The story so far

If you want to keep up with what's happening in the big wild world of memory competitions, you really need to be reading Johann Randall Abrina's blog! Just to look at that summary of all the competitions so far this year fills an old-timer like me with a warm glow of satisfaction - when I started out, there were three or four competitions a year, at the very most, in the whole world! Now even a backwater of modern memory like the British Isles has that many itself, and the cool countries are all running their own competitions all over the place too!

I think the 'big' competition before the world championships is still the German Memory Open, buried though it is in such a busy summer calendar, but don't forget the UK Memory Championship a month later (that link isn't a website of its own, just a note that it's going to happen, but it really is definitely going to happen, and worth going to!)

Or take your pick from any other event on the calendar - that's Mnemotechnics.org, which keeps a good and accurate list of what's happening. There will be a World Memory Championship too, most likely, but they're adopting the successful technique from last year of not revealing any details and then having to retract it when they change. So I don't need to warn anyone not to book their plane tickets, unless they're the kind of person who just guesses the date and location of a memory championship, buys a first class ticket and hopes for the best. And if they are, they probably wouldn't listen to me.

We haven't moonwalked with horses for a while

The following statements were collected by the police:

GUSTAF BOGGINS, HORSE POLISHER: "So there I were, out on the street, washing me 'orse wi' soap an' water before I gives 'im the polish, when round the corner comes this bloke what weren't wearin' no busters [trousers] and I faints clean away in the gutter."

LORD VALIANT, OWNER OF HORSE: "I went into the street to remind the horse polisher to pay particular attention to the tail area, when I suddenly saw him gasp, point and collapse. I looked in the indicated direction and saw a man looking for all the world like Vocator [legendary figure who wore trousers] before he first donned the garment that made him famous. On closer inspection, I saw that he was whirling his Vocator's Article [trousers] about his head in a mad manner. I hastened back inside, fearing the social ruination that would come from being seen in the proximity of such a man, and so didn't see where he went."

VIC BANDYSHAW, HORSE POLISHER'S SUPERVISOR: "I was just checkin' up on Gustaf on account of that toffee-nosed twerp what owns the horse being so particular about its bum being polished good, when here comes this bloke waving 'is Blandford Forums [trousers] in the air instead of putting 'em on his legs like normal folks do. So I shouts 'Hoy, Parcruxis [foe of Vocator and thus by extension a derisory term for anyone opposed to trousers, although the legendary Parcruxis did in fact wear trousers himself], put yer Blandfords [trousers] back on and stop botherin' my 'orse polisher!' But he didn't pay no attention to me, so I just goes and picks Gustaf up out of the gutter, on account of he's sensitive about these things and he'd gone and fainted, so I didn't see what 'appened to old Parcruxis."

DAME DORIS GURDY, GENTLEWOMAN: "I happened to glance out of my window, and what should I see but a pair of overlegs [trousers] being brandished in a most alarming manner. I would have watched further, but I noticed Lord Valiant in the vicinity and hurried away to telephone all our social acquaintances. Now he won't be able to enter a room in decent society without being greeted with 'Good morning, Doctor Overlegs [trousers]!' That's the end of him, socially speaking! So no, I didn't pay any more attention to Mister Lacking-In-Noncontrivances [trousers, but only when the word is used, as in this case, in a negative construction; otherwise it means baked beans] and can't tell you any more."

"BROWN HAROLD", HORSE: "Neigh, whinney, neigh-neigh, hrrumph [trousers], whinney, neiiiiiiiigh."

Spare change?

Okay, here's the thing. For people who haven't been following my life in full detail (which I suppose I can forgive, since I haven't been blogging about it very much, so you would have had to be using some kind of spy satellites and phone-tapping), I've been only sporadically working for the last two years, rather beyond the limits of the time I intended to take off full-time good-money-earning accountancy-cum-financial-analysis, and for want of being able to land a permanent job in that field, I'm currently working in a lower-level admin job. Which, to my surprise, I'm really completely loving and want to do forever, if not for the teensy problem that it doesn't quite pay enough money to cover the costs of the various debts I've racked up.

So, basically, I find myself needing an influx of cash, to pay life's unavoidable bills and not end up out on the streets. So if anyone could throw a little into my begging bowl, which is a Paypal account using my email address, which is zoom_zoom_ben and it's at yahoo.co.uk, I'd really really appreciate it. Any money received will be considered a loan, to be paid back with interest and gratitude as and when my ship comes in. Regular readers will know that my ship does come in, fairly regularly, every now and then, whenever people see fit to give me money for being good at remembering things. And that there really are people out there who still pay big salaries for people who are good with Excel spreadsheets (though I think their numbers are diminishing - big bosses know how to turn on a computer nowadays, which is bad news for the financial analysts of the world).

I do have one memory gig coming up next week, at an art exhibition. Maybe that's a good way to shmooze with modern art people, who always like to pay me to do things. I really need to make more of an effort to make money in these last dying seconds of my fifteen minutes of fame.

Anyway, in summary - money, please? Paypal? zoom_zoom_ben? yahoo.co.uk? Cheques also accepted? Undying gratitude will be forthcoming?

What's the point of toes, anyway?

They don't really do anything, even if they're freakishly long like mine, and they really hurt if you somehow open the bathroom door over your big toe in the morning. And since I was in a hurry to get ready for work, I just put my sock on over it, and my shoe basically filled with blood over the course of the day. Really, it's a terrible wound, and it hurts a lot, so I'm quite entitled to whine about it.

D-d d-d d-d d, Turnabout!

Watching the tennis on Eurosport (which is better than watching it on ITV, even though they show exactly the same footage at exactly the same time, because on my telly at least Eurosport fits slightly more of the picture onto the screen, so you can actually see the score box rather than it being pushed off the left-hand side) always makes me think of Turnabout, the really great daytime quiz show of the early nineties, hosted by Rob Curling, who's now found gainful employment as Eurosport's tennis presenter. During school holidays or other idle time like study leave for GCSEs and A-levels, Turnabout was very much a highlight of the day! There was no Eurosport or anything like that back then, remember, just four channels, and very little to distract you from your revision on any of them. If not for Turnabout, I might even have had to do some work and pass my exams! So we've all got a lot to be thankful to Rob Curling for.

It's not just mobile phones

Really, it's any kind of modern technology. I mean, I hear there's some kind of new X-Box or Playstation or something that's just come out, that allows the government to spy on you, or something (or maybe it's just that it's not compatible with some other kind of X-Box or Playstation, but I hear a lot of people complaining, anyway) that I know not even the most basic thing about. Perhaps I should try to learn about these things, but I think I'll stick with playing Bubble Bobble on my Master System. It's a lot more fun than these modern games, according to my limited understanding of them.

I haven't got a microwave, either.

I've got a mobile phone!

