There's just one thing I don't understand

Why is there a Sea Life Centre in Birmingham? Who goes to Birmingham wanting to see sharks and giant sea turtles? And isn't it really inconvenient to ship all that sea life overland to the middle of a big city? And what do they do if the big tank springs a leak and they need to fill it with more sea water?

It's a working man I am

Sorry I didn't blog anything yesterday, but I was tired after a day of stacking shelves, and I didn't realise I hadn't blogged until after I'd turned my computer off for the night. My memory is bad, you know. However, after another day of hauling a wide range of desirable products around a store that strangely keeps its stock three storeys above the salesfloor, I'm feeling quite invigorated. I think everyone who knows me knows that I'm not really what you'd call a manual worker - I've never had a job that involved anything other than sitting at a computer, and I'm really quite feeble as a result - but it's good fun to do something different. I could quite happily change careers and haul haircare products from one place to another all day long, provided they still paid me what I get now for being an analyst, of course.

Also, on an unrelated note, I've noticed lately that the best way to get a reply from me is to send me an email and not a Facebook message. I think it's because I'm terribly lazy, but since I don't use Facebook very often, I only see the notification-email and replying to it involves at least another two or three clicks of the mouse, so I tend to put it off until I can be bothered. Whereas if I've got an email, I go through my inbox at least once a fortnight or so and make a point of replying to everyone who's expecting me to...

Brum

I'm going to Birmingham for the next couple of days, working in the big High Street store. Just for a change of scene, you know. I can't remember the last time I went to Birmingham, actually - I used to go there fairly often, but it's about twenty minutes longer on the train from Beeston than it is from Derby and somehow that tips it over the edge of 'too far away to be worth the trip'. So I'm hoping to find the city so enthralling that I want to visit more often in future. Hopefully there will be fireworks and escaped zoo animals of the non-violent kinds, and balloons.

I'm memorable!

Also memorable are 2808 decimal digits or 36 packs of cards in an hour, I'm sure of it. Didn't have much luck memorising them today, but the important thing is that I attempted to, and every time I do that it gets my brain more accustomed to the hour of solid concentration and the extensive mental imagery involved. If I can find another weekend or two to practice before the WMC, I'm hopeful that I can do something world-record-breaking there.

Not that I'm going to have many free weekends over the next couple of months, what with the British Othello Championship, the Mensa Annual Gathering (remember that I promised to do some kind of presentation there? I seem to have forgotten to weasel my way out of it...), that potential trip to Tokyo, an important bon-voyage kind of get-together with my brother, a birthday party (York, weekend after October 14th, anyone?) and probably other stuff too. Maybe I should quit my job again.

It's officially Christmas

The shops are filling their shelves with seasonal merchandise, the 2010 comic annuals are out, it won't be long before everywhere is full of decorations and the merry sound of carols! Which makes it all the more inappropriate that it was hot and sunny and lovely today. I feel like I'm living in the southern hemisphere, although that might also be something to do with the fact that I'm standing on my head as I write this.

Mysteries of the Orient

Japanese TV want to fly me out to Tokyo to have my brain scanned! A free trip in return for some tedious documentary filming sounds like a good deal to me. It'll be some time in October, assuming they don't change their minds or find a cheaper way to do it without buying plane tickets for me. Maybe I can go and visit Ayumu the chimp while I'm there!

It's good that I'm going to Japan, because my brother's threatening to outdo me in the globetrotter stakes - having never in his life so far been farther away from home than Wiltshire, he's now got a job in Harbin, China for the next year at least. And I don't know if you've ever checked on a map, but that's a heck of a long way away. Still, hopefully next year's world memory championship will be in that neck of the woods (I forget whether anyone's told me yet exactly where in China they want it to be) so I can visit.

Anyway, it's the weekend and if I don't do lots and lots of marathon memory practice over the next two days I'm going to lose the world championship this year and be banned from competing ever again due to general rubbishness, so I'd better get on with shuffling cards. Also, I need to learn Japanese...

V.F.D.

I've signed up to become a 'volunteer reading partner' - spending an hour a week helping primary school children with reading. It's one of those 'corporate social responsibility' things that Boots is keen on, and the idea behind me volunteering is that, much as I like my job, I do sometimes feel like I'm not exactly helping people or making the world a better place on a regular basis. I mean, at best I'm tangentially contributing in a minor way to enabling Boots customers to enjoy reasonably-priced cosmetics, but somehow that just isn't as fulfilling as it could be. And improving small children's reading skills might turn out to be fun as well as beneficial to the world in general. It's also a scary kind of prospect that I might well back out of at the last minute, but we'll see...

Forget that Northern Ireland thing

I've decided that it makes more sense for me to support Bahrain. They're playing Saudi Arabia tonight, with the winner going on to play New Zealand for a place in the world cup finals. And the second of their two games against New Zealand is on the last day of the World Memory Championship in November - it would have been a great double sporting event if only they hadn't changed the venue. Just picture it, we could have had all the excitement of the speed cards, then sat around watching the footy and impressing the press people with memorisation of international football trivia. It would have been in all the papers.

Except I would doubtless have gone to bed early, because I'm always dead on my feet after the final day of the world championships, and missed everything.



Postscript: Bahrain scored an equaliser in the last minute of injury time to win on the away goals rule! Yay! Go... whatever the national football team of Bahrain are popularly known as!

Red card

I need to get some new cards. I've had my current load for a good few years now, and they're getting to the point where they're too old for proper memorising - they might well start to stick together when I'm trying to nimbly flick them between my fingers in the space of twenty seconds or so, and that would be really annoying. Of course, it's too late now to get new cards for the world championship, because brand new packs are too slippery and I'd be liable to drop them. I'll just have to reward/condole myself after the competition with a big pile of brand new playing cards, and break them in over the course of the winter break.

Hey, maybe I could ask the organisers to just give me lots of cards instead of a trophy or whatever the prize is?

Because you demanded it

A regular reader (and I didn't even know I had any) has pointed out that I haven't mentioned my sainted grandmother on this blog for a long time. This is quite remiss of me, since I only saw Grandma last Saturday, and she's still alive and well and as brilliant as ever. Considering that, as she often likes to point out, she's eighty-nine years old, she's actually in great shape and likely to carry on having my visits to and conversations with her go unreported in my blog for years to come. I'll make more of an effort to give her a passing mention at least, seeing as I know she's got a lot of fans out there.

Apparently people do see her on the street, recognise her from the telly and stop to chat about whatever I've been up to recently. It's the price of fame, you know.

International affairs

Does anyone know anything about the upcoming Slovenian Memory Championship? There's a website, but it's all in some foreign language (I don't actually know what language they speak in Slovenia nowadays) so I don't know any details about it. It clashes with the British Othello Championship, in the even more exotic and mysterious locale of Frimley Green, so I can't go along and see what it's like, but I hope some information about the event will somehow leak into my consciousness. I've never heard of anyone Slovenian even taking an interest in memory competitions...

Come on you greens!

I've become Northern Irish. I was watching their game against Poland tonight, and it was terribly exciting - much more so than England's boring friendly match. I'm going to get some kind of green hat and follow their remaining games avidly.

And because that sounds a little low-brow and I wanted to give the impression that I've also done something worthwhile and educational today, I decided to wander randomly around the internet until I found a significant historical character I'd never heard of. So now I'm extremely interested in the life and times of Taira no Kiyomori. Wow, he was cool. Although I feel sorry for his unfortunate grandson...

Turn on the radio, daddy-o

I think I've mentioned it before, but I always buy the Radio Times. It's the one thing I'm snobbish about - I can't stand the idea of someone coming into my flat and seeing one of those nasty, garish, cheaper TV guides sitting on my coffee table (I don't think I've ever mentioned that I've got a coffee table in my new flat, now I come to think of it - there's no avoiding it, I'm turning into the middle classes) and thinking I must be the kind of person who exclusively watches soap operas and reality shows. So when the Co-Op down the road didn't have any RTs left tonight (and I'm not going up into town, my leg still hurts) I decided to do without knowing what's on telly for the next week. I suppose I could always look it up on the internet, but I doubt I'll get round to it. But if I miss the football, it'll be the Co-Op's fault. I'd stop shopping there, only that would be betraying my socialist principles even more than buying the Radio Times and owning (well, renting) a coffee table.

1404

I happened to notice that this is blog entry number 1404 in this thing of mine. By an interesting coincidence (well, maybe not interesting, but definitely a coincidence), that's the number of digits I attempt to memorise in 30-minute numbers. It's a strange number, but that's because it works out to 6 lots of 234, and my journeys all accommodate exactly 234 digits. If I'd put any kind of forward planning into my journey design, I would have made them 25 locations long, instead of 26 (or maybe even 40, to fit nicely in with the 40-digit rows of numbers we're given), and given us some nice round numbers, but it's too late now. Seriously, it is too late - a few years ago I tried to design some new journeys that were something other than 26 locations, but it didn't work at all. I'm completely stuck in a 26-location mindset, just because the first thing I used a journey for was memorising a pack of cards, and before the "Ben System" came into existence it took me 26 locations to memorise a pack.

Anyway, long disciplines like the 30-minute numbers are on my mind at the moment, because it's time for me to get stuck in to hour numbers and hour cards training whenever I've got a free weekend. It takes a good few trial runs before the WMC before I can really produce a good result, and we haven't actually got that much time left now.

The only trouble is, I haven't been in the memory-training mood just lately. I had quite boundless enthusiasm early in the year, and I'm sure it will return (I think possibly it's influenced by the movements of the planets), but it's probably going to be a real struggle to sit down and memorise this weekend, even if I'm not doing anything. I don't think I've got plans, but to be honest I can't remember. I'm not that kind of memory man, as I keep trying to explain to people.

