My life is an action movie

As I was walking to the MSO the night before last, in the still-pouring rain, a lightbulb fell from a theatre poster and missed me by a fraction of an inch before shattering on the ground. In fact, either on the way down or as the bits bounced back up, it burnt my arm just below the elbow! I have a feeling that this is the kind of thing I could sue someone for, but luckily my life isn't a courtroom drama, so I won't. And then as I was heading back to the hotel, I was halfway down to the platform at the Tottenham Court Road tube station when the fire alarms went off and the whole station was evacuated. Fire engines and everything, and I had to get the bus back. It was all terribly exciting, and also wet.

Anyway, I did end up winning the UK Championship after all, although I was quite some way off my best in everything except random words (don't ask me why, but I got a personal-best 200 in that). All the other disciplines, though, I was somewhere around 80-90% of the kind of scores I expect from a safe, unexceptional result. Boris took issue with that, saying that I could have come really quite close to my best-ever score if I hadn't messed up the speed cards, but I know how good I can be, and how good I wasn't all through this competition, and I need a big improvement if I'm going to do any good at the WMC. Still, it could have been a lot worse.

And the speed cards wasn't because I couldn't memorise them, it was just either tiredness or general stupidity - the first trial I came close but got mixed up with the images somewhere in the middle of the pack, but the second trial I remembered perfectly with almost no trouble at all. But then when I was re-ordering the recall pack I somehow put the first two cards down in the wrong order. Sigh. I still don't know how I did that, I've never done it before.

So, with a bit of training and some more 'practice competitions' in Sweden and Germany, I might be able to get back to my best results. I hope so, anyway, because even though I didn't lose this one, I'm feeling more in a memory-training kind of mood now.

There might be an article about the competition in the Washington Post, if you're a reader, because I did a big long interview with an enthusiastic journalist after the championship. Then we had a big international meal at an Italian restaurant, with at least ten or eleven nationalities represented among the nine people who were there - I had thought that Enrico would be chatting with the staff there, but our waitress turned out to be Lithuanian, so Robertas did the talking instead. All in all, it was a fantastic competition, and I'm looking forward to more!

Now, should I play Texas Hold'em tonight, or go and see Avenue Q?

The best way to prepare for a memory competition

Blogging from London! I love this internet cafe next to Charing Cross. Anyway, I got the train down here yesterday afternoon in the pouring rain, found my hall-of-residence-cum-hotel with a minimum of getting lost, then set out on a reconnaisance mission to find the venue of the UK Memory Championship and the MSO.

If you're ever trying to find MWB Business Exchange's Paddington offices (and you should, it's awesome, I can't recommend them highly enough), you really should follow the map on their website. It's a bit tricky to navigate, but don't give up on it and use Google Maps instead, because the address is "1 Kingdom Street", which Google Maps thinks is about a mile away from where it really is, and the London A-Z thinks doesn't exist at all. Luckily, London has internet cafes for weary and wet travellers (did I mention that it was pouring with rain all day?) to turn to after an hour or so of fruitless searching.

Having established where the memory championship was going to be, I made my way to the easily-found Soho Theatre for a bit of poker before getting an early night. The nightly poker tournaments at the MSO run from 6:30 to 10:30 every evening, but I'm a terrible player, so I figured I could count on being knocked out within an hour or two at most. But I'd forgotten I'm also a naturally lucky player, and by a combination of dreadful play and ridiculous luck I ended up coming second and being there until eleven o'clock at night.

Also luckily, it had stopped raining by that point, which was particularly lucky since I got lost on the way back to the hotel and ended up going to bed at a bit after midnight.

But after a couple of hours' sleep, I was all ready and raring to go for the fourth UK Memory Championship (and the first to be an 'international standard' event instead of a shorter and easier 'national standard'). I managed to find "Kingdom Street" without any real difficulty this time (although it's not really a street as such, just two enormous office blocks on a business park) and got to the completely wonderful venue of the championship bang on time.

I really can't enthuse enough about the venue - it might just be the best place we've ever had, and it's all thanks to the generous sponsorship of MWB Business Exchange. If you ever need an office or a meeting room, check them out, you won't regret it. Now, memory competitors don't ask for much from a venue. A quiet room, basically, but there are certain optional extras that are nice too, like an extra room for arbiters, a place for competitors to go and chat out of earshot of the competition room while others are still recalling, plentiful drinks, and so on. This venue has all of those, it's a huge spacious competition room, and it's completely and totally silent. Even though Paddington Station is right next door, you genuinely can't hear a thing.

It's a gorgeous modern building, made almost entirely of glass, with super-fast zippy lifts without buttons on the inside (you press a control panel outside and it sends a lift to take you where you want to go - only ever seen these once before, and that was at the South German championship. They're very groovy.)

We had 14 competitors turn up - less than was on the list of registered competitors, as usual (I didn't really expect to see "David Duchovny, USA", but it's a real shame that Simon Reinhard wasn't able to come along after all) but with a huge wide range of countries represented. Off the top of my head, it's England, Wales, Germany, Austria, Holland, Slovenia, Italy, wherever Robert comes from (somewhere Baltic, I think) and the Phillipines. The latter team consists of two players and a coach who have travelled about 7000 miles just for this championship, so yay for them. They also called me "Sir Ben" until I told them to stop it.

I did surprisingly well, considering my lack of training and sleep. In abstract images I got a passable 158, then an entirely acceptable 3650 or so in binary. We haven't had the scores for the other disciplines yet, but I think I got about 90 in names and faces, which is as good as I ever get. Then in speed numbers (tiredness and lack of training catching up with me by this point) I was thrown into extreme confusion by Warren saying "Neurons on the ready... get set... go!" instead of the standard formula without the "get set" in the middle and spent about two minutes thinking of nothing but the "get set" and not memorising any numbers. I eventually pulled myself together and got 216, by guessing and luck, and then in the second trial attempted 360 and probably made enough mistakes that I won't improve on my score.

Finally it was 30-minute cards, and I laid out my 18 packs on the table, but as soon as I'd started to memorise I could tell it was going to be an unmitigated disaster if I attempted to look at them all. I decided to play it ultra-safe and just do 12, and I think I got them all right. With 25 minutes of recall time to spare, so obviously I was playing it a lot safer than I needed to, but never mind.

So I'm in actually okay shape to maybe win the thing after all, touch wood. My main rival is Boris, and I will need to do something fairly good tomorrow to beat him, but we'll see. Anyway, time for more poker. It's London Lowball tonight, and I'll try my best to lose more quickly.

No more pencils, no more books

Hooray, no more work until next Tuesday! Down to London tomorrow for some good old-fashioned MSOing and memorising and not watching telly (that always used to be an important part of a week at the MSO, although of course it was more of a big thing in the olden days before BBCi and things like that). I won't be blogging, either, so you'll all just have to do without my daily updates yet again. But when I come back, well, I'll start blogging again. Hooray.

Decamentanniversary

I didn't bother to check the exact dates until tonight, thinking it was later in the week, but in fact the Saturday and Sunday just gone were the 10th anniversary of the first memory competition I ever took part in. It was the World Memory Championship 2000, and the scores are still hanging around on the internet here!

I think 16th out of 21 competitors was pretty good, all in all, considering that I had never used a memory technique before the evening of the first day. Let's be nostalgic and look back a decade to see what things were like back then...

The first thing of interest is that the WMC was just a two-day event back then. Starting at 10am and carrying on until 7:30 in the evening each day. The hour-long marathon disciplines had shorter recall times - I think it was 75 minutes, but I'm not 100% certain - which cut the overall championship length down a bit, and of course there were fewer competitors, so less organisational hassle for everyone. It expanded to a three-day event with longer recall times in 2002.

Dominic O'Brien won quite easily, as he always did back then, with Andi Bell coming second, getting great scores in some disciplines but bad ones in others, which was also quite traditional by that time. And Gunther won the binary and spoken numbers on his way to third place, which he also always did in those days. The World Memory Championship was a little bit stuck in a rut in 2000. It shook itself out of it in 2002 and 2003 with some status-quo-smashing performances.

Whatever happened to... Well, Dominic is still hanging around, albeit as an organiser rather than a competitor (although he still hasn't "officially" retired, you know), Andi pops up from time to time (he won't be in London this week, but apparently he's still planning to be in China), Gunther is still ever-present and still at the very top of the memory world, but what about the rest of those 21 participants ten years ago? Daniel Corney now calls himself Daniel Tammett and writes books about how great he is. Rob Carder last competed in 2002, but kept in touch with things on internet message boards until a few years ago. You never know, he might pop up again some time. Dr Yip is still teaching small Malaysians about memory skills and is sure to turn up at a competition again one of these days. Tom Groves I saw in New York a couple of years ago, and Graham Old has a blog on the internet somewhere that I should go and check out while I'm thinking about it. It'd be good to see them both at another championship. Michaela Buchvaldova is now Mrs Dr Gunther Karsten, and so still involved with championships interspersed with motherhood. I haven't actually heard anything from Christiane Stenger for quite a while, but I think she's still technically a memory celebrity in Germany. Then we have four Malaysians - Dr Yip's class of 2000. I know nothing about them and none of them ever came back to a memory competition. The next year, though, there were some really really talented youngsters who came along with him! I'll write about that next year, maybe. Tatiana Cooley was the American champion - we haven't heard from her for a while, and I have no idea what she's doing now. That great berk Ben Pridmore is still turning up to competitions, but nobody likes him, so that's enough about that. Hew Kian How got the booby prize from Dr Yip that year, then we have Harald Lammermeyer who I think I know, but I can't remember what he looks like or what kind of person he is. I've got a bad memory. Edison Hong won a trip to London by coming third in the US Championship, he was a friendly and fun young high school student, but he didn't carry on with the memory sports thing after this. And the last two are more Germans, I think, but I don't remember them.

And look at how rubbish those top scores and world records were! Except the poem one, that was really really cool, until the likes of Astrid came along a few years later and blew it away.