Well, it's Dai's, he left it here by mistake, and the battery's flat. I think the main thing preventing me from getting a mobile now, apart from that I've got no money, is that I'd have to learn how to use one. It's a bit embarrassing, really. If I ask anyone for instructions, they'll think I'm some kind of unbelievably ignorant eejit. Which I am, but people don't have to know about it.

Rain, rain, go away

What's with the weather? We had a beautiful, hot, sunny bank holiday weekend, and then it went back to cold and rainy and horrible when we go back to work! How are we supposed to complain about the weather if it does things that we want it to do?

All friends together

The Friendly Memory Championship 2013 was a great and friendly success! For one thing, the weather was lovely and sunny after a pretty miserable, cold and rainy week - it always seems to improve when I hold an event at Attenborough Nature Reserve, I should do it more often and fix the whole British-weather problem overnight.

On Saturday people started arriving in Beeston or Attenborough, and we got together in the evening at the Victoria pub down the road, which I heartily recommended but turned out to be having a bad day, and took absolutely ages to bring us our food - but still, a good time was had by all. Dai Griffiths had brought along newcomer-to-the-memory-world Peter Broomhall, as well as a whole lot of pot noodles (I'm still not sure exactly why), to stay at my place and act as arbiters in the competition, and competitor Ryan Smith was crashing here too - I'm always impressed by how amicably memory people settle the question of who gets my spare bed and who gets my very small and uncomfortable sofa.

So to the competition day on Sunday! We arrived at the nature centre's conference room just a bit after nine, thanks to a lost debit card along the way (don't worry, it turned up in Ryan's bag) and greeted the gang of competitors who'd travelled from all over the world, mostly Scandinavia, to be there. We had Jonas von Essen from Sweden, Ola Kåre Risa from Norway and Søren Damtoft from Denmark, for a complete set of nordic languages represented; Takeru Aoki all the way from Japan, just for this competition (how awesome is that?); and Hein van Heck all the way from, well, Wales, but he's Dutch, so it counts as international.

We also had a whole gang of English competitors, all except Ryan being new to memory competitions this year - Darren Ferguson, Phil Peskett and Mike Outram who made their debuts in Wales, and Robert Frost and Phill Ash appearing for the first time here (Phill's appearance was a bit delayed, he turned up late and joined the fun after lunch, but it still counts). Hopefully we're genuinely starting to build up a crowd of regular British memory competitors now, because I'd been worried we were going to become extinct altogether. Completing the set was Darren's wife Claire, joining the team of arbiters.

I'd been very worried about the arbiting, since Phil Chambers couldn't come and he's usually so instrumental in making things work, but everything ran smoothly all day, thanks to our team. We were still able to keep the Friendly Championship tradition of marking papers and announcing results quickly and accurately, even with the need to triple-check a couple of particularly impressive results. The only glaring error came with the spoken numbers, when I'd managed to save a 400-digit collection with the 100-digit filename, and so played too many numbers before we realised what was wrong. It didn't seem to disturb the leading contenders too much, though...

The first of those particularly impressive results came in the second discipline, 5-minute binary, when Ola produced a phenomenal score of 1016! New world record, which he had obviously been working hard on ever since at the Italian championship this year he beat the existing record only to have it simultaneously beaten at the same time by two even better scores. Our other world record came from Jonas in the spoken numbers, with a completely awesome 318! Scores in spoken numbers are just skyrocketing lately, I don't know why that is.

For both of our Scandinavian superbrains, that was their first world record - breaking the German/Chinese domination of the world record list up a little! Ola's record gave him the lead in the competition which he narrowly held until the spoken numbers, when Jonas moved back ahead and eventually won, with both of them getting a safe but still impressive time of just over 45 seconds in the speed cards. Takeru and Søren fought it out for third, with Takeru ending up on top, Hein came fifth and the battle of the English was won by Phil, with Robert pushing him close all the way.

After the competition and the traditional drink in the pub down the road, a gang of us came back to my place to eat pot noodles and watch The Mentalists, which Dai had brought with him on DVD. During the day I'd been wearing my Memory Man costume, including the black turtleneck, and then changed into my Yellow Submarine T-shirt, so it was funny to see myself modelling both of those on the documentary from six years ago - possibly I need to buy new clothes more often. Still good to see that impressive capturing of the 2007 memory world, though the pot noodles didn't go down too well with our foreign guests. I think you have to be British to appreciate them.

The scores can all be seen here - Jonas's win moves him to fourth place on the world ranking list, displacing me down to fifth, and Ola climbs to number seven! But I'm sure our new team of English superstars-in-the-making will be up in the top ten in no time.

In the evening, Jonas and Ola asked me what my first world record was, and I couldn't really remember. There was the poem world record that didn't really count, in the MSO competition 2001 (it was a much more memorable poem than the rules dictated it should be), and I suppose that had already got me excited enough that when I did break an official record (historic dates, world championship 2003) it got swallowed up in the general excitement of doing so well in the world championship overall. Or maybe it did mean more to me, and I've just forgotten over the last ten years - I do remember taking some pride in listing the world records and seeing my name on the list alongside the real greats. I'm getting old...

Okay, I think we're all set

All I need to do is clear a few piles of rubbish out of my living room, and I'm ready for people to come round for the weekend's memorising!

Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!

I have an increasing number of white hairs in the moustache and goatee bit of my beard that have resisted the all-over whitening of the rest of my facial hair so far. I fondly remember, not ten years ago, pulling out the couple of white hairs in my otherwise uniformly dark brown/black beard, to make sure it looked good on some special occasion. Now I'm pretty sure it'll only be a few more years before I can fulfil my ambition to grow a big bushy Santa beard in time for Christmas. Which is wonderful, but on the other hand TV adverts keep telling me that all men want to cure their baldness and disguise their white hairs, so perhaps I'm just not right in the head.

Not your biggest fan, but maybe your medium-sizedest

I don't recall mentioning it for a while, but I really love Stephen King's books from around the mid-90s to the mid-00s. I don't really get on with his earliest stuff, or the more recent ones, but in that era, he really strikes a chord with me. Situations like this always make me wonder what I would say if I met someone like that - "I really love certain of your works"? "Aside from those books that I don't particularly like, I greatly admire your writings"? Not that the situation's likely to arise, but I think it's important to be prepared for this kind of thing with some sort of snappy phrase.

Actually, I always hope that when I meet someone super-famous and awesome, they'll have heard of me. Never happened yet...

World Wide

Hello to the person, people or robot in Antigua and/or Barbuda who's given this blog 41 pageviews in the last 24 hours. I do love the stats page, but I wish there was a way to tell which visitors are evil mechanoids and which are people with a genuine interest in vague and largely meaningless drivel about memory competitions. It would just be nice to know just how many people stumble across this page searching for drivel, that's all.

Anyway, while I'm rambling, let me confess that I've very much let the memory training slide for the last couple of months, after being all enthusiastic about it earlier in the year. Maybe the people at the Friendly competition this weekend can encourage me to get back into it? It would probably help if you all jeer at me for not being able to remember things.