Rain!

So, have we had summer now? Is it going to be cold and dark and wet for the rest of the year? Because I feel short-changed by the weather just lately.

Anyway, if you feel that my blog isn't terribly entertaining at the moment, why not go and read My Milk Toof instead? I think it's a work of genius.

Leg up

I didn't write anything yesterday because my knee was sore. What, you didn't know I type this thing with my freakishly long toes? Well, now you do. Anyway, it's somewhat better now than it was - I took the day off work to give it some more rest, although that did mean letting myself in for a mind-numbingly boring day.

It's not like there's nothing I need to do around the house, like cleaning up the place, or arranging for someone to come and replace my gas meter like they keep sending me letters saying they want to, or sorting out an appointment to give blood seeing as I'm out of USA-visit quarantine now, or arranging to get internet banking set up on my new computer for the BOF account (without which I won't be able to compile my treasurer's report for the AGM in a couple of weeks) or even doing some memory training, but I feel that if you're going to spend the day off work sick, you have some kind of moral obligation to lie around doing nothing all day. And besides, I've got a bad leg so you can't expect me to do anything.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I'll be fit to limp back to work tomorrow, so all will be well.

Laid up

I aggravated my old knee injury last night, by falling out of bed while trying to stagger to the bathroom in a hurry because I was feeling sick. I had been drinking to excess, yes, but I prefer to attribute the nausea and lack of balance to some kind of virus, probably affecting the inner ear. So basically, I've spent today lying on the settee with my left leg propped up on the arm, watching telly and recovering from a virus-related headache I'd developed.

It's the first time for a good few years that I've had any serious problem with my knees, and I'd forgotten how painful and inconvenient it can be. Still, at least I don't have to go to work tomorrow, and I should be limping less by Tuesday.

This has been a cry for sympathy from Zoomy's Thing, a subsidiary of Horseradish Tree Productions. Thanks for listening.

Three days off work

It would be a perfect opportunity to do a full trial run of the world memory championship and really kick-start my training for November. But actually, I'm going to spend the weekend hanging out with family members and doing nothing productive at all. And I don't even care.

I will, however, devote the bank holiday weekend to thinking up something interesting to blog about. Look forward to it!

Behold the amazing memory man!

I like when my job allows me to memorise things and not do any work for a period of time. It doesn't happen very often (which is good, because it would get boring if it did), but today I was roped in to help publicise our department's John O'Groats to Land's End charity walk by memorising all the 72 stages of the journey, complete with dates, distances and nearest Boots stores. See, that's a good way to spend a couple of hours of a work day. Also, I was very impressive and everybody thought I was great.

I'm faster than lightning! Well, very slow lightning, anyway...

I do hate to blow my own trumpet, but I am really quite good at memorising a pack of cards quite quickly. If you doubt it, you could check out this video on Florian's awesome website! Complete with trumpet music!

It really is a lot of fun to watch - I look like I'm in fast-forward riffling through the cards...

Doctor Who and the Giant Squid

While I'm still suffering from a lack of blog-subject-inspiration, I feel like I should record that I also recently watched the Doctor Who serial "The Power of Kroll" for the first time ever, and really liked it. Which is a little strange, since the prevailing opinion among fans seems to be that it's awful. It's actually well-written and entertaining, and the bad special effects don't really get in the way of the excitement too much.

By tomorrow, I'm sure I will have thought of something else to write about other than things I've watched on video.

I can't think of anything to write about

So I'll just mention that I watched Pulp Fiction on video yesterday morning, not for the first time, and wow, that's a great movie. I wish I could write something like that.

Return of the pirate

I dug out my old bandana to cover my head while cycling to Nottingham and back today (I felt like the exercise, and the trains aren't running anyway due to engineering works), and on two separate occasions small children pointed out that I'm a pirate. Personally, I think it makes me look more like a space cowboy gypsy beatnik hippy, but I suppose young people nowadays watch nothing but pirate movies. It's a terrible shame. Still, I do think I look groovy with the bandana and shades and leather waistcoast ensemble I had on today - it's the kind of outfit that will look even better when I'm sixty or so, provided I'm also skinny and ruggedly wrinkled by that point, like some kind of really cool aging rock star.

Busy doing nothing

Yep, there's nothing like a lazy Saturday. Gives one time to refresh important life skills, like how to win at Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Doesn't really give you anything exciting to blog about, though...

Ahhh, the weekend!

What with memorising on Saturday and Sunday last week and then being straight back to work, I've been 'working' for twelve days without a rest. It'll be nice to lie around all weekend doing nothing. Although if I'm in the mood, now would be a good time to launch into Hour Cards and Hour Numbers training in preparation for the world championship. It doesn't count as 'working' if I'm doing it at home...

More media madness

Radio Nottingham tomorrow morning - radio people seem determined not to let me sleep in of a morning, what with all the local breakfast shows wanting me. There must be something about me that goes nicely with cornflakes.

Meanwhile, just check out the photo on this Derby Telegraph article! Heeeeeere's Zoomy!

I'm amazed that they managed to dig up that photo. It was taken at the same time as the infamous scary, lit-from-below picture of me that the Telegraph have been using for the last five years every time they run an article about me, in the meeting room at Parkhouse Recruitment, but this photo has never yet seen the light of day as far as I know. It's certainly different, don't you think?

Medusoid Mycelium

My ever-wonderful friend Jemfy made a brilliant discovery today. Did you know that if you run a Spanish article about me through Babelfish internet translator, it renders my name as "Horseradish tree Pridmore"?

This is a fantastic development. You know how the Beatles called their company Apple because the Japanese word for 'apple' is 'ringo'? Well, from now on you're reading a Horseradish Tree Production. I'm going to work this into pretty much everything I do, as much as possible.

In order to repay the favour, I ran Jemfy's real name through Babelfish in as many languages as possible, and turned her into Badger Waldman in Dutch. Aren't foreign languages great?

Misinformation

Talking with someone at Radio Derby today, who wants to arrange an interview having heard about the weekend's competition:

Him: And you came second, right?
Me: What? No, I won it!
Him: Really? I thought the press release said some fifteen-year-old girl had won it...

Either the powers that be have sent out a really misleading press release (the version on the website is pretty clear about little details like the winner of the competition), or Radio Derby have trouble with reading. Still, I'm going on there tomorrow morning, crack of dawn, just because I can't say no to people over the phone.

There's also some inaccurate information in the Derby Evening Telegraph, and this time it's entirely my fault, I'm afraid. The article says that I won nine out of ten disciplines, which for the split-second I was talking to them I genuinely thought I had. I'd somehow forgotten that I completely failed to record any kind of score in the speed cards, as well as doing as badly as usual in the names and faces. Apologies to Ameel and Eva, and for that matter everyone else who might read the article and think I'm cleverer than I actually am.

Okay, that's the last memory-themed post for a while. Time to find something else to talk about again...

Bad omens

I've just realised that I brought 13 packs of cards to the UK Championships - nine that I optimistically thought I might try to memorise in the 10-minute cards and four for speed cards. That's terribly bad luck. It's like having thirteen people at dinner. If I'd thought of that at the time, I would certainly have lost!

In the news

Ben Pridmore, the goalie for Desborough FC, apparently pulled off a very impressive double save to earn his side a goalless draw with Daventry Town on Thursday night. His fans by now are probably used to the annoyance of finding articles about me when they search Google news, but it's nice to know that the Daventry Express match report has sneaked into the little gaggle of articles reiterating the press releases about the UK Championship. You could also find, if you really wanted to, an article in the Sunday Telegraph which manages to wildly misquote everyone who spoke to the reporter - I'm quite happy to be described as someone whose "spectacular triumphs have yet to deliver him from a bachelor existence in a tiny Nottingham bedsit", but to be portrayed as someone who says memory competitions are not fun, but involve nothing but hours of hard work and practice? For shame. And I didn't forget to tie my shoelaces, I deliberately chose not to buy new ones when they broke, and have for at least six months been walking around with stubs of laces protruding from my only pair of shoes. That's a much more respectable thing to do, isn't it?

The BBC, meanwhile, repeat the rather groovy film of me from a while ago for your viewing pleasure. And there'll be an article in the Derby Evening Telegraph, too - they lived up to their name by calling me this evening, just as I got back from London (I skipped the prizegiving ceremony in order to get back home at a reasonable time and get to work tomorrow - I feel a little guilty about this, but I did already thank the organisers for all their hard work in creating a really great event, and pretty much everybody else had already left anyway, seeing as there was a four-hour gap between the end of the championship and the prizes). Neither newspaper lived up to the 'Telegraph' part of their name, though. They should probably change that.

The prizes, I should point out, were awesome - they always do really stylish trophies at the UK Championship, much better than the boring tin cups you generally get. This year's are irregular-shaped big glass paperweights resembling mountains and glaciers. I really must make an effort to get some trophies for Cambridge next year - a couple of spectators are already wanting to know the details about it, which is forward planning of a kind I don't specialise in.

Finally, for the benefit of the anonymous poster who's been asking the question here and on Florian's blogs of memory events - the World Championship will almost certainly be taking place in a very big conference room in the Strand Palace Hotel, big enough to comfortably fit the seventy-plus competitors they're optimistically expecting. So there's no need to worry about that.

Names and faces

The UK Championships are up and running - if you're not following Florian Dellé's live blogging, then you jolly well should be.

There are 18 competitors, I think, from all around the world, and the number of competitors was enough to force a relocation of the championship from the basement room of Simpsons-in-the-Strand to a conference room in the Strand Palace Hotel across the road. I can't imagine how small the original venue must have been, because the new, bigger alternative has no room to swing a cat. Luckily, the UK Cat-Swinging championships aren't until next week, and memorising numbers doesn't take up quite so much space, but even so, we're quite closely packed together in a little room in the basement.