I'm still meaning to write a book called "Noughty Memories" about all the memory competitions of the 2000s, you know. I'll get round to it one day, possibly after I retire.

Get your kicks on Cycle Route 6

I'd assumed it was going to be rainy and miserable again today, but in fact it was sunny and hot and just plain gorgeous all day long. It's real MSO-week weather - when I used to go to the MSO regularly, it was always baking hot for the whole week. I don't think the MSO saw a drop of rain until it had been running for five or six years.

So after a really quite fun photo session and interview this afternoon, I went out for a bike ride and followed the cycle route all the way from Beeston to Derby without getting lost this time. It's really great, it takes you on a long, winding scenic route through all the nice parts in between the two cities and almost none of the nasty parts. I'd recommend it to visitors who want to see the beauty of England at its finest but can't afford the DVD.

And then I got the train back home, because there is such a thing as too much exercise.

Pearly, where's your milk-white skin?

I think I'm getting wrinkles around my eyes. What with that and the white hair that pretty much dominates my beard nowadays, it's increasingly hard to convince myself I'm still youthful and devastatingly handsome.

This is the kind of thing that concerns me mostly when there's someone coming to take photos of me tomorrow. I'm not sure what for, some kind of news article most probably. But I'm going to look fat and bald and old and hideous, you can rest assured.

And now the news

I'm back, or at least I'm back in a non-cohabiting kind of situation where I don't need to worry about being a bad host by sitting here writing my blog while my house-guest is hanging around. And I felt that several of the news headlines you get shown when you log into Yahoo mail were interesting enough to blog about. Mainly because the only people who've been commenting here lately are the type who just read my blog for memory tips, and I wanted to annoy them.

But "Brigade in industrial action ballot" is a weird one. I mean, can't we specify which brigade we're talking about? I'm sure they've got number-of-characters limits, but they could have substituted 'strike' for 'industrial action'. Because if it's the fire brigade then yes, I can see how that might be a bad thing. If it's the Boys' Brigade, then they can feel free to go on strike as far as I'm concerned. If it's the Teen Brigade, the fictional group of teenage American radio hams who appeared in Marvel comics in the early sixties, then quite frankly the world would probably be better off if they went on strike.

And "May authorises marches ban in city" is really quite groovy, because it has two different months in it, and because however many times I read it I find myself automatically thinking it's the verb 'may' instead of Theresa, and getting confused trying to make sense of the rest of it.

And as for "Cenotaph outrage woman flees court", I just find myself wondering what that story was and why I didn't hear about the cenotaph outrage when it first happened. And thinking that "Cenotaph Outrage Woman" would make a great name for a supervillainess. Much better than "Bigot Woman".

"Students scramble for university places" is a rubbish headline though. For one thing they use exactly the same headline, and story, every year, and for another thing only idiots go to university. Posh, wealthy idiots for the most part. There should be a law against it. So if you've found this blog because you googled 'memory tips for university' or something like that, then go on, bog off and get a real job, you'll get no advice from me.

The secret to harmonious co-habitation

My brother was away in Leamington Spa last night, and he's away in Bingham or somewhere tonight, and just paid a flying visit here on his way between the two while I was out today. I came home to find the only change was a pair of cowboy boots had replaced the flip-flops in the hall (he has unusual tastes in footwear), and a pack of newly-developed photos had appeared on the kitchen table, containing lots of drunken pictures from his first Saturday night back in the country.

These photos were taken (a little unprofessionally - this is about the only one without a thumb over the lens) just before the immortal phrase "Hey, there's a webcam on my laptop that I never use..." sprang to my lips. Next time, hopefully, the phrase "And there are people I work with who follow me on the internet, so we'd better not post anything embarrassing" will spring up too, but that's another matter.

Still, this picture of a bad day for He-Man is quite artistic. The blurry book in the foreground is "The Remains Of The Day", which sort of sounds appropriate for the scene depicted. And it has the advantage of showing my bare foot. I often mention to people that I've got freakishly long toes, and offer to show them, but most people object to me taking my shoes and socks off and sticking my feet in their face, on grounds of hygiene and general good taste. But now I can just show them this photo, and have them react with disgust and horror!

Anyway, the brother's going back into Chinese exile in a couple of days, so I can miss him again, but until then, I'm just lying back, enjoying the peace and quiet and the return of football highlights on a Saturday evening. Ahh, bliss.

On me!

The only thing I genuinely wanted to be when I was young was The Milkybar Kid. So this latest campaign of encouraging adults to audition for the part is quite disturbing to me in many ways. Perhaps it's still not too late for a change of career...

Who's cooler? Me or Daley Thompson?

It's a dead heat, according to the press release sent out today about the UK championship. I beg to differ, unless they're comparing me with Daley as he is nowadays, and if he's really let himself go since he retired from professional athletics. If I was him, I'd sue for libel.

Obscurity

Radio Nottingham are quite persistently asking me to talk to them, but apart from that, there hasn't been much media interest in me for quite a while now. Possibly my fifteen minutes have nearly run out, along with my run as World Memory Champion (because I'm most definitely not going to win in December, so my only hope for keeping the title is if the championship is postponed indefinitely).

I would really like to find something else to be famous for. Being a star of low-budget documentaries about one subject is easy, but being documentarized for two completely different and unrelated reasons takes a special kind of talent. I just need to stumble across something else that I turn out to be good at - it took me the first 23 years of my life to discover memory competitions, but surely there must be something else out there that I'm not completely incapable of doing. I just need to devote some time to going around and trying something new. I've never tried needlepoint tapestry. Maybe I can invent a new way of doing that and become the world champion?

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack

Rather than doing any memory training today, I decided what would be really cool would be to go for a very long bike ride, all the way to Derby and back. I'm motivated by the fact that I'm heavier than I've ever been, probably (I was really very fat back in 2002-ish, but I think I'm possibly even fatter now) and another of my friends has now lost well over ten stone after some dedicated dieting and exercising. I'm surrounded by strikingly slender ex-fatties!

I'm realistic about my prospects of losing ten stone plus, but the fact that I could do that and still be the average weight of an undersized greyhound is a bit worrying, and frankly, being two stone lighter would probably be good for me.

So off I pedalled. There is a network of cycle paths between here and Derby, but it's not very well signposted, so you really need to look at a map before you set off. I didn't, and predictably got completely lost very early on in the expedition. But by a pleasant coincidence, I found myself on Cleve Avenue, where Grandma and Granddad used to live when I was little, even though I had absolutely no idea that I was anywhere within five miles of the road! So I went up and down it a couple of times trying to work out which house they lived in (I couldn't remember the number, and although the house does feature on one of my memory journeys, none of the houses there now look even remotely like the one in my mind. They're all too small, for one thing. So that counts as memory training, albeit the completely unsuccessful kind, and I'll just phone Grandma and ask her to remind me.

Anyway, knowing where I was, I set out on my travels again, and before long ended up in a place that I at first thought was Long Eaton but turned out on closer inspection to be Stapleford. At that point I gave up on the idea of getting to Derby before midnight and decided just to try to find my way home, but luckily I immediately stumbled across those cycle paths I'd lost, and followed them through some delightfully scenic countryside back to Long Eaton (where they come to an abrupt end at the back of the big Asda, which I still call "the new Asda", although it's been there for decades and there's now a genuinely new and bigger Tesco looming over it), then went back home the normal way, along the un-scenic main roads.

So, lots of cycling, and then I had an unnecessarily huge dinner to completely counteract any weight benefits it might have had. I'll start dieting tomorrow. Actually, I feel like making this a new thing of mine - forget memory training, I'll get into competitive weight loss!

Package tour

I did promise a link to good cheap London accommodation, so here we go. I'm staying at Rosebery Hall, a very nice place I've stayed at before, although it does look like it's missing an R. Maybe it was just named after an illiterate. But anyway, £140 for five nights, including breakfast, can't be bad. That's the same as one night in the real hotel near to the UK Championship venue (and you might not be able to get that any more - I got an email this morning that made me giggle, describing this special offer and telling us that rooms will be held at this rate until July 30th).

Also, they're looking for arbiters to help out in London - please do come along if you're not doing anything on August 26th and 27th, it really is fun and we'd all be very grateful!

And also also, if you're booking your stay at an LSE hall of residence online, you get the following options from the 'Title' drop-down menu:

Mr
Mrs
Miss
Ms
Dr
Capt
Colonel
Conf
Maj
Mst
Prof
Rev
Sir

What's a Conf? And a Mst? And what, they don't cater to anyone below the rank of Captain or above the rank of Colonel? And where's 'Lord' or 'Dame' or 'His Eminence'?

And when they ask me how I got her, I'll say "I saved my money!"

In a comment to last night's blog, Boris reminded me of something I should have been telling everyone about ever since they announced the UK Memory Championship - book a room in a student hall of residence! I'm going to book mine this weekend, if I get round to it, and I'll post helpful links then if anyone's interested. Student accommodation is available to the public in the summer holidays, at much cheaper rates than real hotels, and I have many happy memories of staying in halls during the MSO. They usually offer a full English breakfast and everything, and some of them even have en-suite bathrooms nowadays (students are so pampered today, that's probably why they're all so stupid...)

Indeed, the first mental journey I ever created (and I still use it today, ten years later!) was the route from a hall of residence to Alexandra Palace, where the MSO 2000 was held. It's a pretty unprofessional kind of journey, with some locations right next to each other and some absolutely miles apart, but it's become so stylised and altered in my head over these ten years of constant use that it's now nice and evenly spaced and bears no resemblance to the actual places it's based on.

The trouble is, I can't remember which hall of residence it was. I know it was down the road and round the corner from a tube station, but I can't remember which tube station either. If I concentrate, I can picture the real building and roads (as opposed to the completely different-looking ones that appear in the mental journey) quite clearly in my head, but I can't identify where it was. I do remember, though, that there was an old Volkswagen camper van parked on the road with a sign in the window saying it was for sale for £300, and I really wanted it. I didn't know how to drive and I didn't have three hundred pounds (by 2000 I was earning just about enough money to afford a week's holiday in London, unlike previous years when I had to pay for it by not spending money on luxuries like food and rent for a couple of months, but I still didn't have much cash to spare) but I still seriously considered buying it.