Friendly factoids

Sunday's competition will be the eighth Friendly/Cambridge Memory Championship! Interestingly, nobody has ever won the competition twice. This goes hand-in-hand with the other interesting fact that nobody who has won the championship has ever come back to it, ever. That's... kind of worrying, isn't it? Do I not applaud the winner enough? Well, Jonas von Essen is hopefully going to buck that trend and come back to defend his title this year, so maybe there'll be a new page in the history books...

Here's a memory memory that occurs to me - At the first Cambridge championship in 2006, one of the names in the Names & Faces discipline was the wonderfully evocative surname “Catchpole”. One of the German competitors remembered it as “Polegrab”, while one of the English memorisers (who didn’t have such a good excuse; it’s not that uncommon a name in England), rendered it as “Grabpole”.

It’s a natural mistake to make - poles, as a rule, don’t move, so if you picture someone ‘catching’ one, it will usually be a mental image of a hand grabbing a stationary pole. And when you come to translate it back from pictures into words, ‘grab pole’ is what will come to mind...

A Ba Ni Bi

I don't watch the Eurovision Song Contest. And I mean that in the way that some people say they don't smoke, because they only have three or four cigarettes a day, ten at most. As usual this year, I saw that it was on, decided I wasn't going to bother watching it, sort of left it on in the background while not actually watching it as such, and saw the whole thing.

The songs were pretty uniformly awful, as usual, but there's always one that I like, and that usually finishes somewhere low down in the top half - this year it was Hungary, with the very catchy "Kedvesem", by ByeAlex. I'd vote for it, if I watched Eurovision.

Rusty

See, I'm so unused to regular blogging, I forgot to mention a whole lot of things I was meaning to. So here's a bonus second post tonight!

I think I've given myself repetitive strain injury, flipping discs. My right thumb is sort of sore.

Also, just worked it out - if I hadn't beaten Imre in our game at Cambridge, he would have won the BGP, despite only coming to two of the three regionals, so that is actually quite cool and makes me feel that the great honour is much more deserved!

Tomorrow, I need to finish printing things out for the Friendly Memory Championship next Sunday! Yes, I've been ultra-organised this year, and have split Printing Things Out Weekend into two semi-weekends, to fit around my schedule! If only my organisation skills extended to having the faintest idea who's coming to the competition and who's staying at my flat, I'd be confident that everything will go just swimmingly...

Oad-thello

See, it was realising my last proper post was about one othello tournament and that I was going to another today, that made me resolve to get back to blogging more regularly. Oadby, traditional home of the first regional of the year, every March, proudly hosted the last regional in 2013's abridged schedule in the middle of May!

It was basically the same lineup of players as in Cambridge - the shortage of people who want to play in these tournaments is a factor in there only being three regionals this year, but we are firmly planning to be back to five or six for 2014. The difference between Cambridge and Oadby was Steve Rowe instead of David, and instead of Adelaide joining us for lunch, there was Jeremy Das joining us for the afternoon. But we stuck with the same format - a round-robin of 20-minute games and then a double round-robin of 5-minuters.

The results were roughly the same, too, except that I didn't beat Imre, meaning that he won the tournament outright, with Iain second. I was third, which means that I'm officially the winner of the British Grand Prix! This is the thing where you get points based on how well you do in each regional, and the overall winner is the BGP champion. The traditional way to win it is to be the one who attends all the regionals in the year, and I successfully carried out this clever strategy this time round (we only had three, and they happened to all be within cheapish travelling distance) to win my first ever BGP title! I'm so proud. That means that I get the George Greaves Memorial Trophy! It cost a whole twenty pounds, so it's a great honour to have on your metaphorical mantlepiece!

I know how much it cost because I'm the treasurer of the British Othello Federation. I never know how much money has been spent on trophies at memory competitions, and I'm always a bit curious. They range from little glass things of the type that can be bought for a fiver on the market, to really big heavy metal things that look like they genuinely cost a packet.

Anyway, my perfect-attendance prize technically qualifies me for the World Othello Championship in Stockholm in October. I'd really like to go, but I can't really foresee having enough money to do that. Barring a lottery win or a surprisingly lucrative memory-themed job, anyway. It's at times like this that I always regret quitting my job and living a life of idle vacuity for months on end, but I'm sure I'll do it again the next time I've built up enough of a stash of money to afford it...

Resolution

You know what? I'm going to start blogging on a daily basis again. And every post will be crackling with wit and effervescent with interesting stuff. Starting tomorrow!

From white to black... then flip them back!

Othello in the spiritual home of the game (in Britain, at least), Cambridge! Having bought extra-cheap advance tickets (the ones that are only valid on the specific trains they're booked for), I was a little worried when I got to Loughborough in the early hours of the morning to hear an announcement that the train down to Ely had been cancelled. Luckily, a porter (or whatever you call the people who work at train stations) came hurrying over to the platform, waving his hands and assuring everyone that the train hadn't been cancelled, it was just the computer that controls announcements had misunderstood the situation. What had actually happened was that the train was redirected - rather than going through places like Oakham and Stamford, it had to go back to Nottingham and then down the other line to Peterborough, avoiding whatever emergency had closed down the line it was supposed to be running on. So it was only cancelled for people who wanted to go to places like Oakham and Stamford, and frankly, I went to Stamford once, and it's really really boring.

So I got to Cambridge no more than fifteen minutes later than I was supposed to, still with plenty of time to walk from the station to the city centre (a walk that takes nearly half an hour - the train station at Cambridge, as well as being impossible to travel to directly from anywhere, is situated a long way from Cambridge proper; legend has it that they planned it that way deliberately, to keep the riff-raff away from the nice place) before the advertised start time of 9:30.

The competition was in the traditional and awesome surroundings of the Junior Parlour of Trinity College, scenic views from the window, right next to the city centre, usually a musician or two outside on the street (it was a violinist today), and there were six of us playing - me, Imre, David Beck, Iain, Roy and Marie - plus Adelaide joining us for lunch. I was worried about finishing in time for my advance-ticket-mandated 17:12 departure, but as it turned out we had more than enough time for a round-robin of 20-minute games followed by a double round-robin of 5-minute ones, a good pub lunch incorporating a British Othello Federation committee meeting and a leisurely stroll back to the middle of nowhere to get to the train station!

Iain won the main tournament on tie-break from Imre, whose sole loss was against me - I've mentioned a few times before that I always somehow beat him, and today's game was a fine example that prompted me to ask "What happened there? I was completely dead, and then suddenly I realised that I was going to win!" Analysing it on the all-knowing computer program WZebra, it's quite fascinating, and I might blog about it at greater length this long weekend. I was well and truly trounced by David and Iain, though. Imre won the five-minute tournament with 8½ out of 10, and I could only manage four wins - it's been a long time since my last speed-othelloing at the MSO, however many years ago.

All in all, a fun day out, and now I've got a normal two-day weekend (albeit with the shops closing early) before I have to go back to work again!