The Japanese TV crew and a couple of very enthusiastic photographers (who for some reason wanted all the lights turned out except a big spotlight at the back of the room in order to take pictures of all the competitors at their desks - possibly they saw what we all look like and decided that a shadowed effect would be the way to go) added to the crowded feel of the room, but despite the delays all the photography caused, we finished more or less on schedule. Not that it was necessary to do so, because we're not sharing our digs with chess players any more, and can spend the whole day tomorrow memorising at our leisure, without having to hurry.

A lot of the competitors are people I've met once or twice before, and knowing how good I am with putting faces to names and vice versa I was quite happy with myself when I walked into the venue and thought "There's Rick de Jong... no, it's not, it's the one who looks a bit like Rick but isn't... Dave Billington!" and was able to say "Hi Dave" with confidence as if there had never been any doubt. And I was particularly gratified when the first thing he said to me was that at least I knew his name, because Gaby Kappus had greeted him with "Hi, Rick, it's good to see you!"

They don't look all that similar, but there is a definite resemblance. However, my confidence in my name-remembering ability was a little dented when, in front of the Japanese cameras, I introduced Ameel Hoque to them only for him to say "No, I'm not Ameel, I'm Toby Caldwell. I'm new." Kanako from Japan said "But you called him Ameel!", just in case any NHK viewers had missed it and we all had a good laugh at how stupid I am.

Then a bit later, when we went into the competition room, Toby came up to me and said hi, and I laughed "Hi, Toby - see, I remember your name now!" To which he replied "What? I'm Ameel, don't you remember me? Who's Toby?" In my defence, they've both got beards. And hair. And faces. And I think they were both wearing clothes. How do you expect me to know who's who?

Anyway, I might not remember what my friends look like, but I can still remember how to memorise things. This is a competition I should be pretty confident of winning - the world's best aren't here and the next-best memoriser here is Ameel, the world number 44 (well, Dominic O'Brien and Gaby Kappus are here too, but they're arbiting and not competing). And I won the two disciplines we've had results for, words and binaries, and got a passable score in 15-minute numbers, I think. A bad score in names and faces, naturally, but I've given up all hope of doing well at that. Anyway, I'm safely in the lead after two disciplines, with Ameel in second and Florian third.

Also in attendance is Eva Ball, the UK Schools Championship winner and possibly the first British junior ever to compete at a memory competition (unless I've forgotten someone). She protests that she's no good and hasn't done any preparation, but she got the second-best score in words and an entirely acceptable result in binary to lie somewhere comfortably in the top ten overall. We have regular internationals like Rick, Florian, Pierre Berbinau, Tomasz Krasinski, Idriz Zogaj, Dagfinn Hammar and Kranthi Raj, comparatively new internationals like Mattias Ribbing, Marco Lombardo and Håkon By, and a British contingent made up of me, Eva, Ameel, Dave, Toby, Richard Bowdler (who competed for the first and only time in Cambridge 2006, so it's good to see him back - I can now add him to the list of people I've enticed into becoming regular memory competitors by virtue of organising that competition!), Bilal Arshad (new from Cambridge this year) and newcomer Antonio Campo who despite the name is from Wales. A good turnout!

I saw him one day as he stood on the Strand, stopped all of the traffic with a wave of his hand

Here I am in London, all set for a weekend of memorising. Had a fun interview with the Japanese film crew this afternoon, although the Irish radio cancelled on me (possibly something more important than a little national memory competition in another country occurred to them). And tomorrow there's a very brief chat with Radio Shropshire (two to three minutes, in an interview shared with Phil) and possibly also talking to the Sun, but there'll be a minimum of being followed around by cameras this weekend, which will make a pleasant change.

I've even gone to the trouble of finding out which disciplines we're doing on which days - on Sunday morning we seem to have a very unrealistically rushed schedule, so expect stirring tales of memorisers barricading themselves in the competition room to keep out the chess players who want to play there in the afternoon. Anyway, wish me luck, everyone. And then also wish all the other competitors luck, because it wouldn't be fair just to wish good luck for me. I'd be happier if it was one of those competitions where nobody keeps score and everyone is declared the winner, really...

A new approach to preparation

I think it sums up my attitude to the UK Championship this weekend to say that I just realised tonight that I hadn't booked a hotel yet. And also that I felt a bit annoyed today when I remembered that I'm going to this competition and so I won't have a free weekend to practice for the World Championship in November.

I think it's just that it's only two weeks since Hamburg - I'm not used to having competitions so close together. I've done no training at all, except for an Online Memory Challenge on Sunday (in which I got perfectly respectable scores in everything, so possibly I'm worrying about nothing).

I also feel guilty about not having done even the most basic preparation (like, finding out what order the disciplines are in and deciding how many cards/digits/whatevers I'm going to attempt) because it's rather rude to the people who've spent a lot of time and at least a certain amount of money organising the thing if I don't take it seriously. They've also been very enthusiastically sending out press releases, judging by the number of people who've got in touch with me this week asking for interviews. Perhaps there's still time for me to get into match fitness. The competition doesn't start until Saturday morning, after all.

I've got the afternoon off work tomorrow - I was hoping to avoid using up holidays for this one, since I've already taken quite a big chunk of the 25 days that have to last me till the end of March (down to London on Friday night, memorise for two mornings, back up again on Sunday evening, £10 each way because I bought advance tickets, bish bash bosh), but then the Japanese TV people wanted to film me, and Irish radio wanted to talk to me (listen to Today FM from 4:30 tomorrow if you're in range. And if you want to listen to my annoying voice.) so I had to take a half-day. Still, that's pretty efficient for a memory competition. I might even have a few holidays left for just sitting at home doing nothing on a work day! I haven't done that for ages!

Weather report

Flying walruses dominate the skies nowadays. Ever since they started growing wings, it's become increasingly difficult to find a good place to sunbathe without the sun being obscured by great flocks of ugly, blubbery creatures performing loop-the-loops and airborne-scissors-box manoeuvres. Anybody wishing to develop a suntan should therefore head as far away from the coast as possible - walruses like to return to the water occasionally in order to check their email, and so don't normally venture more than a hundred miles from the sea.

Alternatively, for those who have difficulty finding a spot in Britain more than a hundred miles from any coast, holidaymakers could also visit Skegness, where the denizens of Natureland Seal Sanctuary have developed a kind of seaweed-based cannon to shoot down passing wing-ruses. The seals and a few of the sealions have developed a competition among themselves as to who can bring down the most flying creatures, and so there are quite often gaps to be seen in the vast, grey, tusked carpet that normally renders the brightest day as dark as a really dark night. Sunbathers who position themselves carefully and manage not to be hit by a falling seaweed-coated walrus can sometimes get as much as fifty minutes of sun exposure on a good day.

Rather a gloomy prospect, if you'll excuse the pun, but to look on the bright side, if you'll excuse the pun, at least it doesn't rain any more since the earwigs found a way to stop it.

One down, one to go

Well, that's Canada sorted for footage of me. All I really have to say about it is that Josh the director looks spookily like my dad. Or like my dad would have looked if he'd been made of something stretchy and someone had grabbed his head and pulled upwards about six inches. Josh is taller and thinner, is the point I'm trying to make here. But he's got the exact same hair (curly and originally black but unevenly fading to grey and white, bald on top and unkempt back and sides), same moustache and nearly the same sideburns (he says he just had them trimmed yesterday, so possibly they used to be the same ridiculous style as my dad's were). It was quite eerie talking to him.

Here come the Canadians

They're coming to film me tomorrow, at the inconvenient time of 4pm, meaning I have to be in work early if I'm going to get everything done. And then they'll probably be here all night recording a tedious interview that will eventually be cut out of the finished program, if the whole project doesn't get abandoned half-way through. I'm in a grumpy mood, but it's probably too late to tell them to get stuffed now. The Japanese are coming on Friday, but I'm less grumpy with them because they've sent me far fewer emails asking for more information.

Still, in more important news, it's just occurred to me that it's roughly ten years since that fateful day when I saw a big black hat in a shop in Sheffield and thought to myself "I might look good in a big black hat, and it will certainly stop people noticing that I'm starting to go bald. What the heck, I think I'll buy it." If not for that moment, I would be known today as 'the one without the hat'.

Never be without a Beano

I'm feeling extremely accomplished, because I've spent the evening cleaning my living room. Some people, I realise, do this every day, or every week at least, and it takes them about five minutes, but I prefer to leave it at least a year between cleans. But we'd got to the point where I literally couldn't see the floor under all the rubbish, and the giant clumps of dust were starting to develop sentience, so I decided it was about time. And, two full bin bags of rubbish and five or six giant piles of stuff I want to keep having been moved to other rooms, I'm pleased to say I'm now sitting in a nice, clean, tidy room! I feel like I deserve a reward of some kind.

Also today, I came across someone selling old books and comics in Beeston town centre, so I picked up a few old Beanos and other bits and pieces. "And the Viz is for you, right?" the man who sold me them laughed, and I agreed that it was, not feeling like getting into the whole discussion that they were all for me - I don't care what the intended age group of my comics is.

There are some good ones in there, too - the one from January 1986 with a competition to win a Raleigh Vektar bike, the coolest bike ever made. I entered that competition, but I didn't win. John Gray had a Vektar, which was typical of him - he was rich beyond the dreams of the average nine-year-old Clinton Park School pupil and his mum bought him anything he wanted - but I never did get one. Life is unfair.