Of course, now that I'm a wealthy international celebrity who actually has got £300 to spare, writing this has rekindled my desire for an old Volkswagen camper van. Next one I see, I'm having it. Even though I still don't know how to drive.

(Probably) all in the mind

The Mind Sports Olympiad still exists, and they've got a schedule up on the internet. And, once again, I'm going to be in London for a memory competition around that time. Maybe I'll drop by and play some games. Or maybe I won't, because it's expensive and the only people who still go to the MSO are the ones who really, really want to win everything and so take it very seriously, but on the other hand, it might be a good place to hide from the hordes of international press who will be pursuing me after the UK Memory Championship to ask me why I'm suddenly so rubbish.

Possibly I could go to the evening poker games after each day's memory competition has finished, just to make absolutely certain that my memory will fail me, or maybe I could just find games to play during the daytime after the memory is over - from the looks of it, I could play mastermind, abalone, azacru, creative thinking and then a full day of monopoly, plus a bit of evening poker. For only a hundred pounds or so, plus however much it costs to stay in London for a few extra days (I haven't booked a hotel yet for the memory - I'm certainly not staying in the horribly expensive official tournament hotel, I'll find somewhere cheap and nasty).

The only one of those that really appeals hugely is the creative thinking championship - I used to enjoy that, back in the olden days. In an event full of competitions with good and bad moves, or right and wrong answers, it was fantastic to have a completely subjective championship where the aim is to make Bill Hartston laugh. I even won the bronze medal one year, I can't remember which, but wait a minute, it's on the website... 2001. Wow, nine years ago. Anyway, I was extremely proud of that result, because there's a gang of people who always compete in it and who are more in tune with Bill Hartston's thought processes. So, I think I will go along to the MSO this year, I've talked myself into it. Creatively.

Besides, I'm only 31st in the all-time medals ranking, and I'd much rather be in the top twenty and appear on the first page.

Silence

Yes, sorry I haven't been blogging as assiduously as usual just lately, what with having a house-guest and all. But I'll tell you what, I'm going to do lots of memory training for the next couple of weeks, and I'll tell you all about it when I do!

The Road To Wigan Pier

I'm going to somewhere in the vicinity of Wigan tomorrow, to poke my nose into the goings-on at an actual shop, rather than just juggling numbers on spreadsheets. I don't think I've ever been anywhere vaguely near Wigan before, although with my memory being what it is, it's quite possible that I lived there for three or four years and just forgot about it. Still, they've got a football team called Athletic, which is probably the best football-suffix, implying that the team are really good at what they do. There's just something very American or Communist (or maybe both) about proclaiming that you're "United", and names like "Rovers" and "Wanderers" are just silly, because generally speaking they just stay on and around the one football pitch during the course of an average game. And the City Ground isn't even IN a forest!

It's like being married

My flat is full of unfamiliar things like deodorant and nail-clippers. I've never liked sharing my home with anyone or anything, even if it does make dinner for me when I come home from work. Still, it is extremely groovy to see my beloved brother again, it's been eight whole months, which is much longer than we've ever gone without seeing each other in the past. But I think we've got the excessive drinking and filming-selves-dressed-as-cartoon-characters that was a necessary part of the reunion out of our systems, so you needn't worry.

Of course, if only I'd remembered that a couple of people from work watch my Facebook page, I would have advised Joseph not to link that video to it, but it's too late now...

In the cold light of day

With hindsight, it might not have been such a great idea to post that film footage all over the internet last night, but it did seem like a really great idea at the time.

This is what is happening here tonight

If you were wondering

Attentive readers might have noticed that I've taken to only blogging every other day. This is because I keep finding myself without anything interesting to say, and then the following day thinking "Well, I can't go two whole days without blogging, I'd better say something!" I'm going to get out of this habit, one way or another. Anyway, tomorrow my brother's coming to stay, so I'll either have something to blog about or be too busy to blog, we'll just have to see.

Did you hear about the vegetarian cannibal?

He could only eat Swedes.

I think that's a completely groovy joke, because it's exclusively English - as far as I know, there's no equivalent in other languages, and you can't even tell it to Americans, because they think swedes are called 'rutabagas' and Swedes are called 'foreigners'. It's actually easy to tell swedes from Swedes, even if you're English, because swedes are nasty-tasting vegetables that nobody likes, while Swedes are awesome people who everyone likes, and who organise memory competitions!

So, please everybody come to the Swedish Memory Open on September 25th and 26th - see the bilingual website here for more details. I will... probably be there. I hope so, anyway, because I've not been able to go to Sweden for one reason or another the two times I've been invited there in the past, and I'd hate to miss this one too. And I'm sure it's going to be a whole lot of fun for everyone! Twenty non-Swedish competitors is the limit, apparently, first-come-first-served, so sign up fast! (Well, I'm not sure that there will be too many more than twenty non-Swedish people who want to join in, but you never know. It couldn't hurt to sign up fast anyway...)

I would wear my lucky Swedish socks, but they've got holes in. I wear through socks fast, because of my extremely long toes and funny-shaped ankles.

It's a real dilemma

Do I move my desk from the spare room into my bedroom? See, my brother's coming to stay for a while on Friday and I have a hare-brained scheme that I can employ him as a live-in slave-driver and make him force me to spend an hour or so every evening doing memory training. But if I have to go into his bedroom to do that, it probably wouldn't work, and it'd certainly smell funny. So I think the only alternative is to move the desk and turn my bedroom into a bedroom-cum-study like a poor student would live in. But moving the desk is tricky, because I put it together myself and skimped on nails and screws, so it's basically just a few pieces of wood balanced on top of each other, and I would almost certainly drop one of the pieces on my foot and fracture one or more of my toes. My toes are extraordinarily long, you see, and so they're basically everywhere, so if anything falls on the floor, anywhere in the world, it lands on my toes.

Of course, my brother, who's an artist, would probably also like to have a desk in his bedroom while he's staying here, but hey, he'll just have to put up with it. I mean, I'm giving him free room and board just because he lives in China and has to come back home to sort his visa and things out, how dare he demand desks from me too? The big ingrate. He can just use the kitchen table. Or, since I've only got one chair and I'm taking that into the bedroom too, on second thoughts he can just sit on the floor and draw. That'll teach him. Just as long as he doesn't drop his felt tip pens on my toes while I'm busy memorising in the next room.

Dreams

I woke up early this morning because I needed to inscribe two magic words on the floor of my living room before the sunlight reached them. Then I realised that that was a dream, so I went back to sleep. Or rather, I tried to go back to sleep, but I was too preoccupied with trying to remember exactly what these magic words were meant to achieve and what was going to happen if I didn't inscribe them. Sadly, I still have no idea.

Whitley Baywatch

It's the last othello regional of the season in Whitley Bay tomorrow, but sadly I can't go - it takes so long to get there and back that it's a hotel-on-Friday-night kind of affair, and I've got too much stuff to do here at home. Stuff like memory training and spare-room-tidying, which we all know aren't going to happen, but which I would feel guilty about neglecting if I went to an othello competition instead. Still, I hope everyone who does go, has fun!

Quels transports il doit exciter

Bastille Day is a particularly notable day for me (much more so than for those foreigners over the other side of the Channel, I'm sure), because it marks the anniversary of me starting my new job at Boots. Wow, two years. Am I really the kind of person who stays in a job for two years, now? That's rather disturbing, isn't it? It's the first time I've done that for a long time. It's certainly the first time I've had occasion to write about doing that in the five years I've been blogging, for one thing. Wow, five years. Am I really the kind of person who keeps a blog going for five years, now? Well, I will be next Wednesday, anyway. That's also rather disturbing, isn't it?

I need to find something new and temporary to do, quick. In another month it'll be ten years since I started taking part in memory competitions, and that'll be the most disturbing realisation of all.

Names

I don't blog about the news, or about politics, but if I did I would have something to say about the people who elected an MP called Mark Reckless, and then didn't expect him to get into the newspapers for getting drunk. Still, it reminds me of the reason why Boots the Chemists was successful despite sounding like a place where you buy shoes - apparently the arch rival of John Boot's original 'British and American Botanic Establishment' was Dr Coffin's Botanico-Medical Dispensary.

'Boots' is a silly name for a chemist's shop, but can you imagine saying "I'm just going to Coffins to pick up my prescription"? It just wouldn't have caught on, would it?

I love this advert, anyway. "J. Boot takes the opportunity of thanking his numerous friends and the public for their liberal support during the last five years, in which period he has successfully treated almost every kind of disease, and can confidently assert that the vegetable kingdom affords a remedy for all." Catchy slogan. But funnily enough, Boots didn't become a successful business until John's son Jesse started selling real medicine as well as vegetable remedies. I can't imagine why.

What's hot and not what's not

Here are a few things I currently think are really groovy:

The Antikythera Mechanism
X-Men Forever
Paul the psychic octopus
Real tennis
Timmy Time
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Laurel and Hardy
Air

Cobblers

There's a shop just down the road from my flat called The Beeston Cobbler. It's literally a tin hut - a metal shed with a corrugated iron roof inexplicably situated between the houses on the road into the town centre - and it's also in an inconvenient location unless you've travelled to Beeston by train and decided to walk the inconveniently long distance to the shops. So I've always wondered how it manages to stay in business, but when I went there the other day to get some keys cut, it turns out it's the busiest shop in town, with a constant stream of people coming in and out for shoe and/or key work. Meanwhile, the big shiny Timpson's in the town centre is always completely deserted.

Incidentally, at least Beeston's train station is closer to the High Road (we've got a High Road instead of a High Street, because we're weird) than Long Eaton's - for a little town, it's amazing that they managed to find a location so very far away from anything for their station.

