyway, so that wouldn't be such a huge disaster. I don't know why I'm making a fuss about it. In fact, maybe I'll leave my toothbrush behind deliberately, and cut down on the heavy lifting while I'm transferring all my other rubbish to Beeston.

Catching up

Let me see, what happened to me last week while I was drivelling on about the UK Memory Championship weekend? Well, on the Wednesday we had our Team Challenge (no relation to an old friend who goes by that unusual moniker) and went out to renovate the playground of a community centre creche, spreading the good word of Boots community spirit wherever we went. (Yes, Boots are the mysterious people I'm working for. I can't blog about what I did on Thursday without mentioning them by name, so the secret's out.) I "helped" my boss make a new gate in the fence, by handing him tools and occasionally hammering things when he told me how to do it. I'm bad at DIY, as everyone who knows me is well aware.

Then on Thursday I had my been-there-a-month induction session, which turned out to be more interesting than I expected, because of the revelation during the "history of Boots the Chemist" part that in 1935 they commissioned a cartoon, animated by none other than Ub Iwerks, called "See How They Won"! It chronicles the fight against evil germs by the heroic Boots army. I knew there were perks to working for a big company like Boots, but I didn't expect them to include getting to watch classic-era cartoons! I'm all the more convinced that I picked the right job now.

And somewhere along the way I confirmed that I'm moving to Beeston next weekend. Nice little flat, much closer to work, and hopefully the transition will be smooth and uncomplicated. But if I disappear from the internet for a while, you'll know why. Unless I've been abducted by Bulgarian anti-memory crusaders, in which case you'll believe you know why I'm not blogging, but you'll be wrong.

One more thing

Yes! Not content with an extra-long post earlier tonight, I'm going to write an extra blog entry too! I found something else that I can't resist blogging about. That chess game I briefly mentioned in passing, between Jan Smeets and Nigel Short, can be played through on the internet here. And you can read commentary about it here, where it says that the game is "A brilliant effort by Smeets, who later described the game as one of his best ever."

Well... I don't claim to be a grandmaster (a real grandmaster, anyway. I am a memory GM, for what it's worth), but I wouldn't describe this game as brilliant. It's... simple. I understand what's happening, and I'm rubbish at understanding chess positions. It's Ruy Lopez, for goodness' sake! That's the most basic, overused opening in low-level chess games across the world! It's the opening that people figure out for themselves as kids and play exclusively for years because they don't dare attempt something more complicated like a queen's gambit.

And it's not like these two giants of chess do anything exciting with it! Threaten and defend the pawns, exchange a few pieces to make the position more simple, bring the queen out, zoom it into that little undefended space in the corner, chase the king around the board a bit until you contrive a position to take a rook, win.

I've played this exact game a zillion times with my former fellow nerdy teenager best friend David (perhaps it's not just the MSO and othello worlds that are overcrowded with Davids, maybe it's my whole life). And yes, I was the loser in these games more often than not, but still. If that's what passes for a brilliant game between two GMs these days, maybe it's time I came out of retirement...

UKMC, episode five: Escape To Victory (or a bronze medal, at least)

After the speed cards, there was only time for a very quick speech from Phil and Tony thanking everyone for coming and asking them to get out of the room and let the chess players in. I missed it because I was talking to the Sun on Phil's mobile phone, but I'm sure it was a fitting end to an excellent weekend's memorising. I gave Phil his mobile back, burbled something quickly into the microphone about how great it was to see everyone and how the organisers are all great, while trying to keep hold of my non-closing rucksack full of speed stacks timers and packs of cards that were falling all over the floor. You can see it on the Sun website if it's still there and if you really want to. I don't think it shows that I was in a hurry, knowing I was going to be late for the othello if I didn't dash quickly. All that remained were a few closing conversations:

-Phil: Your cards from yesterday are through here, follow me.
-Me (following him): Okay. Thanks again, great competition, etc...
-Lots of other people: Congratulations!
-Me (repeatedly): Thanks! You too! Well done on the [insert anything I could remember about whatever whoever I was talking to had done well]!
-Boris: Hey, Ben, where does a score of 6350 put me on the ranking list?
-Me: I have no idea. I never remember the ranking scores. [I had to keep asking what score I needed to get to number one over the course of the weekend. I seem to have a real blind spot with ranking points memory] James Paterson's the one to ask. James, where's Boris on the rankings now?
-Sun journalist with camera (not the one I was talking to on the phone, another one): Ben, got time for that quick chat?
-Me (seeing Phil had by now disappeared out of sight): Sure, why not? Talk and walk?
-Sun guy: Let me just quickly put this radio mike on you...
-Me (after extensive attempts to clip the thing on my shirt, only for it to fall apart): Can I just hold it in my hand?
-Sun guy: Sure. So, happy with the result?
-Me (holding radio mike): [burbled something about the competition. You can also see that on the Sun website, same video clip, same provisos as before]
-Sun guy: Great, thanks.
-BBC camera crew: Ben, got time for that quick chat?
-Me: Um, yes, sure, just a minute, let me get my cards back first, I'm really in a hurry.
-BBC presenter: Sure, I just have to go and [do something I wasn't paying attention to] first. Talk to you in a minute.
-Me (seeing Phil being hassled by even more people than were hassling me, but noticing a box full of packs of cards sitting near some chess people): Ah, my cards!
-Raymond Keene OBE: Ah, Ben, this is Jan Something and Someone Else, he's the Something of the chess tournament.
-Me (finding my cards, dropping the contents of my rucksack again and trying to pick them up): Oh, great, look, I've really got to dash, I'm playing in a...
-Raymond Keene OBE: Ben's just won the memory competition.
-Jan Something: Ah. You are a competitor in the memory?
-Me: Yes, that's right.
-Jan Something: Ah. And you are the winner?
-Me: Yes.*
*[conversation edited for comic effect. I'm sure Jan Something (possibly not his real name) is a great conversationalist, it's just that I was really in a hurry to get away and not arrive at the othello more than 15 minutes late]
-Jan Something: Ah.
-Me (thinking if I'm going to be talking to chess people, I might as well do what I'd been meaning to do all weekend, and say hi to Nigel Short): Is Nigel Short anywhere around here?
-Someone Else (gesturing to a man sitting right next to him): He's right here.
-Me: Oh. You don't wear glasses any more. [thought to myself: Why, considering that I'm in a tearing hurry, did I just take the time to tell Nigel Short he isn't wearing glasses? He probably knows that already.] Um, I just wanted to say hi. Back when you were in the world championship match with Kasparov, I was a nerdy teenager and I was following the games with rapt attention.
-Glasses-less Nigel Short: Um, thanks.
-Me: Big fan. Got to go, nice to meet you.
-BBC presenter: Ben, have you got five minutes to talk?
-Me (leaving): No. Not even five seconds. Really in a hurry.
[for the record, Michael Adams won the chess, as usual. Nigel Short lost his Sunday game to Jan Smeets, possibly alarmed by the conversation with me, and ended up joint seventh with Jan Werle and Jon Speelman. And yes, everybody at the chess tournament was called Jan - three of the competitors and also the sponsor Jan Mol, who I suspect was probably the Jan Someone I was speaking to.]

I dumped my stuff in my hotel over the road without losing anything, cleverly fitted in an in-depth interview with the BBC while walking to the tube station (they offered to get a taxi, but I refused on working-class-hero grounds), said my goodbyes and hot-footed it to the Royal Horticultural Halls.

I was only ten minutes or so late, and the othello hadn't started yet. There were six of us there - me, Imre, David B and Geoff plus MSO regulars Bharat and David P. The MSO, like the othello world, is overrun by Davids, and another one of them, David Kotin, was running the othello tournament. We played a double-round-robin of ten-minute games, and Imre was on the kind of everybody-squishing form that he seems to reserve for tournaments that don't affect the British rating list. He won all his games, and I managed to win six out of ten, beating Othello David once and Geoff once to end up in bronze medal position.

They don't do actual medals at the MSO any more, but they do do stylish little mini-trophy/plaque things, which look really nice. Of course, they hadn't made the othello ones yet, so I didn't get it before dashing off again, but I'm hoping to collect it some time.

The highlight of the othello was the game against Geoff that I didn't win - I was already well and truly dead, but also running out of time, and so I was playing my moves at a frantic rate. I played my penultimate move, Geoff played his and Imre quipped "Ah, so now Ben can't lose on time."

Not paying attention to this, I played what I thought was my only available move and started flipping discs, only to notice from the giggles of the spectators that this actually wasn't a legal move, and in fact I didn't have any legal moves and should have tapped the clock to signify that I had to pass. This made sense of Imre's comment, but it sank into my brain just a second too late, and I didn't manage to unflip the discs I'd wrongly flipped before my time ran out. So I lost on time in a position where it's not possible to lose on time, which is quite an achievement.