Funnily enough, I also picked up the Beano from exactly 25 years ago, August 11th 1984, which seems like a good opportunity to compare it with this week's issue and see if it really isn't as good as it used to be. I'll do a full review of both, when I get a chance! There's something for you all to look forward to.

Sporting traditions

Live league football on the BBC (admittedly not the games involving the good teams, but it's a start) and England failing dismally in the cricket - I like it when things go back to the way they're supposed to be. Also, if only the selectors had listened to me and not kept on recalling Ian Bell, we probably wouldn't be in this mess, so they've only got themselves to blame.

Other mind sports

While I was in Hamburg, people kept emailing me with news about other mental competition fun. For example, the schedule for the 13th Mind Sports Olympiad has rather belatedly been published. It's happening in the same place as last year, the Royal Horticultural Halls, from August 21st - 31st. I won't be going this year, but if you happen to be in the area, do go along and let me know what it's like.

I also probably won't be going to the World Othello Championship in Gent, Belgium, from November 4th - 7th, but only because you have to qualify for it, and the chances of me managing that are very slim. Indeed, it would require me to remember when and where the Nationals are this year (it's some time in September, I think, somewhere down south), as well as remember how to play the game. I haven't played at all for months...

The Top Ten Club

You know, it just occurred to me at lunchtime TODAY that Hamburg is where the Beatles played in their younger days. That thought never crossed my mind before, during or after my own trip to Hamburg last week. I could have gone on a tour. Not to mention all the Beatles-themed blog titles I could have used! Ah, wasted opportunities, and all because of my bad memory. Still, at least I get to use a very appropriate title for a blog about the world rankings...

The movers and shakers in the top ten of international memory after Hamburg are Simon, who moves up to third place, and Boris, who's now number eight. The world's coolest people are now as follows:

1 Me
2 Gunther
3 Simon
4 Clemens
5 Hannes
6 Astrid
7 Cornelia
8 Boris
9 Joachim
10 Andi

Check out that enormous gang of Germans (plus a couple of hopefully-temporarily retired Austrians) chasing me! Poor Andi's nearly followed Dominic out of the top ten - maybe that will motivate him to really try to win the world championship again this year, but we really do need more British people to help me out here.

But still, I can't believe I didn't think about the Beatles connection. I had the whole day to myself in Hamburg on Sunday, in order to get the cheapest flights, and since all the shops in Germany are closed on Sundays (what is this, the time of Charlemagne?) I had to spend it hanging around the Hauptbahnhof shopping centre, touring the various ancient and beautiful buildings (I'll admit that the Rathaus is absolutely awesome), listening to a lot of really good street musicians (especially one particularly talented xylophonist) and watching the ladybirds. Hamburg is absolutely full of ladybirds. In my quest to improve my German, one word at a time, I just looked up 'ladybird' and found that it's 'Marienkäfer'. Which I did actually know at one point. Also, the word is neuter and not feminine like I would have expected.

As well as having shops that were open on Sunday, the train station also had handy left-luggage lockers, which was a good thing because I didn't fancy carrying my bag around with me all day. As I always do at these things, I'd crammed my little rucksack to its maximum capacity with clothes, books, cards, timers and so on on the way out, not considering that I might come home with a big trophy, a Nintendo DS and other goodies. I had to fit everything I could into the bag and force everything left over (about a dozen packs of cards, the DS (removed from its box), instructions and games) into the pockets of my jacket in order to get onto the plane without paying for an extra bag.

I haven't mentioned my jacket yet, have I? I was wearing a rather groovy black and white jacket that I bought in a charity shop about ten years ago, never wore and recently rediscovered among my old clothes. So I've been wearing it for the last couple of weeks to see if it looks cool, before deciding whether or not to give it to another charity shop and let someone else leave it in their wardrobe for ten years. But actually, I think it does look cool, and Tony Buzan agreed. And Tony does have quite genuinely the greatest taste in clothes of anybody I know, so I think I'm going to keep wearing the jacket. Even though it's a little bit too small for me and it's too hot when the weather's nice.

Speaking of Tony, and speaking of speaking, his speech at the closing ceremony was shorter and used less needlessly complicated words and ideas than at the opening. I'm sure the members of the audience who don't speak perfect English were grateful. Regular memory-competition attendees will be interested to know that he informed us all that in 1994, scientists said that nobody would ever be able to remember a 30-digit spoken number. He also mentioned a few things of interest to memorisers (actually, he told me these things the day before and asked me not to tell anyone or blog about it, but since he then repeated everything so publicly, I assume I'm not under any obligation to keep it secret any more...)

Firstly, he said that the world championship moving from Bahrain was because the sponsor had had financial difficulties - and then added as an afterthought that there had been riots in Bahrain too, which came a bit closer to the official explanation published on the world championship website.

Secondly, he said at great length that the Chinese are very keen to become the top memory-country in the world, and also very keen to host the world championship in 2010. Indeed, they're shortly flying Tony and Ray Keene out to China for a week to "inspect the site". It's sounding like we might really be having a WMC in China somewhere in the near future (although we've been hearing that for five years at least, without it actually happening yet). I think it might be fun, it's only fair to circulate the competition around the world now that it's such an international thing. And provided it's organised by individuals who happen to be Chinese, and that Tony's suggestion that the Chinese government is eager to be heavily involved is just the usual exaggerations, I won't have to boycott the championship for political reasons. That would really be annoying.

Okay, I'm fairly sure that's everything I've got to say about the German Memory Championship 2009. More interesting subjects (or at any rate slightly different subjects, like the World Othello Championship and the Mind Sports Olympiad) will resume tomorrow.

I actually didn't eat a single hamburger while I was there

Well, people have suggested things I could mention about my trip to Hamburg, and my brain has thrown out a few more bits and pieces I'd forgotten about, so here goes with the further German Memory Championship adventures of Zoomy!

I mentioned the scores being read out yesterday, but what I didn't mention is that all the score announcements came with a really groovy and hi-tech animated powerpoint display! It was extremely cool, and a real step up from anything we've seen before at a memory championship. I'd congratulate the person who created and ran it, if only I knew who it was. There was a young man who worked the computer who I never got a chance to say hello to, and I assume he was responsible. I'll make sure to thank him at the next competition, before I get caught up in all the memorising...

Also super-hi-tech and more so than any competition we've had before was Florian Dellé's live blogging of the competition (while he was taking part in it! He got some great scores considering he finished his recall quickly enough to run around with a camera filming the people who were still busy remembering), assisted by Dai Griffiths. You can read all about it here, as well as his review complete with scores of all the disciplines. You can even click on the scores to sort them by overall ranking, individual discipline scores, names, anything you want! What an age we live in.

Dai mentioned that I was doing my weird rolling-pupils-into-head-leaving-scary-white-eyeballs thing again. I don't know if Dai had some kind of video link or if he was just guessing, back in Wales, but I really have no idea I'm doing that. As far as I'm aware, I've got my eyes closed while I'm recalling...

Let's talk about the competition room some more, too - it was spacious and pleasant, there was ample supply of water (albeit the fizzy kind that you always get in Germany - ask for still water and they'll look at you like you're some kind of lunatic) and the only real drawback was that it started to smell a bit funky by the end of the championship. Memorising things is sweaty work, and we had to keep the windows closed a lot of the time because of the noise of trains outside. Still, you got used to it quickly enough.

Boris raised an interesting point in an email today - is the room in Simpson's-on-the-Strand big enough for the world championships? At least twenty Germans have said they'd come, I would hope there'll be up to a dozen British competitors, hopefully a whole load of Chinese and other assorted foreigners. Last time the world championship was held there, back in 2002, there were only 24 competitors, and as I recall there wasn't all that much empty space. Last year at the UK championship, there were 22 and we were fairly close together. I'm not sure if we really could fit twice as many people into that room. We'll just have to see, I suppose. Maybe we can spread out into the hallway.

But back to Germany, the first event of the second day was Historic Dates, and for the first time in German Championship history they provided English translations! It's official, memory championships are now an international sport! What's more, Gaby was kind enough to give all her announcements in German and English, for the benefit of me and the one other non-German competitor Rick de Jong. I very much appreciated it, because I'll admit I had a lot of difficulty following the discussion about the 30-minute cards.

Because some packs weren't shuffled, some people got worse scores than they otherwise might have, whereas other people (like me and Simon) were unaffected. It was suggested that for the purposes of the German Championship, the 30-minute cards shouldn't be counted. It eventually was decided that it would count after all, because otherwise the scores would have changed. I might have missed something in Klaus's logic there, though. Anyway, I wasn't all that interested - I tend to ignore the inevitable quibbles about the rules and scoring when I get involved in a competition and just agree with whoever asks me to agree with them if they try to drag me into an argument.

Where was I? Historic dates! It didn't go quite as swimmingly for me as it usually does, I only got through about 100 of the 120 dates-and-event-descriptions by the end of the five minutes, when I normally get up to about 110 or even more. Hannes, apparently, got right to the end with a minute or so to spare - I don't know how he does it, I thought I was the quickest memoriser in town. But, for the first time in quite a long while, I ended up with a higher score than him - 81 compared to 78!

That left me nearly 900 points in the lead after four disciplines, ahead of Hannes and Simon neck-and-neck in second, with Cornelia just behind them. Cornelia actually had a bit of a quiet competition by her standards, coming up with lots of good results, but nothing absolutely spectacular. I'm sure she'll be back for more next time - with the WMC being in London rather than Bahrain, she'll probably be there this year, too.

But back to the scores, by lunchtime, when we'd heard the results from the first four disciplines, people were starting to talk as if I'd already won, much to my annoyance. I knew that I hadn't got very good scores in the disciplines that followed, you see.