Back in Beeston, also on the road into town is a nice bike repair shop (as opposed to the nasty bike repair shop on the High Road that I went to one time before I even lived in Beeston, who did a really terrible job of fixing my bike but at least also forgot to charge me for the job), where I've dropped my bike off today to stop it falling apart quite so drastically. I could probably buy a new bike for less money than I spend on repairs (or else I could just make some tiny effort to look after my bike so it doesn't need repairing so often), but then I'd probably put the bike repair people out of business, and it's important to support small traders.

The documentary that just won't die

I hear that Superhuman Genius is on telly again tonight. I do wish that someone would repeat The Mentalists instead...

In the stars

My horoscope in the Metro newspaper today was disturbingly accurate - it told me not to go wild with spending money recklessly while I was doing something different to blow off steam today. And since I read that while on the train to London to blow off steam and spend money recklessly, I took it to heart, and only spent a relatively small amount of money on unnecessary things. Still, I'm back at work tomorrow.

Timmy (baa), it's Timmy (baa!)

Have I ever mentioned just how completely awesome Timmy Time is? Really, you should all go and check it out, you won't regret it. Silent comedy at its best.

Even though the omens aren't good

Despite Philipp Petzschner (one of those Germans who I recently said were rubbish at tennis) winning the men's doubles, along with an Austrian who doesn't count for memory-championship-omen purposes, I've still got three days of holiday from work, which I'm going to spend preparing exhaustively for the UK Memory Championship in August, and we'll see how that goes. I've also pencilled into the schedule a certain amount of tidying up my flat, since my brother's coming to stay in a few weeks and there isn't currently room for two people to squeeze in among all the clutter. And I was also thinking of using this free time to work out what to do with my life, generally speaking. That doesn't take more than a couple of hours, I'm sure.

The project that interests me just at this moment is working out a nice balance between memorising and mental calculations to get a good score at the 'square roots of six-digit numbers' event at the Mental Calculation World Cup. What's the minimum amount of data (log tables or whatever) I can memorise that is still beyond what non-World-Memory-Champions can do and leaves a relatively simple amount of calculation?

Also, how can "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" be advertising a new, more butter-like taste? Does that mean their whole brand name has been a lie until now? If it tastes more like butter now, that means it previously didn't taste entirely like butter, and so believing it's not butter would have been really quite easy! I mean, I eat the stuff myself and if they hadn't made it explicitly clear that it wasn't butter, I might have believed it was. But then, I'm stupid.

The books on my bookcase

That new bookcase I bought a couple of weeks ago had a tendency to tilt wildly to the side and make all the books piled on top of it (I've still got more books than shelves) fall off. I could prevent it doing that by propping a vacuum cleaner against it and making sure all the shelves were packed tightly with books, but that only worked until you took a book out. So there was nothing else for it, I had to buy a hammer today to nail the back panels on and finish putting it together. So, now it's fixed and I've got my books piled into and on top of it, in a random order (the only people who alphabetise their books are the ones who never read them), and the second shelf down struck me as being an extremely groovy cross-section of my tastes in reading. So I thought I'd list all the books here, for the entertainment of my blog-readers.

I mean, I could have spent this evening writing the article for the othello newsletter that I promised faithfully to write today but still haven't, but I thought this was more important.

Adolf: Days of Infamy - Osamu Tezuka (translated by Yuji Oniki, edited by Annette Roman)
Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
The Four Immigrants Manga - Henry Kiyama (translated and edited by Frederik L. Schodt)
The Riverside Chaucer (complete works) - Geoffrey Chaucer (edited by various, general editor Larry D. Benson)
Elidor - Alan Garner
Voyage of the Dawntreader - C.S. Lewis
Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams
The Last Hero - Terry Pratchett (illustrated by Paul Kidby)
Four Tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth) - William Shakespeare (edited by various)
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish - Dr. Seuss
The Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio (illustrated by Louis Chalon, translated by J. M. Rigg)
A Dark Horn Blowing - Dahlov Ipcar
The Beatles Diary volume 1: The Beatles Years - Barry Miles
Who Really Killed Cock Robin? - Norman Iles
The Journey of Self-Discovery - His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda
Lustiges Taschenbuch 350 - (various writers and artists - it's a collection of German Donald Duck comics)
Time Trap - Nicholas Fisk
The Twits - Roald Dahl (illustrated by Quentin Blake)
The Witches - Roald Dahl (illustrated by Quentin Blake)
Whatever Love Means - David Baddiel
Discworld's Unseen University Diary 1998 - Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs (illustrated by Paul Kidby)
Hard Times - Charles Dickens
Northern Lights - Philip Pullman
Curiosities of Literature - John Sutherland
Doctor Who The Handbook: The Fourth Doctor - David J. Howe, Mark Stammers, Stephen James Walker
The Illustrated Guide to Blackjack - Dennis Purdy
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Brontë
Abbott's New Card Games - Robert Abbott
A Treasury of Royal Scandals - Michael Farquhar
Dragon's Egg: The Complete Guide to Rearing Your Dragon - Claire Hawcock and Niroot Puttapipat
Dreamcatcher - Stephen King
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and other stories (The Canterville Ghost, The Sphinx without a Secret, The Model Millionaire, The Portrait of Mr. W.H.) - Oscar Wilde

So there you have it, my second shelf down. Go and read them all, and I'll be testing you later. Except on the couple of books on that list that I bought but never finished. I don't really recommend all of them, but at least they look good on the shelf.

... that hadde ylad of dong ful many a fother

A day spent pushing wheelbarrows full of compost up a really quite steep hill really does make a refreshing change from sitting at a computer all day, playing with spreadsheets. Actually, 'refreshing' isn't quite the word, now I come to think of it. Still, it was fun, and almost certainly good for me.

The only trouble is, it was sunnier than I thought at the time, considering it was raining on and off all day, and I've got sunburnt on my face and arms. This wouldn't be a huge problem, I get sunburn all the time and it just turns into a really nice tan - but I was wearing my stylish bandana on my head, and now I've got a really visible tan line across my forehead. I look, to put it as nicely as possible, like a complete weirdo. I'm going to have to wear a hat or bandana constantly. Not a terrible hardship for me, obviously, but it's going to look weird at the office.

Hey, I know what I'll do! I'll wear a wig! It'll look very professional, and stylish!

Working time

It's our department's now-annual Business In The Community day tomorrow, so we're all trekking out to a field behind a school to haul loads of compost up a hill and plant things in a garden. At least the weather will be nice, hopefully.

And then, well, after a normal working day on Friday, I've got three days' holiday at the start of next week. The plan is to jump-start my memory training and/or find something else exciting to do with my life (I haven't decided yet), although I'm also going to do an interview on Radio Nottingham on Monday morning, since they asked nicely. Still, five days off, I can do no end of productive things in that time! I won't, of course, but it's theoretically possible!

Memory Gym

A couple of people have asked me what I use to practice memorising spoken numbers. And since I seem to be too lazy to reply to emails at the moment, here's a public plug for The Memory Gym, as created long ago by Australian memory men Tansel Ali and Metin Hassan. There's more than just spoken numbers on the website, but that's a good place to start, it's a quick and convenient way to do a bit of training. Have fun!

Silver lining

If anyone's keeping track, you might have noticed that not only did England lose to Germany, but Switzerland are also out of the World Cup, meaning that not only will I not win the office sweepstake (another £2 down the drain - gambling will be the ruin of me), but also I won't win the World Memory Championship unless I can find another omen to put my faith in.

What with Germany winning the Eurovision Song Contest and Britain coming last, it seems clear that I need to find some kind of international competition that Britain can beat Germany at, just to prove that it's still possible. Luckily, it turns out that it's still Wimbledon fortnight, and the entire nation of Germany has been completely rubbish at tennis ever since Boris Becker and Steffi Graf retired. Consequently, I can say with great confidence that as long as Andy Murray refrains from being knocked out until after the remaining Germans in the doubles competitions have made their exit, Britain will have been proved to be the best after all, and the WMC is mine all mine!

And it's entirely the referee's fault!

It would have been so much more thematically appropriate if England had lost 4-2 to Germany, with one of England's goals being a controversial one that hit the crossbar and bounced just behind the line. Bad refereeing and a lack of hawkeye technology on the goalline has ruined a resoundingly ironic scoreline. Bad drama.

Anyway, I got a Whoopee Annual 1985 for 50p today (most of the pages are detached from the spine, but they're all in there), so I'm happy. Ah, the Bumpkin Billionaires. Now that's skillful writing - every strip had a plot of "the family try to get rid of all their money but somehow end up richer than ever", and they produced one a week for something like twenty years, and they were usually very funny too! And Fun Fear and 'Orrible Hole and Evil Eye... it's been said before but it's still true, kids these days are terribly deprived, growing up without entertainment like this.

That last blog post was an accident

I clicked the "Publish Post" button before so much as typing a single word, and for some reason Blogger isn't programmed to ask you "Are you sure you want to publish a completely blank post?" Which is nice to know, just in case I do want to publish something completely blank in future.

Anyway, what I was going to say was that I've had an extremely satisfactory day today - I've practiced memorising countless packs of cards, abstract images and spoken numbers, watched two quite good games of football and one downright excellent episode of Doctor Who (I haven't been hugely impressed with the latest series, generally, but the final two-parter was awesome) and eaten a lot of food that isn't good for me. What more could anyone want from a Saturday in summer?

Well, it would have been more satisfactory if my experiment to speed up my speed cards speed had been a bit more successful (and speedy), but never mind. Failed experiments are useful too, and I'm sure I can come up with a short-cut to get consistently below that 21.9-second mark...

All's well that ends well

I've been in a shakespearey kind of mood recently. On the way to Germany the other week I bought an inexpensive collection of four tragedies, and I can safely say that Hamlet and King Lear are both really quite awesome. I must get myself a complete works some time. It'd look good on my new bookcase.