Zoomy of days gone by

Ace has kindly posted pictures of the great York get-together of 2001 on Facebook, and it provokes many thoughts within my brain. Firstly, that I would probably die if I tried to spend three solid days drinking so much booze now, at my age. Secondly, that I really didn't look good back then. Especially when wearing that polka-dot shirt that I thought was cool, but even allowing for that, there's no escaping the fact that that was during the period of my life when I didn't realise I was bald.

This may take some explaining. I knew I was baldING, and had been for years, but my mental image of myself was of someone with a reasonably nice head of hair still, whose receding hairline wouldn't really be noticed by the casual observer, especially if I was wearing my hat. It wasn't until late 2002/early 2003 that I thought to myself on looking in the mirror "Wow, I'm really properly bald! When did that happen?"

So looking at those pictures and seeing myself properly slap-headed in 2001 is a bit of a shock. It really brings home the depths of self-delusion I was under in those days. Hey, I was 24, and such reckless youths are allowed a bit of self-delusion, right? Plus that was during my particularly fat phase, and when I wore big round glasses that I thought made me look eccentric and cool... I'm quite grotesquely nerdy-looking in those pictures, as opposed to the "ultimate nerd who all the other nerds look up to" style that I totally pull off nowadays.

It's probably a good thing that I'm so happy with my appearance now. How many other people can look back on their early-twenties selves and say "Yep, I look a whole lot better now!"

Anyway, I'm going to Cambridge on Saturday for the othello regional! I thought I might have to give it a miss, because I'm really seriously having to avoid spending money at the moment, but advance train tickets sucked me in with their enticing cheapness, and I'll be there and back for £18... plus £10 entry fee for the competition, plus the price of a good pub lunch in one of those expensive Cambridge pubs, plus other ancillary expenditure, but the point is that you're not supposed to add these things up, and anyway, it's still a cheap day out with good company!

Adventures on the high seas

I had a really great dream last night, in which an acquaintance who happened to be the captain of a cruise ship gave me the job of first officer. As well as getting to wear a very swanky uniform, my adventures on the first day of the job involved a robotic ship's cat's heroic struggles against an evil genius rat called Boris (with apologies to the memory man Boris Konrad, who must have been on my mind at the time, but who isn't an evil rat in any way, shape or form), and a trio of armed women occupying one of the first-class cabins (although the guns turned out to be toys that fired harmless indoor fireworks). The job also paid £90,000 a year.

So now I really want to work on a cruise liner. I'm sure it will be exactly like that.

Keeping you in the loop

I've been more than a little neglectful of this poor blog lately. I didn't even mention that I was doing a memory performance yesterday for an upcoming TV show! If they decide to use it, anyway, because it wasn't a spectacular success. And I've got another performance at an art exhibition in June - what is it about arty types that attracts them to me?

And I didn't mention that I had an interview last Friday on Radio Lincolnshire. Which was also unspectacular, it has to be said. You would have thought I'd be great at these things now, because yesterday also saw the first proper public debut of my Memory Man Costume! Yes, no more shabby old clothes, I now do these things in a light brown three-piece suit, black turtleneck and of course the hat. It was, at least, successful - the TV people had brought something along for me to wear in case I looked particularly awful, but decided I was okay the way I was.

That's probably the first time I've scaled such sartorial heights as 'okay as I was'. I'm a clothes horse!

It's a good time to be a Doctor Who fan

Okay, we're three episodes in to the new series of Doctor Who (or the second half of series 7, as they strangely insist on calling it), and they've been three good ones! Nothing even approaching the depths of that one with the pirates last year, or the various other lows of the whole River Song saga, I've enjoyed the whole semi-series so far, and I can't wait for what's still to come!

Wa erf?

The Waterfall pub in Derby is now called the Wa erf, according to the big letters on the wall. I suspect someone must have stolen the other four letters - and given what they spell, and that you'd need to be able to reach about twelve feet off the ground to swipe them, all evidence points to someone who's of above average height.

The goggle box

While I was too poorly or too busy remembering numbers and things to be sitting in front of the telly, the Easter weekend saw the return of Doctor Who and Jonathan Creek! Yay!

Although the Doctor was pretty good, my thoughts on watching the opening moments went along the lines of "Oh, the whole world in some kind of peril again. Oh, wow, it's wi-fi that's our enemy this time. Didn't we already do sat-navs? Seriously, he's not even pretending he doesn't write these in the car on the way to work any more!" This was followed after the opening titles by "Where did they find that guy? It's not just that he can't act, he sounds like he's never heard anyone act, or talk, before! Meanwhile, the older monk talks like everyone used to in Doctor Who of the sixties. They really ought to do a special episode where all the actors talk like a fifty-year-old BBC drama, that'd be cool!" And then "Wait, the whole opening couple of minutes was just there to justify the clever episode title, wasn't it." And then there was "So how did the hulking great robot get into the upstairs of Clara's house so quickly? What, did it climb up the drainpipe?"

But after that, and after resisting the urge to just fast-forward through it and skip to the end to see the Doctor press the good old 'make everything okay again' button, there were some good points, and I did like the clever revelation that it wasn't the real Doctor who'd broken into the building. Steven Moffat does write the exact same story over and over again, but it's usually entertaining when he does.

But then I can't help thinking "Maybe Doctor Who should try to be Jonathan Creek, just for a change, every now and then?" Because that's a programme that really makes you think "Oh, that's very clever, in a silly kind of way!", which is exactly the kind of thing that Doctor Who strives for a lot of the time. And the Doctor really should be more of an outer space detective, it suits him.

The new Jonathan Creek was just awesome in every way, and there needs to be lots more of it. Particularly Rik Mayall!

Dragon flu

Okay, I'm finally back home in Beeston, a day later than planned! I had to stay an extra night in the hotel in Pontypool, because I was hugely, violently ill all day on Sunday. I did suspect the catering in Llanover, but nobody else was affected, so it must just have been some evil Welsh virus - it was a proper 24-hour thing; having been up all night being sick and generally yucky all day, I woke up at 11pm on Sunday night suddenly feeling a lot better again. I absolutely never get ill, so this whole thing was a bit of a disturbing surprise.

In any case, that's set back my easter-weekend schedule enough that only now do I get to talk about the Welsh Memory Championship 2013! Everybody will have forgotten about it by now...

I got the train to Abergavenny on Saturday morning and cycled to Llanover from there - it's actually only a bit closer to Abergavenny than it is to Pontypool, but I was trying to make sure I didn't get lost, having made that trip last year. It worked, too - I was at Llanover Village Hall well before the start time of nine o'clock! It was only on arriving that I suddenly realised I wasn't wearing my hat, and had to unsuccessfully rack my brains for where it might have been. I eventually concluded that it was back in my hotel room, along with the spare pens I'd cleverly thought to bring along because my favourite biro was running out of ink, but no. I can only assume it's on the train, never to be seen again. Oh well, time to keep the headgear industry in business by buying Hat Number Six, and I'll have to do it before I go to Darmstadt at the end of the month! Maybe I should go back to the fedora, I don't seem to lose those with quite such frequency.