Spoken numbers (in German, but that's not too big a problem for me), was frustrating. You only score up to your first mistake in this one (with the best score from three attempts counting) and I kept making little mistakes. I ended up with a score of 50, while Simon ended up with a very cool 135 and Boris started out a succession of great results in his best disciplines with a 100.

Abstract images, meanwhile, I was expecting something good. After years of moaning that it's a stupid discipline that should be got rid of, and hoping somebody will listen to me and scrap it, I've recently started seriously training for it. My argument that the only way to do well in it is by coding the background patterns, which turns it into another numbers-style discipline, took a bit of a blow when Boris mentioned that he doesn't do that, and he won the event comfortably (as he always does in the absence of Gunther). But my system and training paid off, and I ended up with a perfect 225. By the world championship, I'm aiming to get 300. And then I'll insist even more strongly that they scrap the stupid event once and for all!

Names and faces, on the other hand, I'm still resigned to never being any good at. Especially when the names are all German, although that's not much of an excuse. Suffice to say that I got a pretty bad score, while Boris broke the world record (held for many years by Clemens Mayer), while Simon and Hannes continued to gain ground steadily on me.

The real disaster for me, though, was speed numbers. Two trials to memorise as much as possible in five minutes, with the best score counting, and I started as always by attempting a 'safe' 360, only to have little gaps in my recall here and there and end up with a score of 234. There was a time when that would be one of the top scores, and anything over 300 was practically unhead-of, but those days are long-gone. I knew I'd have to do better in the second attempt, and tried for 400, only to end up with a miserable 240 (and I was lucky to get that - my recall was very patchy and I had a lot of gaps to fill in with best-guesses that I wasn't entirely certain about). It was tiredness, I think - I'm still not in top competition fitness, and two solid days of memorising drains my brain power. Hannes won comfortably with 362, and I was just glad he didn't get more than that. But Simon's 296 was enough to push him fractionally into the overall lead ahead of me, and this is the point where I really started to feel that everything was slipping away from me.

And it certainly didn't get any better with the penultimate discipline, random words. I was trying for a safe-ish score of 180 or so, but my memorising just wasn't quite clear enough, and this is a discipline that can really punish a few little gaps in the memory. I don't practice words enough, and I'm going to have to knuckle down on that in future. Long story short, I ended up with a miserable score of 100, Boris broke another world record with 280, Simon had 229 and Johannes 222.

The competition was running behind schedule (as memory competitions always, without exception, do) and Klaus suggested that we start the speed cards before the scores of the random words were announced. Everybody insisted that we stick with tradition and know exactly what the scores were before we got started - it really is important, because there are complicated calculations to be made about exactly what times to attempt in everybody's favourite final discipline. So there was a lot of time for me to pace around like a caged tiger, fretting that I was going to lose the competition that I'd been winning so comfortably half-way through. When we finally got the confirmed scores, they looked like this:

Simon 7128.3
Hannes 6635.8
Me 6608.6
Boris 6218.3
Cornelia 5987.2

With the rest of the chasing pack, headed by Dennis, too far behind to catch up. But with a lead of 520 points, Simon was going to be next to impossible for me to catch. I was racked with indecision - Florian asked me if I was going to go for a fast time or a safe slow one, so he'd know whether to set up a camera to film me or not, and I replied (about a minute before we had to start memorising) "I don't know!"

I had three choices - a safe 1-minute pack in the first trial to at least guarantee 3rd place, probably, followed by an attempt at a fast one; a sort of semi-fast one of 30 seconds or so, which is something I've experimented with but I'm still not confident that it's more reliable than just going as fast as I can; or just going as fast as I can and really throwing down the gauntlet to Simon and the others.

Actually, as we started to memorise, I was still planning on option 2, and I didn't make an effort to go particularly fast. But the images slotted into place very quickly and easily, I sped up, and I stopped the clock at 24.97 seconds in the end.

I think I might have stopped the clock a bit noisily, so I do apologise for that - Jürgen had asked that people not do that, just before the memorising started, but it's hard to remember etiquette when the adrenaline starts flowing.

Thinking through the journey while waiting for the five minutes' memorisation time to be over, I was extremely surprised to realise that I had remembered it all very well. I only had a few gaps to fill in, and when I came to put together the unshuffled pack in the recall time, I was able to fill in all the gaps with minimal difficulty. The only thing I was a little worried about was the exact order of a couple of sequences of images - I was about 90% confident that they were right, but I much prefer to be 100%. It's better for my blood pressure.

I insisted on someone checking my results straight away, despite people flapping around with cameras and saying wait, wait, just a moment. And I got extremely excited when it was eventually confirmed that I really had broken the world record, and bellowed "YES!" at top volume, scaring everybody else in the room (again, apologies. It's exciting.)

After a certain amount of skipping around the room, high-fiving everybody and bowing to the applause, I went to see what everybody else had done. Simon had done a super-extra-safe 1 minute 43 seconds or thereabouts, Hannes had had mistakes in his recall. You get 1200 championship points for a 25-second pack (not something that had ever happened before, of course), but that still didn't leave me in a safe position. Simon needed a time of what I estimated at 50 seconds or so in the second trial to win the championship (although now that I sit down and think about it more clearly, it was actually more like 44 seconds). And Simon is of course the other person who's done a pack in under 30 seconds in competition before now. My only consolation is that he's only done it once, and he just barely got the recall done in time, and we were now at the end of a much longer and more exciting competition with infinitely more pressure on him. But since it's terrible sportsmanship to wish failure on someone else, I put all thoughts of that out of my mind and tried to do an even faster time in trial 2.

That was a complete and total disaster - my mind was still buzzing too much and I didn't come anywhere near remembering it properly. I even had some trouble passing the cards between my fingers, and even though I was trying to go as fast as possible, I only stopped the clock at 23.33. But never mind, one world record is enough for me, especially if it's a speed cards one.

Simon, in the end, just did a time of 65 seconds, making sure of winning the German championship and coming second in the German Memo Open, while Hannes tried for a fast time but didn't get it right. Boris's 74.78 seconds rounded off a really good championship for him, but was just barely not quite enough to catch Hannes in the final rankings. Cornelia was fifth, then there was a big gap down to Dennis and Jürgen, then an excellent eighth place for another newcomer Fabian Saal, then Simone Nicklas and Florian rounding out the top ten (he's also got my speed cards performance on film - look out for it on the memory-sports.com website!)

So then we all scurried over to the main building lecture room for the prizegiving ceremony and memory-show (there's always a big show at the German championship in the evening - it starred Ramon Campayo breaking a speed-memory record, and the really absolutely awesome Jens der Denker, who I've seen before but is still quite sensational). Every competitor in the adult, junior and kids competitions (actually, we don't seem to be saying 'kids' any more, it's Junior Group II) came up on stage one at a time to get a certificate, round of applause, and photo. For the record, Dorothea and Konstantin won the Junior I and Junior II competitions, as expected, but they were up against some tough opposition. If only we could get young people in Britain to take some kind of interest in memory sports too.

There were, as is also always the case at the German championships, lots of trophies too. Trophies for first, second and third in each championship (Junior I, Junior II, German Adults and German Memo Open) AND big trophies for the winner of each one (except the Memo Open, which I don't have a problem with at all, really). So Simon ended up with three trophies to take home - 2nd place in the GMO, 1st place in the DGM, and the gigantic German Championship trophy. I think they gave the kids' trophies to the adults and vice versa, but I'm sure it got sorted out in the end.

Fabian, who's about nine feet tall, caused some amusement trying to pose for his photo without obscuring the prizegivers (Klaus, Tony and Silja Nintendo), and there were plenty of laughs as usual when the winners of each championship were handed, one by one, far more prizes than they could possibly carry. Nintendo were very generous - I've got a DS! I'll have to buy an adaptor so I can plug the German plug into my English sockets, but still, a DS! Groovy! And two brain-training games, in German! I might have to buy some more games instead. And I pocketed €700, which equates to £557.97, thanks to the weak pound and strong euro. I like the point-nine-seven theme I've got going here too.

So that's the German Championship, and woohoo, I won! But I was lucky to win. I'm really not going to win the world championship unless I improve on that performance - the days are gone when I could accept bad scores in a few disciplines and rely on good results in the others to carry me through. I need to improve my all-round performance, or the likes of Simon, Hannes, Gunther, Cornelia, Boris, Dennis and even a few non-Germans will eat me alive in London in November.

Still, that makes six consecutive memory championships I've entered and won - one short of Clemens's record. It really would be nice to break that record by winning the UK and World championships (assuming I don't go to Sweden or France, if the latter is even still happening - I haven't heard anything about it for ages, and I'm still not sure whether I can manage a trip to Sweden or not). But then, Simon was the one to end Clemens's run, which might be a bad omen considering how close he came to beating me this time.

However, I promise that as and when I do end up losing a memory competition again, I won't 'do a Clemens' and disappear forever! I'm looking forward to the days when I'm not the favourite for every championship I enter - it's a lot more fun to be the underdog.

There aren't enough hamburger-puns

Plenty of hamburger-buns, but not hamburger-puns. I'll just have to use non-Hamburg-themed blog titles in future. Anyway, when I left off my last blog, we were just about to start the competition. Everybody had changed into their official competition T-shirts (really cool ones, too, with German-flag collars and sleeve-ends) and found their way to the competition room (spacious and quiet, whenever there wasn't a train coming in to the station next door) and sat down to kick off the event with 30-minute numbers.

The German championship is uniquely arduous in having the three 30-minute disciplines all in a row, from 2pm until 8pm at night. It's seriously draining. But the first one, at least, went okay. I had experimented with attempting seven journeys' worth of numbers, 1638 digits, but without much success. So I just went for six journeys, 1404 (plus an extra nine for good luck when I had a few seconds left at the end), and seemed to remember most of it okay.