Tennis!

See, I told you I'd blog about something different tonight! Tennis, or men's singles tennis at any rate, is rubbish. It went through a period a few years ago where it wasn't so rubbish, but now it's more rubbish than it ever was. Case in point - that match tonight that has just been suspended at 59 games each in the final set. No breaks of serve. This is what happens when players are all about big serves and no technique, and that's a fair description of all the top players in the men's game at the moment. So now once again people are saying we should scrap the rule that there are no tie-breaks in the final set, but frankly if you do that you might as well just have the two players toss a coin at the start of the game to decide who wins - it would be just as accurate a measure of tennis-playing ability.

Tennis bosses, whoever you may be (I don't really know who owns tennis nowadays), take the technology out of it, make them play with old-fashioned wood-and-catgut rackets, and we might actually see some interesting games.

More Memory News!

I know, I know, but there's a whole lot of news happening in the memory-sports world at the moment, and I feel that I really need to report this one too. Tomorrow, I'll talk about something completely unrelated to memory. And not about football either, even if Capello leaves Jermain Defoe and Joe Cole on the bench and England lose miserably and Emile Heskey accidentally permanently cripples Wayne Rooney by tackling him by mistake...

So, here's the latest news, as emailed out to everyone at lunchtime today:

The UK Open International Memory Championships

Competition Schedule published

In view of the fact the the World Memory Championships has been postponed till December, the WMSC has acted swiftly to keep faith with competitors who have been preparing so hard for those dates. The UK Open International Championships will now be staged in London on Thursday and Friday August 26/27 - the same we we had all planned to be in China. This will be a two day event to International Standards and arbited by Phil Chambers.

The venue is being kindly sponsored by MWB Business Exchange who operate a number of excellent meeting venues around London and beyond. Their website is www.mwbex.com We are still in dicsussions with them as to which of their venue would be most suitable. This will be announced shortly.

Already current reigning World Champion Ben Pridmore has registered, along with past World Champion Andi Bell. Boris Konrad, the President of MemoryXL will also be there along with competitors from Philippines, Turkey, Netherlands, USA, Wales, Sweden and Norway. The competitor registration fee will be 40 pounds to cover the cost of translations and printing of papers. A registration form can be found by clicking here REGISTRATION FORM
The Programme is as follows
DAY ONE:

8:45 Competitors Arrive and take seats
9:00 Welcome
9:30 15 Minute Abstract Images
9:45 Collection of papers
9:50 30 min Recall
10:30 30 Minute Binary
11:00 Collection of papers
11:05 1 hour Recall


12:05 LUNCH

1:05 Competitors take seats
1:15 15 Minute Names and Faces
1:30 Collection of papers
1:35 30 min Recall

2:15 5 Minute Numbers (trial 1)
2:20 Collection of papers
2:25 15 min Recall
3:00 scores announced

3:15 5 Minute Numbers (trial 2)
3:20 Collection of papers
3:25 15 min Recall

3:55 30 Minute Cards
4:25 Collection of cards
4:35 1 hour recall
5:35 End of day 1 (marking cards event)


DAY TWO:


8:45 Competitors Arrive and take seats
9:00 Announcement of scores


9:20 15 Minute Words
9:35 Collection of papers
9:40 30 min recall


10:30 30 Minute Numbers
11:00 Collection of papers
11:05 1 hour Recall


12:05 LUNCH



1:05 5 Minute Historic Dates
1:10 Collection of papers
1:15 15 min recall


1:45 Sound test for spoken numbers
2:00 Spoken Numbers (trial 1 - 100s) - papers on floor
2:02 5 min Recall
2:25 Announcement of scores


2:35 Spoken Numbers (trial 2 - 200s) - papers on floor
2:39 10 min Recall
3:05 Announcement of scores


3:20 Setup for Speed Cards
3:40 5 min max - Speed Cards
3:45 5 min Recall
3:50 Check speed cards
4:00 Announce results


4:15 Setup for Speed Cards
4:35 5 min max - Speed Cards
4:40 5 min Recall
4:45 Check speed cards
5:00 End of competition


7:30 Prize Ceremony
8:15 Celebrations

Look out for a further announcement shortly


Well, I suppose I'd better go and register, seeing as they're telling everybody that I already have. But anyway, this is excellent news! A proper 'international standard' competition in Britain! And the timing of memory championships is now very nice, with this one in August, Germany in November and then the big kahuna in December (hopefully)! Coupled with a good training regimen, I might do okay after all...

The most interesting news is that Andi Bell has 'registered' for the UK championship (might be in the same way that I've 'registered', by sending Chris an email saying I'd come along if they organised a championship, but still). Andi at a WMSC-organised competition with no prize money? That would be something new. I was expecting to see him at the world championship, but if he's really coming to London, that suggests a fundamental change in his attitude.

Andi's main weakness is his monumental power of self-belief. He's spent the last five or six years coming to competitions with the genuine belief that he's going to win, and then finding out that he's not been training and can't achieve the wonders he thought he could. If he's going to take part in a two-day competition like this, it's because he wants to practice for the world championship, which means he's being realistic about his abilities, which means he might be a genuine threat in China in December! Sounds like it might be a great championship...

Magdeburg Hemispheres

I didn't go bike-riding today, I went to Sheffield on the train instead. It still counts as avoiding memory training, I suppose, but at least it's creative. I also bought a new bookcase from Argos yesterday and assembled it myself tonight while watching the football. This will, when I've got round to putting books on it, remove the pile of books currently littering my bedroom floor and will make my flat a more orderly place, more conducive to memory training, so it doesn't count as procrastination at all.

On the way to Sheffield, I passed the time by mentally calculating the volume of a hemisphere of radius 17.3... somethings. I don't actually know what the unit of measurement was, but it doesn't really matter. Anyway, the reason for this is that it was the final task in the Mental Calculation World Cup, and I thought it was a completely awesome question to ask (Magdeburg is big on hemispheres - Otto von Guericke demonstrated the amazing capabilities of his vacuum pump by way of hemispheres and horses in Magdeburg). We got the formula two-thirds-pi-r-cubed and pi to 50 decimal places, and ten minutes to work out the answer as accurately as possible. I got it completely wrong on the day, so this was an exercise to prove I'm entirely capable of doing something like that really. The ability to memorise intermediate results really comes in handy in that kind of question, so it should be a speciality of mine. And yay, I did get it right today (within 0.015, anyway), so that just goes to prove something. Maybe I'll make more of an effort before the next mental calculation competition and try to get good at it.

Also, here's an interesting point raised by an anonymouse - the Asian Games are from November 12 to November 27, the World Memory Championship is now scheduled from December 1 to December 6, and then the Asian Para Games will take place from December 12 to December 19, all in Guangzhou. If the government of Guangzhou doesn't want the WMC to happen before the Asian Games, do they really want it to be sandwiched in between the two like that? (And then there's the question of whether the official explanation is entirely accurate. I'm saying nothing, except to point out that last year's wasn't...)

Vicious cycle

It's the Great Notts Bike Ride tomorrow. I haven't registered for it this time, but I'm sort of contemplating going along anyway. I probably won't, if only because I realise I'd only be doing it as an excuse not to practice memorising, and I want to be fierce with myself about that. If I've got until December now, it's actually not impossible for me to do reasonably well, with just a little bit more devotion and motivation than I'm currently mustering.

Still, I'm going to stop blogging about memory stuff now, I've been doing that too much lately. I'll find a new and exciting subject tomorrow.

Post-match postscript

Well, that was rubbish. I'm watching the Slovenia game on Wednesday on the big screen in one of the conference rooms at work, and we'd better win that, or the combination of England going out of the World Cup and me being at work would just be too depressing for words...

Spreading the word

Just for the benefit of anyone whose sole source of memory-related information is my blog, here's the email we got from the WMSC early this morning, just as I was about to set off for work:

URGENT and IMPORTANT Announcement
The China Organising committee has written the following letter to the World Memory Sports Council and have asked that we immediately pass this on to all competitors.

“Dear World Memory Sports Council,

It’s known that China had won the bid to host the 19th World Memory Championships in 2010, and it was to be held from August 21st to August 27th in Guangzhou, China.

This will be the first time for China to host this international memory sports event. World Memory Championships represents the world’s greatest test of memory and is of great importance to the development of human minds and the Chinese people are endeavouring to host a high-level and distinctive WMC.

We are grateful for the trust that WMSC puts in us and are honoured to be given the opportunity to host this great event. At the same time, we are also keenly aware of the heavy yet lofty responsibilities we bear.

In order to maximize the international influence of the WMC and make it more authoritative, we’ve been seeking the co-operation of the Guangzhou government since the successful bid of the 19th WMC, with the hope of attracting the public, news medias and more memory sports fans to participate in this championship.

However, as the 16th Asian Games are to be held in Guangzhou from November 12th to November 27th, this become the focus of the Guangzhou government and they have now made it clear that there should be no big event to take place in Guangzhou before the Asian Games.

Under these circumstances, the 19th WMC is now officially postponed to a new date, December 1-6 , 2010 . All other previous arrangements, including the prize find, will be honoured then in full.

So China Organizing Committee informs all the foreign competitors to suspend their bookings of airline tickets and hotels. We are sorry for the inconveniences caused by this decision, and we sincerely hope that WMSC can assist us in informing the registered competitors of this delay as well as explaining to them the reasons why we must make such a decision. We (China Organizing Committee) extend our sincere thanks here.”

On receiving this, the Council has naturally made forceful representations on behalf of all competitors to our hosts in China, to ascertain why this announcement has been made now, so close to the event. We understand that they have been in negotiations for some time with the Provincial Government to try and avert this possibility, but to no avail. We are only too aware of the enormous upset and inconvenience their announcement is going to cause. It has come as a great surprise and shock to us all.

We will share any further information as soon as we receive it.


And this from the GGK, about the German championship:

Hallo Ben,

the next German Memo Open will be in Heilbronn on the 12./13. th of November 2010.