The village hall is a really great location for a memory competition, as I think I might have mentioned last year - it's quiet, there's a little room for arbiters, a kitchen and a big, spacious room for the competition itself. Which is good, because we had a record turnout, something like seventeen competitors, including more newcomers than you could shake a stick at and delegations from Sweden, Norway, Hong Kong and the Phillipines, plus the ever-awesome Dai and Phil to keep the whole thing running smoothly.

We started with names and faces, which didn't go too terribly for me. I'm trying to be a bit more systematic about it nowadays, rather than just looking at the paper and thinking 'right, how am I supposed to remember these things?'. But after that, we went on to five-minute binary, and I did better at that than I've done for many a year! Granted, not quite well enough to get my old world record back, but in fact I got the exact same score, 930, that I did in the golden age of 2008. Next time, I'm sure I'll do even better!

In random words I got an extremely respectable 87, then in 15-minute numbers a sort-of-acceptable five-hundred-and-something, and then five packs in 10-minute cards. Both of which I could improve on, but it's still a lot better than what I was getting this time last year. After a nice buffet lunch which wasn't at all responsible for poisoning me (that was probably McDonald's in the evening), it was five-minute numbers, which was my only completely disastrous result of the day, something awful like 160. I need to get back in the habit of being comfortably able to do 360, error-free, every time.

Anyway, I was roughly neck-and-neck with Jonas all the way through, but he moved ahead with one of his usual earth-shattering scores in abstract images, which I can definitely get better at with a little more practice, and beating me in historic dates, which I really should get good at again. We both got 100 in spoken numbers - that's the kind of thing that happens a lot when there are just two trials, of 100 and 400 digits - and so he had a lead of about 250-ish points going into speed cards.

We both did a 40-something-second first trial, then I came thiiiiiiis close (imagine me holding my finger and thumb really really close together) to winning it at the last, with a 26.88-second pack where I annoyingly switched the order of a pair of images right at the end. Oh well. So Jonas breaks my unstoppable Welsh Open winning streak! Much deserved, of course, and all the more motivation for me to try to win it back next year! John Burrows was overall-third and new Welsh Champion, beating last year's winner (and only other Welsh competitor) James Paterson. Dai had arranged some awesome medals - the international-competitor ones had a Welsh dragon made up of flags of all nations on them! - and Phil Peskett (one of those newcomers I mentioned) accompanied the prize ceremony by playing triumphant music on the piano. It was almost as stylish a ceremony as at the World Championship, and lasted for less than six hours!

Anyway, sorry for the cursory and entirely-me-centric review, but I'll be back on form shortly. Going to have some chicken soup now, not that I'm feeling all that much like eating, but I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that going 48 hours without any kind of nutrition is bad for you. Cymru am byth!

Ponty-Pridmore

Here I am at Pont-y-pwl, which is what the Welsh call Pontypool. The train station is "Pontypool & New Inn", or "Pont-y-pwl & New Inn". You would have thought there would be a Welsh name for New Inn too, but perhaps it's an exclusively English-speaking inn. Getting here on the train was an interesting experience - I've mentioned in this blog a couple of times that whenever I take a long train journey, someone throws themself in front of the train, and sure enough that's what happened today. I got to Birmingham to find that everything was being delayed or cancelled, including the train I was supposed to get to Newport. But there was one to Hereford that left a mere ten minutes or so late, so I hopped on that. I happen to know that there are trains that go from Hereford into Wales the other way, and then go south down through places like Pontypool, since I was expecting to go through there anyway and was a bit surprised that Cross Country Trains Dot Com was sending me via Newport, so I figured it couldn't hurt to be on that one. The people who work at the station were pretty clueless about what was happening, and were besieged by crowds of people expecting them to help, so I think it's always best to follow the rule-of-thumb "get on the first train that's going in the right general direction".

I only mention that rule when it works. Usually it doesn't, and I end up in Thorpe Culvert (small station on the way to Skegness) for six hours, but today it was just perfect. The Hereford train went a strange circuitous diversionary route to Droitwich, but when it eventually ended up at its destination, there was a Pontypool train on the platform right next to it, just about to leave. I hopped on and arrived in "the 'Pwl" about fifteen minutes later than I was originally supposed to. I'm impressed by my train-catching abilities!

In other news, it's sad to hear that Richard Griffiths has died. I feel I should mention it here, because the news stories all list a huge number of roles he's played, but never mention the two things I'll always associate him with - the starring role in "Pie in the Sky", and Doctor Meinheimer (and his nearly-exact double Earl Hacker) in "The Naked Gun 2½". Brilliant, both of them.

Anyway, tomorrow is the Welsh Memory Championship! I should qualify my comment the other day that I always do badly in Wales by admitting that I've won every previous Welsh Championship, but the competition should be very fierce this year! Lots of people, from beginners to experts, will be there!

Wales, here we come!

It's Easter, and it's also the Welsh Memory Championship on Saturday! I have a tendency to do really badly at these things, but I'm at least in better mental shape than I was last year, so we'll just have to see what happens. I'm going down to Pontypool tomorrow, and then finding my way out to Llanover on Saturday morning. I'm sure to forget something important, like my hat or a map of how to get there, and not remember until I'm half-way there on the train...

Familial

It's been a while since I researched my family tree, but I logged on to Genes Reunited the other day to find a message from someone in New Zealand who's also descended from my virile great-great-great-grandfather, William Bancroft (his first wife died when he was in his early fifties, so he married a woman thirty years younger than him and had three more children). Maybe I'll dig into my family history a bit more and see who else I can meet...

Congratulations to the winners!

At the UK Championship in 2008, I was at my peak of memory fitness, at least in terms of National Standard competitions, which are a different beast to World Championships. I set three cool new world records, in 15-minute numbers, 10-minute cards and 5-minute binaries, which have all stood to this day - because that's the point when I stopped training for these things with any kind of enthusiasm, and because there are very few National Standard championships in the world.

But no more! At the Italian Championship in Rome today, Johannes Mallow beat my numbers record, and he, Ola Risa and Jonas von Essen ALL beat the binary record! Okay, it was always a bit silly that I held a world record in numbers, which lots of people are better than me at, but binary is supposed to be My Thing! Now I'm the fourth-best in the world at 5-minute binary! I'm going to have to do something about this...

Hannes also beat his own record in abstract images, and Boris beat his own record in 5-minute words. I think that's all the records that have tumbled today, but if I missed anything, sorry. Rather than sitting here all day and following the live streaming and Dai's entertaining commentary on Facebook, I was dedicated and did a practice session of every single discipline myself! No world records here, especially towards the end of the day when it was a struggle to remember anything at all, but the practice is going to be useful for next weekend. Also, it kept me from being too depressed that I'm here at home in the middle of a never-ending blizzard, when all my friends are having fun in Italy. I bet it's really hot and sunny, too.