Gaby Kappus, who I don't think I've mentioned yet, was sharing the master-of-ceremonies role with Klaus and also acting as 'ombudsman', checking competitors' scores if they didn't believe them. Actually, all the scoring seemed to be done extremely well, by a team of arbiters who clearly knew what they were doing. I should really have found out their names and/or thanked them, but I never remember to do that until it's too late. I get so wrapped up in memorising things, you see.

However, it takes time to mark all those papers, so we set off onto discipline two, 30-minute cards, without knowing how the first one had gone. I was attempting 18 packs here, more than anyone else, and I can normally do that many and get the recall more or less okay. But this time round, I really struggled with the recall, having to cross things out and start again on three different packs. I ran out of recall time and so I knew I'd got 15 at most, even if I hadn't made any silly mistakes along the way.

There were some problems with the cards, apparently some of them weren't shuffled properly. This kind of thing does happen occasionally, however careful the organisers are - I always bring my own pre-shuffled cards with me, ever since the same thing happened to me at the world championships in 2005. That way even if nobody remembers to shuffle the cards, I won't notice. I suppose I could also try memorising my cards in advance and just hoping someone forgets to shuffle them, but I think that sounds like more hassle than just winning fair and square.

Anyway, Tony then read out the results of the 30-minute cards (or the Zahlenmarathon, as they call it over there - all the events have cool German names) in reverse order. I'd got 1193, which would have been a new world record if not for the fact that Hannes got 1264. Drat it, he did the same thing to me in the historic dates at the world championship last year, too. Still, that was a pretty good start to the competition. One more marathon before the end of the day - binary digits, at which I'm generally better than anyone else. But what with the long day of long-distance memorising, I was never going to break any records there. Still, it all went fairly well, and I went back to the hotel pretty satisfied with the first day's competition.

As we found out the next day, I'd got 14 packs right in the cards and 3610 in the binary - not world record standard, but enough to give me about 700 points lead ahead of a closely-packed chasing group of Simon, Hannes and Cornelia.

You know, that account has practically put me to sleep, I don't know why I'm sharing it with the world as if you'd be interested. I'll continue tomorrow, if I can think of a way to make it more interesting...

A few more hamburgery morsels

I forgot to mention that after the press conference I did a quick interview with people who I think were from the local TV news, in which I think I explained the systems we used and asserted that anybody can do it. Although since the conversation was conducted in German, quite frankly I could have been talking about octopuses juggling goldfish for all I know. The interviewer was very nice, but she did cut short the list of questions she'd said she was going to ask me, and I doubt that my incoherent stumbling responses ended up making it onto the telly.

I also forgot to give credit or even a namecheck to Frank Miltner, who's another of those people who does all the work of running the German championships and doesn't ever seem to get a mention in ungrateful competitors' blogs. He compered the opening ceremony and at one point asked me a question in English that I still failed to understand. Possibly it's all languages that I have a problem with, not just German.

Hamburglar

I'm home again from Hamburg - actually, I got in at about one o'clock in the morning after a late-night flight, but I'd sensibly booked a day's holiday for today, so I get to catch up on my sleep and blogging rather than going to work. And wow, that was a fantastic German Memory Championship! I'll blog it in installments, just to keep the suspense going and also because I'm much too tired to write up the whole thing today.

I flew in around lunchtime on Thursday (with FlyBe, who I've never used before but are cheap and perfectly nice, so I'll probably use them again) and found that finding the venue and my hotel was extremely easy - 25 minutes on the S-Bahn takes you from the airport to a train station right next to the Hamburg University buildings where the competition was held, while right next to the station on the other side was the Radisson Blu hotel (formerly known as the Radisson Sas - what with SAS Furniture in Beeston closing down and now this hotel chain changing its name, it's been a bad time for SAS enthusiasts just lately) where most of the competitors were staying. It's possible that I might still have managed to get lost, but as I got off the train I ran into a whole mob of memorisers who pointed me in the right direction.

The Radisson hotel will be very nice when it's finished, probably. At the moment, it looks from the outside like they still need to finish adding walls, roofs and other such essentials, while on the inside there are some classy and shiny new bits and a lot of bare boards and unfinished sections. And also, from eight in the morning until eight at night, a lot of loud hammering and drilling noises all day long, for which half-price meals in the hotel restaurant are supposed to compensate.

My room was very nice, with lots of pillows, international TV channels, comfortable bed and all the bits and pieces that you expect in the good hotels. It also, weirdly, has a window between the bedroom and bathroom, so if you really want to you can sit on the bed and watch someone else in the shower or on the toilet. There's a venetian blind on the bedroom side of the window, but even so, I don't know why they thought a window was necessary in the first place. Anyway, I didn't stay long in the room, both because of the deafening construction work and because I wanted to see some of the city before spending two solid days remembering stuff.

My conversation with the receptionist had made it pretty clear that my ability to understand German had deteriorated in the couple of years since I was last there, but you don't need to speak the language to use the super-user-friendly and efficient train ticket machines or the trains themselves, so I went down to the Hauptbahnhof, assuming that was the best way to find the city centre. And indeed it is, unless you leave the station by the south exit, in which case it's an experience more comparable to getting a train to King's Cross and wandering out into the streets to see the sights of London. But by a strategy of walking around and turning the other way whenever the word 'Erotik!' loomed in front of me in blue neon, I eventually found my way back to the train station, out the other side and into the proper shopping area. Which is really nice, and I'd recommend it to anyone.

A little bit of sightseeing later, it was back to the hotel for a half-price dinner with a gathering of German Gedächtnissportlers which confirmed that, yes, I definitely can't understand even the most simple conversation in German any more. Resolution for next year - go on a refresher course and improve my language skills. It's so embarrassing when I go over there and everybody effortlessly switches to talking in fluent English whenever I'm nearby. And then bedtime, in preparation for the excitement to come.


The competition didn't start until 2pm on Friday, with a press conference/opening ceremony at 11:30, but since the building works prevented me from having a lie-in, I went back into the city to get some rubber bands to hold my packs of cards together (the cardboard boxes are getting rather old and falling to pieces, and I'd hate to lose a stray card somewhere along the way as they travel around the world) before heading out to the university. Rather than having breakfast at the hotel, I decided to get the event off to a traditional start and go to McDonald's. I really am eating more healthily nowadays, but you can't beat junk food for a memory competition.

And so began the thirteenth German Memory Championship, the first one held in the north of Germany (my knowledge of German culture is sadly lacking, so I have no idea what kind of social or political significance this has, but everybody else felt that it was a point worth making) and brilliantly organised, as always, by Klaus Kolb and his team. As usual, there was a great sponsor, Nintendo, a very professional look to the whole event and lots of media people scurrying around. The press conference was held in a very stylish lecture room, watched from the walls by photos of eminent professors including Agathe Lasch (1879-1942), the first female linguistics professor in Germany, who wore a monocle and looked very cool.

The field of competitors was even stronger than is usual for the German championships - the publicity booklet handily was able to list all the favourites by their current titles: German Champion 2008 Johannes Mallow, South German Champion 2009 Simon Reinhard, North German Champion 2009 Boris Konrad, Vice-World-Champion 2008 Gunther Karsten and Women's German Champion or German Championship Runner-Up 2006-2008 Cornelia Beddies [I don't like the idea of having women's titles in a sport where men and women compete on equal terms in the same events, and I was pleased to see that there was a minimum of mentions of it this year]. Oh, and also that foreigner who won the world championship. There were also a whole lot of other competitors, old and new, most prominent among them probably Dennis Müller in his first really big competition but having claimed some very impressive results in training and probably a star of the future. Plus the usual mob of juniors as well - if only we could get the same kind of thing going in Britain, maybe we'd have somewhere close to the same number of good adult memorisers as the Germans have...

Hannes and Cornelia got to sit up on the stage and do quick memory demonstrations at the press conference, joined by Klaus, Tony Buzan and the Nintendo representative, whose name started with S and had a J in it somewhere, I think. I'm bad with names, have I ever mentioned that? Tony gave a very lengthy speech, in English, informing us that the world's greatest thinkers (Tony and his friends) had a meeting in Kuala Lumpur last month at which they proclaimed that it is no longer the age of information, but the age of intelligence (in the same way that it was once the age of agriculture, or the age of industry). This made the 2009 German Championship particularly special because it was officially the first memory championship of the age of intelligence. How this differed from the announcement a few years ago that it's now the millennium of the mind, I'm not sure, but it got a round of applause. During the course of the speech, Tony asked his young, German-speaking, audience to split into groups of three and discuss among themselves questions like "What is it more important to manage than to manage knowledge?" and asserted that "The world is in the trouble it's in because we're thinking informationally".

But I shouldn't be nasty about Tony's speech, since a) everybody else seemed to genuinely appreciate it (although the Nintendo woman looked downright baffled) so clearly I'm just being a miserable old cynic, and b) Tony later told me I'm looking really great and asked if I've been exercising. I think I really do look quite a bit less obese than I did at the world championships last year, so I was very flattered. And anyway, who am I to criticise someone who's unquestionably one of the world's great speakers - he went on for at least fifteen minutes, without pause or reference to any notes, and I'm sure he could have carried on all day without repeating himself if he'd wanted to.

The shorter speeches from Klaus and Madam Nintendo, as far as I could understand them, were more along the lines that memory and learning are not only good for you but can also be a lot of fun. There were Wiis and DSs set up in the hall outside, demonstrating all the cool brainy games now available. Gunther made a quick announcement that he wasn't going to be competing this year after all, apparently because he just wasn't prepared well enough for it, although he did say later that he'd be back for the world championship. He's growing his hair long and was unshaven - I think he's going a bit rock-n-roll in his old age.