We would be glad to see you again .

Klaus Kolb


Short and sweet, that one. Anyway, this is terrible! Shocking! Enormously upsetting! That means no memory competitions at all this summer! What am I going to do for my summer holidays? I'll have to go to the seaside, like normal people! I'll be forced to sit in a deckchair on Skegness beach, wearing a knotted hanky on my head and reading a newspaper! And I bet a crab will come along and nip my toes, too! Not to mention the horrific cruelty I'll have to inflict on some poor donkey by riding on its back, and it's ENTIRELY the fault of the WMSC and GGK and whatever-initials-the-Chinese-memory-organisation-uses!


But to be serious, although this rearrangement can actually only be a good thing for me, assuming it happens like that (let's face it, there's a good chance that 'postponed' will be a precursor to 'cancelled altogether'), because I now have six months to prepare for the WMC instead of two, I'll get the German championship and maybe a UK championship before it, to build up the preparation and stamina, and because I feel vindicated in my "don't book your flights and hotels until the last possible moment, everyone" advice once again... on behalf of the memory competitor community in general, I'm annoyed. 'Enormous upset' is putting it a little too strongly, but definitely annoyed. The more the WMSC pretends it's a real organisation with official bids and forceful representations and things, the more annoying it is when things go wrong every year. If they'd just act like the well-meaning and generous amateurs they are, we'd all have more of a sense of all being in it together, easy-come-easy-go, never-mind-eh, let's-get-together-and-decide-what-to-do-next kind of spirit, and we'd get a proper World Memory Championship every year without the plans being changed at the last minute.

So, let's assume that we do get a full memory competition schedule in the winter - we really need to fill that summer gap with something. Everybody except me has been training hard for a World Memory Championship in August, I say we arrange a full three-day competition somewhere cheap, in Britain, Germany or wherever is convenient, on or around the dates when we were expecting to be in China. And everyone can help out with the organisational duties. Who's interested?

Interview

There's a journalist who's sent me four emails over the course of the last day, asking for a quick interview. I've just been too lazy to reply (I've got the usual pile of emails from friends that I haven't responded to yet, let alone the emails from the international press [by which I mean Radio Nottingham and a French magazine], so I apologise to anyone reading this who's waiting to hear from me), and it occurred to me that I should prepare some answers in advance, since people always ask the same questions. So, all you journalists out there, here's the Zoomy FAQ:

Q: How do you remember things?
A: I don't remember things, I'm just really good at guessing.

Q: I've forgotten where I put my car keys, can you help?
A: They're on the kitchen floor, near the sink.

Q: Have any interesting memory-related things happened to you, involving Japanese chimpanzees?
A: Yes, I was once abducted by Japanese chimpanzees and forced to compete against them in a series of memory tests. I won easily, and the chimps conceded that humans are superior to them in every way.

Q: Why is your lucky shirt lucky?
A: Luckily enough, it conceals a very lucky small computer, hidden under the picture of a dragon, into which I can type all the numbers/words/abstract images I'm pretending to memorise, pretending to scratch my chest. Then in the recall period, by a remarkable stroke of luck, I can print out a perfectly-recalled paper and win every competition. Also, the shirt was bought for my by my gal pal Emma Picot.

Q: What's your favourite colour?
A: I'm actually blind, and don't know what colours are.

Q: Please recite pi to 50,000 decimal places.
A: I've forgotten it. The 50,001st digit is 3, though.

Ovgu!

The Mental Calculation World Cup was held at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, and everyone got official university T-shirts that said "JETZT ABER OVGU!" in big letters on the back. I was confidently expecting 'ovgu' to turn out to be an obscenity in the native language of one of the competitors, but unfortunately it didn't. Still, I'm sure one day I'll be walking along the street and suddenly find myself punched in the back of the head by an offended Uzbek.

But nevertheless, I'm in a good mood today, because I got Switzerland in the office World Cup sweepstake, and they unexpectedly won. It's another of those omens I like to attribute to the World Memory Championship - if Switzerland win the competition, I will be absolutely guaranteed to win too!

Whine, whine, whine

It seems like all I do lately is whine about lacking motivation to practice memory. You'd think losing my favourite world record would get me back into it, but no. (Theatrical sigh) Ah well, maybe I'll just go to China and set a new world record for the worst ever score by a reigning world champion. It'll be hard to beat Clemens Mayer's 2007 record of scoring zero points by not competing, but I'll try.

Bah.

This is what comes of playing Emile Heskey. Why has Fabio Capello not listened to my constant moaning in private conversations with friends? He's only got himself to blame.

Anyway, this morning, I went into the Oxfam shop where I found that Bobby Bear annual a few weeks ago, and what do you know, now they've got Teddy Tail's Annual 1934! I'm quite certain that wasn't there the last time. But it's come from the same person - the Bobby Bear had 'David Hill, Xmas 1932' written by an adult on the inside front cover, this one has 'David Hill, 6, Xmas 1933' written presumably by David himself. He'd also grown out of the habit of scribbling on his books with pencil over the course of the year. He might have been disappointed with his 1933 Xmas present, though - it's nowhere near as much fun as the Bobby Bear. I know Teddy had slightly more history and prestige behind him, but his adventures aren't as interesting.

Anyway, I need to track down David Hill or the relatives who are posthumously giving his books to Oxfam - I have visions of a whole house full of classic comics that are being chucked in the recycling bin as we speak...

Congratulations!! You are the master of othello game!

You can play the 1988 NES othello video game here, if you want. It's very complimentary to you if you beat it.

Head-counting

I haven't really got the time to talk at length about the Mental Calculation World Cup, but I should just make it clear that it was an excellent competition, very well organised and a lot of fun. And the fact that a whole lot of grown men were hugely outclassed by an eleven-year-old girl makes it all the more fun! It's interesting that the best overall score in the events that all the competitors (except for me) had prepared for in advance was by the aforementioned youngest competitor, and the best score in the 'surprise tasks' was by the oldest. That probably says something about age or educational standards or something like that.

Anyway, I need to practice mental calculation some more. But more urgently, I need to practice memory. Starting next week, I'm going back to posting daily training scores on my blog. It worked for a fortnight or so, let's see if it can work again.

German Gehirn

Okay, lots of exciting adventures to describe, not much time (I've got a busy schedule of doing nothing planned), I'll just summarise things tonight. Firstly, it was the South German Memory Championship in Stuttgart, and I did more or less reasonably well. Only got a fairly lousy sub-300 score in speed numbers, and then a not-quite-my-best 870 in speed binary, something tolerable but not as good as I should be getting in abstract images, and perfectly reasonable scores in the German-language versions of names, words and dates.

Just as an aside, memorising words in a language you don't understand is an interesting process - I tend to make up meanings for all the words I don't recognise, which in some ways is more conducive to creating a memorable mental story than a list of randome words I do understand. It takes longer, though. And I would have got a better score if not for the internet, too. While recalling, I wrote down the word 'abbrechen', and thought to myself "Is that right? Doesn't feel right, but if it's not, where would I have got the word 'abbrechen' from? I have no idea what that means. It must be right!" Actually, it wasn't - the word was 'abschlagen'. So how did 'abbrechen' get into my head? From the internet cafe I popped into on my way to the competition, of course. When German computers ask you to confirm something, they don't say 'OK' or 'Cancel', they say 'OK' or 'Abbrechen', of course. Stupid internet.

Still, I got to have fun with other weird words - three in a row were 'Laborantin', 'Entwurf' and 'Mäuler'. I guessed (rightly, as it turns out), that the first is a female lab technician, but had no idea about the next two. However, I did happen to know that 'Ente' means 'duck', and 'Maulwurf' means 'mole', so obviously this mad Laborantin has created two unholy mixtures of mole and duck, which can both swim and burrow and so might possibly be the most advanced species on Earth.

Anyway, I was talking about the competition in general, wasn't I? I finished off with a fairly good 29.71 seconds in speed cards, which would have been just about enough to (unofficially, since I'm not South-German) "win" the championship if Simon hadn't managed to record a time. So I wandered over to see how he'd done, just in time to see him successfully recalling his pack, and revealing a staggering time of 21.90 seconds! For crying out loud! That was my favourite world record! And it's going to be really hard to get back, too! I have beaten that time in practice, but only by basically running super-fast through the cards, naming the 26 images and hoping they stuck in my brain. It works maybe one time in ten, so I can't really do it in a competition...

Anyway, apart from that, it was a great championship! The number of great German memorisers involved in organising or just hanging around was quite staggering - MemoryXL is an awesome organisation and we really need to get together and create a British equivalent. If only I wasn't so lazy.

Still, I didn't have time to stick around, I had to scurry up north to Magdeburg for the Mental Calculation World Cup, but I'll tell you about that tomorrow - this 'summarise' thing has turned into a bit of an essay. I didn't win that one either, if you were wondering.

Itinerary

Is a difficult word to pronounce if you have trouble with the letter R. So here are my plans for the next few days:

Tomorrow, crack of dawn, get train to Manchester Airport and fly to Stuttgart, arrive there pleasantly early in afternoon, find hotel (shouldn't be too difficult, even with my sense of direction, it's just over the road from the train station), see sights. I've been to Stuttgart before, a couple of times, but I'm sure the sights have changed a bit since last time.

Saturday, find University of Stuttgart (also right next to hotel and train station) and memorise small amounts of numbers, cards etc in a no-pressure kind of way, safe in the knowledge that my scores won't be counted because I'm not South German. Note to self - avoid wearing lederhosen, just in case someone mistakes me for a South German and publishes my terrible scores for the world to see. Also avoid making lederhosen-themed jokes in case they offend genuine South Germans. Then after competition, beetle off back to the airport, fly to Berlin, get a train to Magdeburg, get an S-Bahn to Barleben, find hotel (quite some way from the train station and it'll be dark by then - this is the point where the schedule might go wrong), go to sleep.