Well done, everyone!

It's... disturbing

Those adverts for mind-altering drugs to use on your cats and dogs. There's something deeply wrong about the whole idea. Though I'm tempted to get one of the things and plug it in, just to see what effect it has on me.

Football fan

I see that next Thursday, there's a match between Gateshead and Newport County, at Boston Utd's York Street ground. Gateshead apparently couldn't find anywhere better or closer to stage their home game, which I find a little difficult to understand, seeing as how it's hundreds and hundreds of miles away. But still, it puts me in mind of the time I went to York Street, some time around 1986, to see an England v Wales under-15 match. England won 5-0. This has to count as a good omen for the Welsh Memory Championship two days after the thrilling Gateshead/Newport match. As well as a good omen for Gateshead, although I don't really care about that.

Who keeps buying the thing?

Remember that blog last year about how my monthly income from "How To Be Clever" had inexplicably increased to the dizzy heights of £47.29? Well, it kept going up, and now it's always well over £50 a month. Last month was a staggering £83.69, although today's payment has sunk to a mere £65.71. I'm mystified. It still isn't a real book, after all...

Memorable results

The results of the Slovenian championship that I was so ignorant about yesterday have popped up on the internet - Christian Schäfer, Boris Konrad and Annalena Fischer showed seven Slovenian starters what a trained memory can do, in a regional-standard competition (the short format with more emphasis on the disciplines that require non-technique memory).

Over in New York, meanwhile, where the memory competitions are even more non-system-demanding (you won't find binary digits or abstract images there, and if you can't remember random words you won't win the title), congratulations to Ram Kolli! It's a long-awaited win - he won the championship in 2005, the year before the new-style cool final format was introduced (incidentally, is it really seven years since I went to watch the first one?) and then seemed to come second every year thereafter, so he's well overdue another win now.

I'd really love to arrange an American-style competition as some kind of English Memory Championship some day. Maybe if I ever end up with some money, somehow, I'll do it.

Memory 2013 is go!

The USA Memory Championship is happening right now, over in New York. Wish I was there - a Canadian TV company were looking for something to make a programme about and I dropped some heavy hints that the best thing for them would be to fly me out there, but they didn't bite. It's always a lot of fun, and it's good to see that they've amended the rules to allow for the possibility of two or more competitors perfectly remembering two packs of cards in five minutes - I remember the days when no Americans could come close to doing a single pack in that time; now there's the possibility of a play-off with three minutes, and then thirty seconds!

Judging by the pictures and tweets they've posted on Twitter, the eight finalists include Nelson Dellis, Chester Santos, either Ram Kolli or someone who looks a bit like him, and several people I don't recognise. I really do wish I was there to watch the finals and cheer them on! My money's still on Nelson to win...

There's also rumours vaguely fluttering around the internet that there's a Slovenian Memory Championship happening today, but I know absolutely nothing about it. It's probably in Slovenia, but that's not a great help; I can't really point to Slovenia on a map with any degree of accuracy. I'm sure it's a great competition, though!

Next Saturday there's the first Italian Memory Championship, in Rome. I extra-double-wish I was going to be there, but I haven't got any money. There are prizes, that would just about cover the cost of the trip, more or less, if I did go there and won, but that's a bit of a big if. Anyway, the Saturday after that, it's the Welsh Memory Championship, in Llanover! And that I will be going to. I'm a lot more prepared than last year, although admittedly that's not difficult. It's great to have competitions everywhere! The memory season is here!

Compare the adverts

Normality reasserted itself well and truly on the final day of the othello, with me losing all three games horribly - I'm meaning to write at greater length about it and othello in general, just as soon as I feel like it, but tonight I'm distracted by another subject. Those Compare The Market ads with Robert Webb completely destroy the suspension of belief

... that's weird, I'd got that far into writing when someone posted a comment asking how the final day of the othello went. I must be some kind of future psychic! Maybe I will write about othello tonight after all...

The fun of othello, you see, is analysing your games on WZebra, the computer program that knows everything about othello, after the game. The modern generation of young othelloists immediately pull out their iPhones or whatever and check to see what moves they got right and wrong, whereas old codgers like me wait until they've got home to their old-fashioned laptop computers. It tells me that there wasn't some kind of awesome game-winning move that I missed against Emmanuel C, that in fact we were basically neck-and-neck all the way through, with just a couple of mistakes towards the end tiltiing it from 34-30 to him, to 34-30 to me, and back again. It's fun, if you're the geeky type.

Right, I'll write properly about othello at some point in the future, and also finish that thought about meerkats. Look forward to it!

Othello!

Othello! I haven't played for so long, I seem to have forgotten how to play badly. Eleven players, so a round robin with eight games today and three tomorrow - my first game, against Emmanuel Caspard, was one of those where I was sure that there must be some clever move that would win it for me by miles and miles, but if there was then I missed it, and ended up losing 34-30. But after that, I went on a sort of unstoppable winning spree, beating Roy, the other Emmanuel, Pierluigi and David Beck, and playing really well (by my standards) in all four games! Then against Stéphane for the first time I got the feeling of not at all knowing what I'm doing, but somehow he took twenty minutes and two seconds to complete the victory (20 minutes on the clocks) and so I won on time, completely undeservedly. Then I had a bye to bring me up to six points from seven rounds - for reference, my rule of thumb is that five and a half points in total from the Cambridge International would be a great achievement, and I've only managed it once before! The final game of the day was a loss to Martin Ødegård, who apart from having a surname full of letters I don't know the ascii codes for had a perfect day, winning eight out of eight. Caspard is second with six and a half, and I'm in third place overnight with six. Woo!

Three games to go tomorrow, against Imre, Arnaud and Borja, all of which I'd expect to lose, but even if I do, the competition has been a great success. I must make a habit of never playing othello, even online, between tournaments!

The old alma mater

Here I am, back in Cambridge. Depending on whether I went to the Christmas tournament last year (I can't remember), I haven't been here for at least a few months. But I'm breaking away from the tradition of staying in Cityroomz and going with somewhere a great deal cheaper, albeit a much longer walk from the train station. Cityroomz, back when it was Sleeperz, was the really cheap and nice hotel in Cambridge. Nowadays it's the moderately-priced and nice hotel, which is a terrible shame. Nobody wants a moderately-priced and nice hotel, at least not while there are still fairly-cheap and nice hotels around the place!

Anyway, Cambridge International othello tomorrow and Sunday! It's not part of the European Grand Prix this year, so I'm not sure how many Internationals, or even Locals, will be there, but we'll see. I haven't played any othello at all since the last tournament I went to, whichever it was, so I think we can guarantee I'll do badly.

Hello Sam!

While my brother was here, he showed me something he'd found in a charity shop, and asked "Do you remember this book?"

"Not even slightly..." I said, picking it up and looking at it. "OH, GOD, YES!" I exclaimed after opening it up and seeing the Computer Card and Word Displays inside. It's only the best book ever, 'Hello Sam' by Heinz Kurth!