Then it was time for a free lunch in the university cafeteria down the road, and on with the real business of memory. Even without Gunther, this was going to be the strongest competition we've had for a long time; for one thing it would answer the question everyone's been wondering (or maybe it was just me) - who's the best nowadays out of Simon and Hannes? Simon had a year away from memory competitions, during which Hannes improved himself up to similar world-beating levels, and the two of them were hot favourites for the German championship. I knew that I'd need to be at my best to win the event, and I wasn't sure whether I'd been quite as assiduous with the training as I should have been.

As always, the adult competition was confusingly split into two different events - the German Memo Open, listing everybody's scores, and the Deutsche Gedächtnis Meisterschaft, for German competitors only. This makes the statistics website seem to say that Gunther's won twice as many championships as he actually has, but for the purposes of this blog, I'm just going to talk about the GMO. By contrast, the UK championship has trophies for the best three British competitors and one for the best foreigner, but only lists the results as one competition.

Tune in tomorrow to hear what actually happened at the championship!

Cheap trip

I've got rather more euros than I thought I had - about 100 of the things, if you count the 20-euro note with quite a big chunk ripped out of it that I doubt I'll have the nerve to try to spend. Incidentally, have you ever noticed that 100-fils coins from Bahrain look quite a lot like 1-euro coins? It can be confusing if you're a globetrotter like me. Perhaps I'll try to pass off those fils as euros, seeing as I don't seem likely to be going back to Bahrain now. But what can I do with those Brazilian reais I brought back with me even though you can't change them outside Brazil on the grounds that I'd probably be going back there some day?

Sorry, I'm just showing off about all the places I've been. I'll stop now.

I've also got dollars, you know.

Last day

Woo, just one more day of work before I jet off to Hamburg for a weekend of intensive memorisation! I'm feeling less and less like I'm properly prepared, which is annoying. I'm still quite hopeful of winning, but it's quite possible that the whole competition might turn out to be a horrible disaster instead. We'll just have to see what happens - the best way to guarantee success is not to think about it and just have fun, or at least that's the way it always works for me.

Hitting the heights

Well, I take it nobody wants a fun-filled family day out at the Heights of Abraham, then. (Or possibly you just need to read my blog from last Friday, but I can't believe anybody would fail to read my blog every single day). I'll just have to go along there myself and shanghai the first one adult and two children I meet along the way, because if people don't use free tickets to their maximum capacity, the capitalists will win!

Foreign films

I've got Canadian and Japanese TV filming me in August, just before (but apparently not at) the UK championship. That's two separate TV companies, not a Canadio-Japanese co-production like one of those 1980s cartoons animated in Japan and dubbed by Canadian voice-actors. Although they should totally make one of those about me. No, this is the boring kind of documentary that all of my devoted fans just can't get enough of. Especially if I change my mind and tell them I don't want to be filmed after all. I don't actually like making documentaries, after all. I should put my foot down some time and say that I think we've done enough of them and it's getting a bit old now...

At last the truth can be revealed

"Zoomy's thing" has in fact been ghost-written for the past two and a half years by a team of ghost-writers employed by the government, under the supervision of editor-in-chief Emma Bunton Out Of The Spice Girls, who's actually quite a lot cleverer than most people think. It has been important for reasons involving national security to keep up the illusion that Zoomy himself still maintains a daily blog, hence the deception. In fact, it still is vitally important to the security of the nation and the existence of Zoomy himself that this deception not be revealed, but unfortunately there was a typographical error in the latest edition of the ghost-writers' secret instructions, issued today, and now they start with "Do under any circumstances reveal in the blog that Zoomy is in outer space and not at home writing his inane nightly drivel..." so the writers have had no choice in the matter.

Zoomy's occasional appearances on television were all pre-recorded in early 2007, and the results of all memory competitions to which they refer were decided in advance by a committee of government and WMSC officials - Zoomy has been represented by actors (the identical triplets Steve, Dean and Other Steve Bradshaw) at all competitions and the results manipulated by arbiters to conceal the fact that "Zoomy" can't actually memorise anything. At othello competitions he is played by Joel Blackmur in an ingenious disguise made from coat-hangers and gravy. At parties and social occasions, a crude robot is used.

Zoomy's space mission is top-secret and highly classified, but it involves a giant magnet in Bridlington which was built by accident and can't be got rid of due to a refuse collectors' strike, which attacts alien spacecraft from the farthest reaches of the galaxy and have to be continually repelled by Britain's own space program. Since this space fleet consists of one spaceship, and since this was built in the nineteen-fifties and requires course calculations to be done with pencil, paper and a book of log tables, and since all log tables were thrown on a big fire when scientific calculators were invented in 1983, the only person who can fly the ship is someone with a really good memory for numbers.

If any aliens read this blog entry and its revelation that Zoomy is currently taking a week off on one of the least pleasant moons of Jupiter, they'll immediately send their most magnetic spacecraft out on a beeline to Bridlington, take over the country and eat all the ice cream. So now we're for it.

Heights of absurdity

Hooray! I've won a prize in a raffle! A family day out at the Heights Of Abraham!

It does look like a fun kind of place, judging by the website (although the writers of it don't know how to use apostrophes), but all in all I think I'd still prefer to stay at home and watch telly. Besides, it would be embarrassing to ask someone to lend me their wife and kids for the day, even if I promised not to damage them. So, does anybody out there want this golden ticket? Free for the first person who asks!

Also, boo to the blood donor people. You can't give blood for 28 days after you return from the USA (because they're all swimming with West Nile Virus over there, apparently), which means I'll miss the days the donor van comes to work, and have to go somewhere else and get out of sync with the donor van's visits and be dreadfully inconvenienced.

I wonder if they sell hamburgers in Hamburg

I need to spend this coming weekend doing tedious things like shuffling and labelling the cards I'm going to memorise in Hamburg, printing out a map of the hotel and competition location so I don't get lost, digging through the drawer where I put foreign money to see if I've got any euros, getting new batteries for my speed cards timers, making sure my lucky t-shirt is clean and that I know where it is, writing a list of the important things I need to take with me and will forget otherwise (earplugs, hat, stopwatch, toothbrush etc) and so on. But since I won't be doing any memorising (too close to the event), I'll have plenty of free time to hang around doing nothing, too. Perhaps I'll write a book. Or reply to all those people who want to interview me just lately.

Thanks for the questions!

It's always nice to know that some people are still reading this thing, and I do apologise to anybody I narked or saddened. But hey, now I've got something to write about tonight, so all is well with the world again. First question...

Tell us more about your trip Stateside!!

Well, that's more of a command than a question, but that's okay. I like having instructions shouted at me occasionally, it removes the need to think for myself. Anyway, apart from the lengthy flight delays, my visit to Pittsburgh was just fantastic. I got to meet up with quite a lot of people I only previously knew over the internet (among them, if they're reading this, Max and Logan, who I should say hello to - and assert that although comics fans won't believe me, Logan is Canadian and that's his real name) and have a lot of cartoon-animal-related fun! I also got to look around the city, which isn't nearly as exciting or big as I expect American cities to be. It did, however, have a really amazing fireworks display on the 4th! With some really clever rockets that make smiley faces in the sky!

Now that you are an expert in long-distance cycling, what are your thoughts on this year's Tour de France???

My readers are fond of punctuation, aren't they???? Anyway, I currently have no thoughts on the Tour de France, except that it provokes a memory of the Luxembourg National Anthem from an episode of Maid Marian And Her Merry Men: "Hurrah for the state of Luxembourg, all Luxembourgers sing! And let our heroes' deeds throughout the rest of Europe ring! A man from Luxembourg once came thirty-seventh in the Tour de France, and in this year's Eurovision Song Contest we stand quite a good chance."

Let me just see what's happening in the Tour. Ah, I see Bradley Wiggins, who's got a silly name, isn't winning, Lance Armstrong, co-star of Men's Health's Superhuman issue, is doing slightly better, and someone I've never heard of called Alberto Contador is winning. Hooray for him, I wholeheartedly approve. I know two people called Alberto and nobody called Albert. Nor am I friends with anybody called Bradley or Lance, nor anyone with the silly surname Wiggins.

You could talk about how, confident or otherwise, you feel about the upcoming competitions Ben.

If not maybe you could discuss the number of locations you have used in recent memory training sessions :-)

What I would really like to read is a list of 50-odd items described in the pictures made by another person. Censored obviously (which is probably why nobody ever does it; he he.)

;-)

Up to the challenge Ben ?

Erm, I'm up to the challenge, but I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "a list of 50-odd items described in the pictures made by another person." You mean my images for memory, or someone else's?

Anyway, as for the rest of it, I feel sort of semi-confident about the German championship. I've slacked off the training quite a lot just lately, but before that I had a month or so of very dedicated memorising, and hopefully that'll stand me in good stead. My motivation comes and goes these days, but I think the truly mind-boggling amount of memory work I did back in 2003/04 still helps me be in a good state with just a little bit of refresher-practice before a competition. I don't think I'll ever be able to get back into the mindset I had before I won the world championship, when I was training constantly and never leaving the house unless I absolutely had to. But I'm still keeping up with it, because I really don't like it when I'm not the world champion.

The number of locations I've used... I've currently got 62 journeys, some of them old familiar ones I've been using for years, some of them brand new and still not entirely clear in my head, with 26 locations each. Plus a half-journey that goes up to 14 locations max before I get lost, that I use when I need a partial one, like in trial 2 of spoken numbers (11 locations for the 100-digit trial, then 22 for the 200-digits, which uses one-and-a-bit journeys). That makes 1626 locations, unless I've got my sums wrong. Which I probably have, because the radio's playing and I can't be bothered to concentrate.