Sunday, be ferried back into Magdeburg by Mental Calculations World Cup organisers (hotels, meals, guided tours etc are all free of charge for competitors, as always), pose for photo, then try to remember how to do mental calculations. I haven't calculated anything mentally since 2006, so my hopes aren't high for lifting the World Cup for England.

Monday, more of the same.

Tuesday, get away from Barleben/Magdeburg in time to see the sights of Berlin, a city I've never once visited despite all my millions of trips to Germany, then fly back to London (because that was cheaper than Manchester, not to mention Birmingham which is much easier for me to get to and from by train but fails to provide any reasonably-priced flights on the days I want to fly to and from there). Get home probably late at night due to unexpected delays, go to bed just in time to get up for work on Wednesday. If I didn't find this kind of thing so much fun, I'd drop dead from mental exhaustion and stress.

Encouraging

I did a 30-minute cards practice tonight (it was going to be hour cards, but I felt my mind wandering about 15 minutes into it, so I changed my plans), and did 15 packs, all perfectly recalled without any real problems. That's pretty good, really - when I'm properly in form, I do 18. Maybe in a week or two I'll be back up to full speed.

Although on the other hand, it is the World Cup. Maybe if I'm lucky we'll get knocked out early as a result of unfathomably picking Emile Heskey, and there'll be no important games to distract me.

Last Call?

Good grief, it's only May. Since when are world memory championships organised so far in advance that they're sending me emails insisting that I register at this point in the year? Still, I thought I should reproduce it here, for the benefit of anyone who reads my blog but isn't on the WMSC mailing list:

There are now just twelve weeks to go to the 2010 World Memory Championships in China. With a prize fund of US$ 92,000, this is the biggest amount in prizes ever offered for a memory championships. So far competitors from 14 countries are registered, and this is expected to increase over the next few weeks. The logistics of organising a World Championships are enormous. Competitors may ask to compete in their native language, and resources required to prepare and translate the memorisation and recall sheets. In addition, arbiters are required who are fluent in all these languages. As a result, of this, it may be necessary to close the registrations earlier than in previous year, so that there is sufficient time for preparations to be made.

This is therefore the Last Call for competitors to register for the 2010 World Memory Championships . If you are planning to compete, please do not assume that the organisers will know this instinctively, if you haven't completed your registration form. Please click on http://www.worldmemorychampionships.com/2010RegistrationForm.asp and do so without delay. This also applies to our Elite Competitors - our Top Ten Memorisers. We can only make preparations for you, if we know you are planning to compete.

All competitors, regardless of rank, are require to pay their competition fee in advance of the competition. Registrations without a fee are not confirmed.

Also, please allow plenty of time to organise your travel visa to enter China. This may well take longer than expected. If you require a formal invitation, please email me by return.

The 2010 World Memory Championships in China promise to be the most spectacular so far. Don't miss out by leaving your registration too late.

I can't help thinking the "please do not assume that the organisers will know this instinctively" is inspired by my tendency not to tell anyone I'm coming to competitions and assuming they'll make all the necessary arrangements anyway. But if they really insist, I'll do it tomorrow. Can't be bothered tonight.

Also, "As a result, of this, it may be necessary to close the registrations earlier than in previous year, so that there is sufficient time for preparations to be made."? As a result of what? Everything that the first paragraph says has also applied in every previous world championship.

Still, it can't be a bad thing that everything's getting done in advance. Unless it gets cancelled again. Go and register, everyone!

Sluggish

Well, having done no memory training yesterday, I eventually managed to force myself to do a 30-minute-binary practice today, and wow, I don't remember ever being so slow and lumbering at memorising 1s and 0s. It's been a while since I last practiced, I know, but even so, today was exceptional. I had to really give myself a mental kick up the backside, repeatedly, not to give up half-way and go and do something else, but at least I managed to get over that hurdle and now, theoretically, it should be easier to get into the swing of things tomorrow.

But as for today, I only got through four and a half pages in the 30 minutes. I normally aim for seven and a half as a best-case-scenario, although only if my brain is running in a super-speedy kind of way do I get that far. I don't recall ever not getting to the end of the fifth page before, it's a bit scary.

Thing is, though, going so slowly makes my recall much more accurate - I normally think I'm doing well if I get about 80% of the rows correct, whereas today it was very close to 100%, and I ended up with a score of 3210, which is... well, it's not what I'd call 'good', but if I'm having a bad day I'm more or less satisfied with anything over 3000. And maybe next time I can increase the speed a bit without dropping too much of the accuracy. Maybe. We'll see, but if I can chain myself to the desk all day tomorrow, I might start thinking it's still possible to do well in Guangzhou.

(It isn't, but I like to try to be optimistic anyway)

Everybody, have you heard?

I think everybody probably has, but I was listening to the radio tonight when they played this completely awesome song that I've never heard before. A bit of internet research reveals that it's been covered by everybody in the universe and featured in no end of films and TV shows that I've heard of but not seen. But now I've officially added it to my mental list of great songs that I'm aware of the existence of. I wonder how many other classics there are out there that are still avoiding me?

Bank hol

Okay, this upcoming three-day weekend is officially, scientifically, the make-or-break moment for the 2010 world memory championship, in so far as it involves me. If I can do a proper weekend's hard work at memorising things for long periods of time, I can still possibly get back into championship-winning form. If I can't, I might as well give up on the idea and find another way to spend my summer. We'll just have to see.

It seems I'm too nerdy to wear a nerdy shirt

During all the excitement of Pac-Man's birthday last week, I spent some time looking for interesting Pac-Man themed websites. One of the coolest things was this shirt on the Errorwear website - it's a picture of level 256, when the program's level counter (having only been allocated two digits of hexadecimal to keep track of how many levels you've played) resets to zero and causes the game to get horribly confused and (by an interesting chain reaction of confusion) replace the right-hand half of the screen with colourful gibberish symbols. "Ooh, groovy!" I thought to myself. "I might have to buy one of those!" And then I looked more closely and read the little description... There is no level 256 in Pac Man. Upon reaching this summit, the game simply breaks, and this is how it looks. For that added touch, we've also set the displayed score to be 3,333,360 which is the highest possible score. If you eat every dot, every ghost, and every fruit for 255 levels, this screen and this score are your rewards.

But, but, but... that's not right! Actually, the game doesn't completely break as soon as you get to level 256 - Pac-Man and the ghosts can still move about what remains of the maze, and move freely around the garbled right-hand side (except for a few bits of wall here and there), you can eat all the dots on the left and the nine dots (some of which are invisible) that appear on the right, and keep scoring points. Once you've eaten them all, you just have to sit around and wait for the ghosts to kill you, because the game doesn't register that the level is over until 244 dots have been eaten and there aren't that many dots on the screen, but the game still technically works. The maximum 3,333,360 is the score you get if you score every possible point, including the ones on level 256. So you can't see a score of 3,333,360 on the screen at the start of level 256, like on the T-shirt! (and ANYWAY, the score display only shows six digits, so when you get above a million it just resets to zero again). This shirt is fundamentally inaccurate! I can't wear that!

It's great to be such a pedant, it really is.

On an unrelated note, if you ever get to watch the Japanese memory documentary, pay attention to one particularly exciting bit - they use a 'walking' sequence! Every documentary that has ever been made about me, the director has got me to walk along some pavement somewhere, with the idea that they could use it to link two other sequences together. It's usually raining, I'm generally fed up with filming at this point, and the walking footage always, without exception, ends up on the cutting-room floor. But in this one, check it out, there's me and Boris, carrying umbrellas and walking towards the university in Tokyo. You can't hear the dialogue, but I'm saying something along the lines of "Every documentary that has ever been made about me, the director has got me to walk along some pavement somewhere..."

And on another unrelated note, has it ever occurred to you, as it did to me and one of my reading kids today, that Sally and her brother from The Cat In The Hat must be about sixty years old by now? I wonder what they're doing now.

Backwards house

I mentioned last year that when it's hot, the living room and kitchen in my flat get all the sun and heat in the mornings, and the bedrooms in the afternoon. This might be a good thing for weekend memory training - forced out of the room with the TV and internet connection, I can spend the mornings in my spare-room-cum-study, memorising cards and things, and then when the sun creeps round to the back windows, escape it back in front of the telly when Doctor Who comes on.

I've only seen three episodes of the new series, for one reason or another. I always seem to be out on Saturday nights nowadays. So I still haven't made my mind up about Matt Smith...

It's like the end of an era

My trusty chess clock (which has never in its life timed a game of chess, but is very useful for othello) started saying "bat" at me yesterday, which is chess-clock-ese for "I need a new battery or four, or else I'm going to stop timing things for you." On opening it up, I found that two of the batteries in it are Woolworth's own brand ones. How deeply disturbing it is that I won't be able to buy any identical ones to replace them!

Actually, I can't remember how I got them in the first place - I've never in my life bought cheap batteries, I'm a sucker for advertising and I buy whatever the pink bunnies tell me to buy (obeying the pink bunnies causes me a lot of problems in life). They must have either come with the clock (I don't think they did) or been in some other appliance I stole the batteries from. Anyway, I'll have to throw them out and symbolically close the chapter of British life that was Woolworth's (or, as one blog-commenter once ordered me to write it, Woolworths). Unless anyone else in the world has still got some Woolworth's batteries on the go, which they almost certainly have.

And by the way, I don't mean 'throw them out', I mean 'put them in the battery recycling bin in my local Boots, obviously'.

Hillsborough is a very hilly place

I hadn't considered it before, despite it being my ancestral homeland, but the 'hill' part of Hillsborough is probably because there's lots of ups and downs there. Anyway, it was to the Hillsborough area of Sheffield that ten othello players flocked this morning for the latest regional tournament. I flocked rather later than the others, not having got out of bed in time to get the early train, and also didn't bring my othello set as I'd promised because I couldn't find one of the boxes of discs (no good ever comes of tidying up your flat for the benefit of Japanese TV crews). I didn't think that'd be a problem, though, since we always have enough boards, but it turned out that this was the one tournament where we didn't.