It's about a Solar Automatic Man called Sam, and you communicate with him like this:

Take the Computer Card that comes with the book and put it on top of the appropriate coloured word...



And hey presto, you're having a conversation! Such an ingenious idea, and I really loved it when I first read the book. There's an adventure involving Sam's Booster Box, that makes things grow bigger. And it ends with Sam telling us he's going to the sea for a holiday and that perhaps he'll see us there, but I don't know if there was ever a sequel. I don't know what happened to our original copy of this book, either - we weren't exactly ones to throw things away, but I don't remember seeing it after I was eight or nine. Impressively, this nearly-30-year-old copy still has the Computer Card with it - not necessary, since the book cleverly includes a template for you to make a replacement, but still cool!

Thundercats forever!

My brother's just gone back to China, having been staying with me for some time, and one thing we always like to do when we get together is watch Thundercats cartoons - we videoed them when they first came on TV in late 1985, probably because we were out playing in the snow when the first ever episode was on, and have watched them pretty much constantly ever since. Now that the series is available on DVD, of course, other people without our video collection have the ability to watch Thundercats too, but it'll take a heck of a lot of watching before anyone catches up to my and my brother's word-for-word knowledge of everything that happens in every episode.

One thing about the DVDs is that they have the episodes in a weird order. Wikipedia insists that that's the order they were originally broadcast in in the USA, but I personally doubt that. I never saw any website claiming that sequence of episodes until the DVDs came out - there were basically two different episode orders proclaimed by American websites, one of them roughly the same as the British broadcast order, one of them with a few differences. America, of course, is a weird place where different states get different television schedules, so all of the broadcast orders might be correct, but I still suspect the DVDs are just plain wrong.

Anyway, in Britain (the only country that matters), this is how the greatest toy-commercial cartoon of all time first appeared on our screens. If you've got the DVDs, this is the order you must watch them in, okay? With a few incidental notes along the way...

1 Exodus
2 The Unholy Alliance
3 Berbils
4 The Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr
5 Trouble With Time
6 Pumm-Ra
7 The Terror of Hammerhand
8 The Tower of Traps
9 The Garden of Delights

This is the end of our first videotape, which our father had inaccurately labelled "Thundercats (30 mins)" - the first episode was shown as a compilation of the first two, and actually lasted 40 minutes or so. Actually, being an old-fashioned E-180 tape, it only had room for eight episodes, but we had the video set to the wrong channel for Pumm-Ra and recorded the snooker on BBC2 instead. So having noticed the problem a week or so later, we taped Tower of Traps on top of it, leaving only a couple of seconds of Willie Thorne and an out-of-sequence videotape to show anything had gone wrong.

But as fate would have it, that's a perfect cut-off point for the first marathon watching session you might like to have - you get the first four world-building episodes and one other by head writer (and best writer in the whole series) Leonard Starr, and the four by Julian P Gardner, with his own somewhat different (but still, mostly, hugely compelling) take on the early days of Thundercats. He disappeared completely after The Garden of Delights (an incoherent and almost completely incomprehensible story that's still strangely fun to watch), leaving the way clear for the golden years of Thundercat adventures...

10 Mandora - The Evil Chaser
11 The Ghost Warrior
12 The Doomgaze
13 Lord of the Snows
14 The Spaceship Beneath the Sands
15 The Time Capsule
16 The Fireballs of Plun-Darr
17 All That Glitters
18 Spitting Image
19 Mongor
20 Return to Thundera
21 Snarf Takes Up the Challenge
22 Mandora and the Pirates
23 The Crystal Queen
24 Safari Joe
25 Return of the Driller

Two more three-hour cassettes full of excitement and adventure! Volume 2 goes up to about half-way through Spitting Image - we were experimenting to see if we could fit nine episodes on a tape, knowing that as good luck would have it Pumm-Ra and Spitting Image were available on a commercially-sold tape, whereas most episodes were never released to the video stores at all. Volume 3 covers the rest, up to the point where Children's BBC stopped showing Thundercats for a good long time.

Virtually all the episodes on volumes 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 were written by the five writers who'd go on to define the cartoon - Leonard Starr (all-round great), Peter Lawrence (script consultant who seemed to be roped in to provide a hasty script whenever someone else had missed a deadline), William Overgard (wrote stories almost exclusively about his own characters, with a Thundercat or two grudgingly included in the margins of the adventure), Bob Haney (with his unmistakeable contraction-free and weird-sounding dialogue) and Stephen Perry (perfectly okay stories without the characteristic quirks of his fellow writers). Well, there's also one by C H Trengove and two by Howard Post in the 'golden age', but the series certainly benefited from the small core of consistently good writers. But then we had to wait a while before volume 4...

26 Turmagar the Tuska
27 Sixth Sense
28 Dr Dometone
29 The Astral Prison
30 Queen of 8 Legs
31 Dimension Doom
32 The Rock Giant

And when it did come back, it was just these seven episodes. All good ones, though, even The Rock Giant, a Peter Lawrence classic with a plot consisting of "a rock giant comes and the Thundercats fight it".

33 Lion-O's Anointment First Day: The Trial of Strength
34 Lion-O's Anointment Second Day: The Trial of Speed
35 Lion-O's Anointment Third Day: The Trial of Cunning
36 Lion-O's Anointment Fourth Day: The Trial of Mind Power
37 Lion-O's Anointment Final Day: The Trial of Evil

Then, later still, we got the Five Trials. This is where American episode guides differ from British ones - the ones that come closest to our order tend to place the Trials earlier in the sequence. The problem is that the final scene features lots of characters who haven't been introduced yet, like Hachiman and Snarfer, which would mean that the Trials have to take place after The Thunder-Cutter and Feliner. On the other hand, Lion-O encounters Acid Lake and the Gaw-Rak-Rak apparently for the first time, which would mean that the Trials take place before Return of the Driller and The Astral Prison... unless he's just got a really bad memory. It's all very confusing.

Anyway, we saw fit to end Volume 5 at this point, since it had the Five Trials on it, although the BBC continued almost immediately with new episodes - almost, since they started with The Rock Giant, apparently unsure whether it had been shown before, and then moved on to...