And so that was the weekend. Hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed living it. I doubt you did, since I'm not THAT great a writer, but never mind. I got criticised for not blogging enough about the world memory championships last year (even though I spent it in a hotel without internet access), so I wanted to make up for it here. Normal bloggery resumes tomorrow with a precis of what's been happening to me over the last five days.

UKMC, episode four: Am I Still Writing This Thing?

Seriously, I'm going to have to spend next week catching up with blogging all the things that have happened to me this week. And then the week after that blogging all the exciting things that will happen to me next week. And the week after the week after that... well, you get the idea. Maybe I'll just spend all day blogging tomorrow instead of packing up my stuff because I'm moving house next weekend.

That's something I haven't blogged about yet, because I've been writing about the UKMC.

Anyway, last Sunday morning, it was the final day of the competition. After another very nice full English breakfast at the swanky hotel, I went over the road to find that I was comfortably in the lead. So in five minute numbers I went for a "safe" 360, only to forget an image half way through the final line, so I only wrote down 339. And had a mistake in a previous row, so ended up with a score of 299. Which is still pretty good, really. Wasn't long ago that 280 was my safe-ish score and 324 was my risky second attempt. Which just goes to show how the standard at these competitions is going up at a staggering rate, like I always say.

I was reasonably confident of a halfway acceptable score in abstract images, having done a bit of practice before the competition. I said to Boris that he was going to get 200 or so, wasn't he, and he replied that no, he wasn't going to do that, 150 would be a good score for him. Accordingly, he got 205, while I ended up with 144. Which is still a personal best, and a halfway acceptable score by any standards.

Around this time the media throng started arriving, in the form of that BBC documentary I've probably unwisely agreed to allow to film me, and also another person with a camera from the Sun. I spent most of the time in between disciplines (and there wasn't much time, since we were hurrying to finish before the chess players moved into the room) talking to people and not really being sure who I was talking to.

So, we got on with the historic dates, which went pretty well, and the spoken numbers, in which I got a quite acceptable 99 in the first trial (Boris got a perfect 100, but I always struggle with that last digit, since I memorise them in threes and have one left over that I have to remember by just repeating it to myself). It's always fun to watch memory competitors after a spoken numbers - everyone stands outside the room in a group, reciting the number to each other and exclaiming "Drat!" or "Woohoo!" depending on whether what they remembered agrees with the group consensus.

Which left us with speed cards. I had a lead of around 1200 points, so I was safely the UK champion unless I failed to memorise anything and Boris did a pack in 25 seconds or so. But I was in with a good chance of knocking Gunther off the world number one spot, with a time of (according to my rough calculations) 50 seconds or so. So the sensible strategy was a safe, slow first pack to make sure of that, followed by an amazing world record to blow everyone away.

And so I went through the pack twice, really really quickly, in 47 seconds or so, which should have been safe, but my brain wasn't really up to speed, and I didn't pay attention to the last few cards both times I looked at them. So I got the recall wrong and was torn between attempting another safe time or saying to heck with it all and going for that world record. I really wanted to break the world record and make "Superhuman Genius" out-of-date before it was even broadcast. Besides, it annoys me that they bullied me into making a record attempt outside the competition and ending up with a sort-of-semi-official-but-not-counted-as-a-100%-real world record.

In between speed cards trials I escaped the cameras long enough to get my historic dates score corrected (the arbiter had somehow stopped marking my recall paper about a third of the way through the final page, possibly distracted by a butterfly)* and recalculated that a speed cards time of about a minute would still be enough to take that number one spot. And, on the advice of James, I decided to refrain from attempting the world record anyway, and just play it safe.

*[see my post of three days ago. The arbiters were great. Really they were. Just ignore me.]

So, I did 56.41 and recalled it without a hitch. Woohoo, UK Champion, World Number One, Really Great Memory Person, and so on. Woohoo! Boris did 54.41 to ensure his second place and to move back into the world top ten (at the expense of Dominic O'Brien! That's a cool achievement to put on your CV!), and Gaby did 54.50 to narrowly snatch third place from Katie.