Lately we've become very uncoordinated at getting boards, clocks etc to the people who can bring them to the next event - this is almost certainly Geoff's fault for moving to Denmark and leaving the uncoordinated British to their own devices. Still, we improvised with three good boards, one rubbish titchy Character board and one i-phone othello app. There also weren't any transcript sheets, so we weren't able to preserve our games for posterity.

I arrived in time to find Iain waiting for our game - we played our game inside while the rest of the gang were out in a conservatory where the light was too bright to see anything and the temperature was somewhere in excess of 100 degrees, and I ended up winning. I'm not sure how, exactly, but it's the end result that counts. That's the first game Iain has lost in a regional this year, after draws with me in Oadby and Ian in London.

The tournament moved inside before everyone melted, to the main room of the pub - we weren't paying anything for the venue, but did have to put up with the general background noise. I proceeded to lose to Roy and Steve, as I generally do far more than I really should, while Ian drew with Iain again to head the leaderboard at lunch. After that, I beat Kali, wiped out Ali again, as I also did in London, and then followed it up by beating Ian in a completely awesome game that I wish I'd written down - I made lots of moves of the kind that common sense dictated would eventually go horribly wrong but never did. It was either a moment of inspired genius or the kind of game that would make the othello program wZebra swear at me and call me an idiot. Then I came alarmingly close to losing to Rob but somehow managed not to, to finish with five wins out of seven, and third place half a point behind the Ia(i)ns. Which is really quite cool.

It seems to me that just about every othello competition I ever attend can be summed up as "I beat the winners but lost to Roy and Steve". I need to find a way to stop doing that. Especially the losing-to-Roy-and-Steve part.

It's like Christmas!

Not one, not two, not two-and-a-half, but THREE different and unrelated parcels arrived for me today! From Japan! America! Norfolk! DVDs of my Japanese television exploits, which I'm sure are going to be fun, if slightly incomprehensible since they're in Japanese; some books I ordered from Amazon; and a book of Toby Twirl adventures from my sainted mother (see last week's blog about Bobby Bear for details, if you really want to).

It's probably because, according to the best Google logo ever (go and check it out, quick, while it's still the 21st of May!), today is Pac-Man's birthday! It's Pac-Mas! Not that I'm saying that Pac-Man is generally superior to our Lord Jesus Christ, but I think the presents are better. Let's make this an annual occasion when I get fun things in the post from everyone!

It's hot

Very hot! The kind of weather for gambolling gaily in the fields, although I still have to go to work so I haven't had much gambolling time. Here's what I'm doing for the next couple of weeks - going to Sheffield on Saturday for othello, theoretically doing some memory training on the Sunday and then throughout the bank holiday weekend after it so as not to make a complete fool of myself when I go to Stuttgart the next week to unofficially take part in the South German memory championship (which is technically only open to South Germans). Then, if possible (I haven't checked), I'm taking the train from Stuttgart to Magdeburg that evening and then, all tired and not having done any practice since 2006, competing in the Mental Calculation World Cup the next day. I don't mind making a complete fool of myself there. I do feel a little guilty about possibly taking a place in the competition away from someone who can actually mentally calculate (it's limited to 40 people, and the organisers choose which 40 applicants to accept), but only a little bit. When I come last, it will make the other 39 (barring the inevitable multiple no-shows) feel better about themselves.

Souvenir T-shirts

I'm wearing my World Memory Championship 2003 T-shirt at the moment. It's extremely groovy, but it sets me wondering "when was the last world championship that gave us T-shirts?" Was it 2003? Or did they do that at one or both of the Bahrain ones? I get a shirt every year from the German championship (which is good, because I don't own many shirts and I prefer not to buy clothes if I can possibly avoid it), but you don't often get one at the Worlds.

What I really wish they'd do is give out souvenir trousers at memory competitions. I only own two wearable pairs, and one of those is my work trousers that I couldn't be seen in public in outside of work hours for fear of being thought uncool.

Makes it all worthwhile

After an extremely stressful and irritating day at work, I must admit it's nice to go into a final meeting and having the conversation go:

"Hi, Ben. Have we worked together before? Your face is familiar."
"Maybe you've seen me on the telly. I'm the World Memory Champion in my spare time."
"Oh, yes! You did that thing with the barcodes, and the cards! That's amazing!"

Almost encourages me to try to remain the world champion forever.

The Wright brothers are turning in their graves

I don't comment on the news in my blog, as a general rule (a general rule that I break frequently, but a rule nonetheless), but sometimes I read a quote that makes me think "Gah!" One such quote comes from 'aviation expert' David Learmount today:

Technologically there's nothing we can do about this. We cannot build engines and aircraft which can fly safely through volcanic ash, it's just out of the question.

I ask you. What kind of person gets involved in the aviation industry with that kind of attitude? The whole concept of aeroplanes is fundamentally out of the question - you can't make a gigantic metal vehicle that somehow flies through the air! The very idea is completely ridiculous! But someone made one regardless, and I expect them to keep on making them, volcanic ash or no volcanic ash. So stop whining, David Learmount, and go and invent an ash-proof engine. How hard can it be? I'll expect to see one by the end of the week.

Aunt Kitsie

In a really awesome development all round, I found Bobby Bear's Annual 1933 in the Oxfam shop in town today, for only £3! More than a hundred pages of comics, stories, puzzles and instructions for making a book-table with two leaves from a wooden packing case! Two of the filler stories are even early works by Norman Hunter that I've never read before! This completely surpasses even the 1950 Toby Twirl book that I found in another Beeston junk shop last year, and proves that I'm living in the land of antiquarian anthropomorphic animal annuals!

Now, please go out and buy some Kiwi boot polish.

On an unrelated note, if you eat a lot of cherries, do they each count as one of your five a day?

Dumplings

Here's what I'm going to do. I did like the idea of going on X-Factor as a singer in Brazilian Mystery Cloak, but I don't think it's quite the career move for me - I disapprove of X-Factor (the TV show, I approve of the superhero comic, although the original incarnation was a lot better than the current one), but I did always enjoy Stars In Their Eyes, so I'm going to wait for that to come back. I could never decide whether to be Paul Simon or Meat Loaf (I don't think the world is quite ready for my Cher, which is the voice I do best).

No, what I'm going to do is learn to cook. I think I'm actually not a bad cook, for a bachelor - many of the meals I cook involve mixing two or even three packets of foodstuffs together - but I think I could be better. I haven't had proper suet dumplings since my dad died, and I'm sure it can't be difficult. I'm going to have proper ingredients in my kitchen cupboards, like flour and eggs and sugar and things. Maybe even spices! I've got a spice rack, after all, it'd be nice to put something on it. And I'm going to make stew. And casserole. That kind of thing. It'll be great!

I think my head's screwed on backwards

I'm having disturbing feelings of optimism about the new government of this country (I'm sure I'll get over it, don't you worry), and equally disturbing feelings of pessimism about memory competitions, mental calculation competitions and so on. I need to either find something else I can strive to be world champion at (because let's face it, life is meaningless unless you're at least trying to be some kind of world champion) or really make more of an effort to hold on to the memory title. But I'm still not really feeling like it. Consequently, tonight I'm watching the football and quietly enthusing about several very nice bits of the coalition agreement. Possibly I'm sickening for something.

I don't like being surveilled

There's a van that's always parked around here, with "Survey Solutions" written on the side. While it might be perfectly innocent, I prefer to believe that it's actually some shady government agency surveying my every movement and using an elaborate double bluff to try to cover its shady activities. I need to invest in some kind of lead-lined windows. Which will also help with insulation, it's cold around here at the moment.

Wails

It seems to be becoming an annual tradition that the Welsh Championship is where I realise how very badly out of practice I am. Only last year, the Welsh Championship was in March or something (I don't remember exactly, my memory is bad) and the World Championship was in November. Now if I want to do any good in China, I've got three months to improve from 'rubbish' to 'good' (to use my own scientific terminology for how well I can memorise things).

It's a stamina thing, pure and simple. I hadn't spent a full day memorising competitively for six months, and by lunchtime I was done for. I got entirely acceptable scores in the first four disciplines, then it went 10-min-cards: 4 packs. 5-min numbers: 203 (only attempting 243 because I was very, very slow and I knew I couldn't do more than that without making a mess of it). Abstract images: 150 (again, that was all I attempted). Historic dates: 60-something. All a long way below what I can do if I can just stay more awake in the afternoon.

I set myself a modest target of at least beating Christian's score from Cambridge last week, and a 96 in the spoken numbers just put me over that level with one discipline to go, so I could safely attempt two fast packs of cards, safe in the knowledge that I had no chance at all of getting them right, but not really minding. And yes, I did make mistakes - just a couple in the first pack, and then found I couldn't even remember the first pair of cards in the second attempt. So I ended up with a final score in the low 6000s, which I suppose could be worse. But that's not the performance of someone who wants to win the world championship.

I don't think I do, to be honest. I'm seriously asking myself which is less offensive to my fellow competitors - not competing at all, or competing and doing badly. If I was one of my rivals, I wouldn't want to beat an obviously out-of-shape Ben, but I wouldn't want him to drop out and not give me the opportunity to beat him, either. I could get back up to world-number-one standard with three months of solid work, but... I can't see it happening.

Anyway, enough about me. We had seven competitors in Newport - John Burrows and Antonio Campo forming the Welsh contingent (yes, he's Welsh, despite the name. They have burrows in Wales too and there are at least as many Welsh people called John as people who call themselves Ieuan), me by myself as Team England, Idriz and Mattias from Sweden, Conor from Ireland and Roy from Hong Kong. Mattias continues to get great scores, improving on his Cambridge performance with 3000-points-plus to take second place - John was third and the new Welsh Champion. Arbiting was professional and excellent as usual, courtesy of Dai, Phil and Warren. Congratulations to everyone, and long may the Welsh Open continue!