I estimate that I need 31 journeys for the German championship. Having twice that many journeys prepared was not deliberate.

Your birthday's only a couple of months away, should we follow tradition and throw another Poohsticker event? Perhaps something pub based this time for those of us who are temporarily incapacitated?

Would be great to get the old gang back together again :0)

Yes, yes it would! I don't know how we got into the habit of only getting together once a year on my birthday, but I think it's a great tradition. And to compensate for the Zoomy-centricness of it all, I'll buy birthday cards and little presents for everybody else this year! How about a weekend in York - I think it's the anniversary of that great event some time around now. How long ago was that now? Eight years? Wow, I must be old.

What are your views on the Fermi paradox?

I had no views on the Fermi paradox until I looked it up on the internet. I think it's a nice thing for science-fiction writers to write about. Personally, I think humans need to broaden their ideas of what alien intelligence life would be like if they want to find any evidence of it. People still think in terms of little green men in flying saucers, and all those fancy radio-signal-monitoring things are geared to detect something that's basically exactly like us. Show some imagination, people. Aliens a squillion light-years away are probably sitting in their living rooms "listening" to radio comedy shows transmitted by the disturbance in air currents caused by a dense metal box being strategically hit with some kind of space hammer. We need to build some kind of receiver that can pick that up.

Thanks for the questions, one and all!

Did you miss me?

I deliberately didn't blog anything last night, to see if anyone would complain. Well, actually, it was more that I couldn't think of anything to write about and didn't want to subject my loyal readers to the first thing that came into my head. I'm generally a bit short of inspiration lately, for some reason, so I think it's high time we had another of those 'please, blog-readers, tell me what to write about!' episodes.

So please, if you're reading this, and have always wanted to know something, ask me a question, and I'll answer it at length in my next blog!

Otherwise, it'll be very boring around here until my muse returns.

Well, what an anticlimax

Tom Watson just needs an easyish putt to win the Open and he collapses at the last moment. And now it's after 7:30 and I'm wondering whether I can still fit in the 30-minute binary practice I was meaning to do after the golf to round off the day's training, or whether I should just leave it so as not to overload my brain. Maybe leave it, I think - binary I don't need to work out how many journeys to attempt because in that one I just do as many as I can until time runs out, one journey, repeat it, then on to the next, with no third or fourth read-through like the others. For some reason, possibly because it takes a bit longer to translate binaries into images, they stick in my brain with only two viewings, whereas numbers and cards don't. A bit of speed training in the evenings next week, using the backup journeys I'm not going to use in the competition, should set me up right for Hamburg.

Something I haven't mentioned in my blog yet, I think, is that the UK Championship is happening two weeks after the German, in London. The scheduling is a bit unfortunate - with the German championship being the bigger and more useful preparation for the worlds, competitors whose budget can only stretch to one event are more likely to go for the German, and personally I'd prefer to have the one-day UK first, then the two-day German, so we get a steady build-up to the big three-day WMC. Still, I've been unusually well-prepared this weekend and booked my cheap train tickets (£10 each way) down to London on the internet - still need to decide between the nearby but expensive hotel or a more distant but cheaper one, but I'll see how I feel. I think it's high time I stuck to those principles I'm supposed to have and stayed somewhere cheap and nasty.

In other news, isn't the internet great? I typed "Snodgrass" into Google to see what would happen, and the second entry was a really very fun short story about a John Lennon who left the Beatles before they got big. I heartily recommend it.

Old Ben Morris

Watching 59-year-old Tom Watson embarrassing all the young golfers after three days of the Open makes me hope I can do something like that at the World Memory Championship, if it still exists, thirty years or so into the future. I'd like to think that by then memory competitions will be the world's most popular sport (especially on the Martian colonies and among robots), with thousands of memorisers struggling to qualify every year for the big event (held in Simpson's on the Strand after a last-minute rescheduling caused by a power failure on Space Station 23B). But there'll be a rule that former champions qualify automatically, so I'll be there every year and people will point me out and say "There's old Ben, he was one of the greatest memorisers of history, particularly noted for his performance in the 2009 world championship when he finished a valiant second behind Ayumu the chimp..." But then, long story short, I'll win in magnificent style and everybody will say "Wow, that certainly destroyed my deep-seated prejudices against the elderly and bald." It'll be great.

Jack's back!

I missed the latest series of Torchwood first time round, but I happened to be idly flicking through the Radio Times tonight about thirty seconds before the first episode was repeated on BBC3, so I had it on, and wowee, it's good! People criticise Torchwood, but I've always loved it. They just need a way to stop John Barrowman aging so visibly, so it can run for years and years...

Hamburgers for all!

Yes, I've booked my flights and hotel in Hamburg, and now I'm all set for the competition. Except I was feeling too tired tonight to do any training, so I'm probably going to fail to memorise anything at all when I get to the competition.

I'm also going to fail to remember any German words, because it's been two years since I last visited the country or made any attempt to speak the language. I haven't even written a comically-ungrammatical post on a German internet forum for ages. Perhaps I should buy a phrasebook.

It's infectious

I do have a rule about not using this blog to comment on internet news stories, I know, but I couldn't resist pointing out that Yahoo News had a story today headlined "Parademic Accused Of Murder". They've fixed it now so that it says 'paramedic' instead, but it did make me giggle that all those 'pandemic' stories are contaminating unrelated articles (with no underlying health problems).

I'm not sure what a 'parademic' would be. 'Para' comes from the Greek meaning 'alongside' or something like that. A sort of secondary disease that makes the main epidemic even worse? But then again, 'demic' is only the Greek for 'people', it doesn't necessarily have any kind of medical connotation. Perhaps a parademic is some kind of similar but creepily different species that lives alongside humanity and occasionally gets accused of murder?

Actually, there's a film coming out soon along those lines that sounds cool. It's called "District 9", and I must try to remember to go and see it.

Numbers!

I've been asked to put a link to the Major memory system trainer, created to help you learn probably the best system for remembering numbers. I'm nothing to do with this website, and I haven't given it more than a quick glance, so I take no responsibility for the contents, I'm just endorsing it because the creator asked me to. But hey, I'm sure it's very helpful if you want to learn the Major system! Check it out!

While I'm throwing links around, beginner memorisers should also be keeping up with memory-sports.com, which has lots and lots of helpful hints and advice!

And here's something I was meaning to blog about last week, but I was on holiday. It's day 40008 today, you know. If you didn't know, Microsoft Excel processes dates as a number, starting from January 1st 1900, and last Monday was equivalent to the number 40000! I like big round numbers, and I want to share them with the world.

A year passes like nothing

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of me starting my new job (I probably shouldn't call it my 'new' job any more after today - from tomorrow onwards it will officially be my boring old job), and as regular readers will know, me having the same job for a whole year isn't something that's happened very much just lately. It's good to be boring.

I'm going to spend the day still catching up with all the stuff that didn't get done because I was late coming back from my holiday, and also I'm going to be coming in late because the local newspaper are interviewing me. It really is a mystery to me why I'm still employed.

Shopping

I've got a new stopwatch, alarm clock and comb to replace all the things I've lost/broken in the last few weeks, so now I'm all set to go to the German championships, memorise things within the appropriate time limits, wake up in time for the start of the competition and make sure that my remaining hairs are all pointing in the right direction. All I need to do is some training!

A week of evening practicing, followed by next weekend a full run-through of the competition, should set me up nicely. It's going to be a great competition!

State quarters!

Another thing I did in America was acquiring lots of those 25-cent coins with pictures on them depicting one of the fifty states of the US. I already had a couple of them here in my drawer full of miscellaneous foreign coins, but now I've got 14 in total! Obviously I need more American holidays, so I can acquire a full set.

And another thing I did on the way home was lose my stopwatch. I really have to get a new one so I can do some last-minute training for the German championship. It's less than three weeks away, and I haven't booked any flights or hotels yet!

Zzzzzzzzz

A day at work with serious jetlag is really no fun. I'm going to bed now, I don't expect to wake up until Monday.

Pennsylvania Pippins

I'm home at last! And feeling hugely sleep-deprived, despite spending most of the afternoon napping. Hopefully I'll be recovered enough to stay awake at work tomorrow.

Anyway, here's something new - I've become a baseball fan while I was in America! Channel-hopping during a quiet moment I came across a game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Houston Astros, and to my surprise I loved it! It's an exciting and fascinating game and I really should have listened to the people who've told me so in the past. Last night while stranded in New York I watched the Yankees thrash the Twins 10-2, and I'm definitely a convert to the joys of baseball now. I'm going to have to find out whether it's possible to watch games on the telly over here...

I even know what the designated hitter rule is, and even have an opinion on it! (It's bad.) I need to go to a game in real life, next time I'm over that side of the ocean! Go Pirates!

There's no escape!

Well, the flight from Pittsburgh to Newark was even more delayed than the one in the opposite direction last week (due to thunderstorms somewhere, apparently, although since it's been beautiful summer weather everywhere I've seen for the past week, I don't know where these thunderstorms could have been), and I missed the flight back to Birmingham. And they couldn't put me on another one until 7pm tonight, so I'm stuck in New York for the day.

Okay, there are worse places to be stuck, so I'm not going to complain too much - I'm going to see the sights and have some fun. The only problem comes when I get back to work on Friday and have to fit at least three days' worth of number-crunching into a couple of hours. But hey, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, and for now the sun's shining, the city's got that distinctive New York smell to it, there's things to do and places to go. See you if and when I eventually get home!