James Ponder won the battle of the Jameses to take fifth place and the coveted third-best-British-entrant trophy and prize (another thing I forgot to mention about the arbiters - arranged lots of sponsorship and some extremely cool prizes again!). Jürgen, Ameel (have I mentioned Ameel Hoque? Another excellent newcomer to watch out for in future competitions!), Mark Channon and Mia rounded out the top ten. Two-time Polish champion Tomek Krasinski was a close enough eleventh that I'd feel like I'm being rude not to give him a namecheck too. Mark Aarøe Nissen (who I haven't mentioned here before, but who was competing in his first real-life competition after taking part in the Online Memory Challenge) got an excellent 87.11 seconds in his first ever real life speed cards. Everybody else, I'm sure, had good reason to be proud of their performance. Give them a round of applause, if you're reading this!

Of course, by the time we ended we were overdue to clear out and let the chess players in, so they were huddled outside muttering dire imprecations in Russian (most of the competitors were British, but I assume chess players of all nationalities curse in Russian), and I was decidedly overdue for an othello tournament quite some distance away elsewhere in London.

Final episode tomorrow! Thrill to my attempt to make a quick getaway from Simpson's!

UKMC, episode three: Interlude

With the competition only taking place in the mornings because we were piggybacking a chess tournament's rooms, I had Saturday afternoon free. Eventually, anyway, because as mentioned I was talking to Canadians while everybody else got to wander off for lunch - and that was only after waiting around for them to finish talking to Tony (who is one of the world's great talkers, as everyone knows, and can go on for hours if you give him half a chance). Meanwhile, Ray Keene did his best to persuade me to come to the prizegiving/gala dinner on Monday evening and I said I would (mainly because of my usual difficulty in saying no to people), despite having to work in Beeston on Tuesday. Then after leaving Simpson's, it occurred to me that I was on telly on Monday night and I would much prefer to be at home for that. So I made a mental note to tell them that I wouldn't be going to the dinner after all. But I decided to wait until after the competition had finished, just in case anyone had the idea of rigging the result so that the winner would be at the prizegiving.

Not that anyone would do that, of course. I'm joking. Please don't rig the result of any future memory championship to teach me a lesson, arbiters.

Anyway, I went to Victoria station for a late lunch - I love the food court there, a couple of times when I went to the MSO and stayed in a hall of residence nearby, I had my tea there every day. And then I went down the road to the Royal Horticultural Halls down the road, where this year's somewhat smaller-scale MSO was taking place. The Horticultural Halls are surprisingly devoid of any plant life, but a nice place for an MSO, featuring rooms of various sizes spread around the building, just right for all the various competitions.

There wasn't anything happening there on Saturday afternoon that I could compete in, but I went along anyway, just to say hi to all the usual MSO suspects - the dozen or so people who can still be found there every year. Everyone seems to still think of me as a usual suspect, too, even though I've barely shown my face at the MSO for the last few years. But after that, I decided to see a few sights, seeing as I was in London. I got a tube to Oxford Circus, intending to walk down Oxford Street to Charing Cross Road, check out all the bookshops, go down to Trafalgar Square and admire that big column thing, then walk back along the Strand to my hotel.

This was a pretty ambitious plan for me - I can't cope with London streets, even if I'm only planning to walk along three really big and well-known ones. I get confused and lost if I try to travel anywhere in London that isn't within sight of a tube station. I have taken the tube from Euston to King's Cross in the past.

However, on Saturday I set out on this adventure with great confidence, which was only slightly dented when I realised after quite a bit of walking that I'd turned the wrong way out of Oxford Circus and was headed down Oxford Street in the wrong direction. Never mind, I thought, I'm still seeing the sights, and I haven't really been down this end before very much, and when I get to Marble Arch I'll get the good old tube down to Tottenham Court Road. But when I got there, it turned out that Central Line services were seriously disrupted due to what the tannoy described as "a person under a train". So I got a bus instead. I practically never take London buses, and I should do it more often. And I got off at Tottenham Court Road and successfully completed the rest of my planned walk, so I felt hugely accomplished and metropolitan.

Then it was just back to the hotel to enjoy some abstract images practice and rather a lot of Sky One. Being a Virgin customer, I really miss being able to see some Simpsons episodes other than the handful that Channel 4 keep endlessly repeating with all the funny lines edited out, and even better, I got to see the new series of Gladiators!

New Gladiators is basically exactly the same as old Gladiators, which is exactly the way it should be. I'm hugely in favour of this! And I still want to be a Gladiator when I grow up. Maybe once I've won the world memory championship I'll turn my attention to bodybuilding.