38 The Thunder-Cutter
39 Mechanical Plague
40 The Demolisher
41 Feliner - Part One
42 Feliner - Part Two
43 Excalibur
44 Secret of the Ice King
45 Sword in a Hole

That's the end of volume 6, and also of the Golden Age Of Thundercats Cartoons. The remaining 20, which didn't get shown until even later, are mainly written by a wide range of one-off jobbing writers, most of whom didn't seem to understand even the basic concepts of the series. I suppose they had to fill out the 65-episode contract somehow, but it's a bit of a dismal end to the show. Our volumes 7 and 8 had to be reconstructed after losing the originals, so I can't completely 100% promise that they were shown in this order, but it was something very close to this, anyway:

46 The Wolfrat
47 Good and Ugly
48 Divide and Conquer
49 The Micrits
50 The Superpower Potion
51 The Evil Harp of Charr-Nin
52 Tight Squeeze
53 Monkian's Bargain
54 Out of Sight
55 Jackalman's Rebellion
56 The Mountain
57 Eye of the Beholder
58 The Mumm-Ra Berbil
59 The Trouble With Thunderkittens
60 Mumm-Rana
61 Trapped
62 The Transfer
63 The Shifter
64 Dream Master
65 Fond Memories

Luckily, that wasn't the end - imagine if your marathon watching-session had to end with Dream Master (possibly the worst episode ever) and Fond Memories (consisting largely of footage from previous episodes, although at least it wasn't a straight "clip show" like some cartoons produce). To get the full British Thundercats-watching experience, you need to watch Thundercats-Ho! The Movie - never shown on TV over here, but available as a video release. It appeared on the shelves before the second half of the first-season episodes had been shown, so you could watch it after The Rock Giant if you want to, but it's best to save it for a finale. Watch the VHS, not the split-into-five-episodes version on the DVD. You haven't got the VHS? I don't know, try eBay or something.

That, however, is the end. While they did make further episodes in America, they never found their way across the Atlantic, and I'm pretty sure that's a good thing. Okay, off you go and watch those DVDs! Relive my childhood!

The world's foremost cartoon character

Facebook is a funny thing. Yesterday I found myself with invitations to "like" two pages - Dave Farrow's, which asserts that he's "the world's foremost memory expert", and Tansel Ali's, which makes the slightly more modest claim (and, you know, not quite such an outright lie) that he's "one of the leading Memory Experts and Mind Athletes in the world". Facebook probably has hundreds of other pages following the same basic theme.

I don't teach memory courses myself, but this doesn't stop me getting lots and lots of messages on Facebook asking for advice in my capacity as one of the world's other foremost memory experts. And while I know that most of these come from people who don't speak English as a first language, I just can't resist making a slightly rude plea for a bit of basic message etiquette...

Rule 1 - Please don't address me as "Mr Ben". That just sounds silly. As a general rule, don't address anyone British by "Mr" and their first name; that's not how names work. But please also don't call me "Mr Pridmore" (that's my dad) or "Sir" (that's the boss of the Sparky People). "Ben" is fine on its own. Here's a visual guide for anyone who's confused:

Oh, and also please don't call me "Sir Ben", but as far as I know, nobody's ever drawn a picture of someone by that name. Incidentally, I somehow couldn't lay my hands on a Sparky Book this morning, though I know I've got some around here somewhere, so the Sir picture was stolen from this splendid blog which you should all go and read.

Rule 2 - Please don't start your email by saying "this is urgent", "this is very important" and so on. Not if you're asking me how to memorise random numbers, anyway. That really is never important. And do give me a day or two to reply before you follow it up with another note asking if I got the first one. Seriously, I wish I was as keen to improve my memory as some of these people are.

Rule 3 - Don't go into amazingly technical fiddly details of exactly how to visualise your person/action/object images, or whatever, and ask me if you're doing it right, because beyond the very basic principles, all I can do is explain how I do it and tell you that it's different for everyone and you should try different things to see what works for you. And I get tired of typing that, over and over again.

Rule 4 - Please don't assume I'm withholding some kind of super expert memory secret from you if I reply with something like the above. There really isn't a shortcut, you'll just have to work at it, I'm afraid.

Rule 5 - If you ask me for advice on how you can teach your tiny children how to memorise things in order to pass exams and be successful in life, don't be surprised if my advice is to just leave the poor kids alone and stop being such a pushy parent.

Thank you all for your attention

Mr Ben.

What a beautiful day!

The sun's shining! It's warm enough to go out without a coat, just about! You have to chain yourself to the ground so as not to be blown away by the gale-force winds, but it's still starting to feel a bit like spring! Yay!

Meanwhile, an acquaintance last night accused me of calling myself a 'memory athlete' and told me that sounds a bit silly. I of course replied that I never use that expression myself, and think it's a lot silly, but then I looked up the word on that famous source of information-that-might-not-be-true-but-who-cares, Wikipedia, and found that "The word "athlete" is a romanization of the Greek: άθλητὴς, athlētēs, one who participates in a contest; from ἂθλος, áthlos, or ἂθλον, áthlon, a contest or feat."

So it's not necessarily a sporty thing, and we memorisers can quite justifiably call ourselves athletes, and if anyone says we shouldn't, we can just point them to Wikipedia! I'm still not going to call myself a memory athlete, though.

I know that's not nearly as interesting as the genuinely-true fact that 'gymnast' is derived from the Greek word for 'naked', but I thought it was worth mentioning.

How to be French and clever

If you're a French speaker and want to know what "How To Be Clever" by that Ben Pridmore person was all about, can I suggest that you buy the new French edition - "Comment être génial avec votre mémoire", as translated by Max Parcœur?

I can't offer free emailed versions of this, since the translator wants to make money out of it, but I assure you it's worth buying - it has pictures and everything! Oh, and it's available on Amazon, but if you buy it on Lulu, it gives more money to the writers.

I feel all mercenary now.

Hooray for football

Really, it's not like the ballboy was a tiny helpless infant - he was a hulking great teenager who could probably beat Eden Hazard in a fight. People should be focussing on how rubbish Chelsea are at playing football, not how good they are at kicking small children.

Great final line-up for the League Cup, though - won't exactly do wonders for the cup's image as the trophy that nobody cares about, but it should be a very fun game to watch.

Online

There are some nice photos of the WMC to be seen here: Photographer Captures The Strain At The ‘World Memory Championships’.

I'm not sure about the inverted commas - they seem to be implying that the competition isn't a real world championship, it just likes to call itself that. And while I'm allowed to constantly imply things like that, I'm a competitor, so it's fine. I'm intolerant of that kind of thing in other people. Still, there's some very nice pictures of the weird goggles and headphones a lot of competitors like to wear, an extremely unflattering shot of me, deep in thought, and down at the bottom of the page an extremely cool one of me with all my packs of cards. The clever photographer has realised that the best way to make me look cool in photos is to cut my head out of the picture.

If you want to take part in a fun memory competition without being worried that the photos will make you look silly, I heartily recommend the Online Memory Challenge! I've been having a Challenge every Saturday at 10:00 GMT, along with the awesome Jonas von Essen and any other memory people who feel like turning up - it's open to everyone and a great training aid! If you want to join in, send an email to simon.orton, at gmail dot com, and he'll give you a link. Come and play!

Poles apart

My Blogger stats page tells me I've had a lot of pageviews from Poland lately, so I just want to say a big hello, Pole or Poles who've been reading!

It's a bit like the North Pole here today, or at least the way I understand the North Pole to be. There's about an inch of snow out there, and nasty icy remains of the previous snow still underneath it. Good job I hoarded lots of food before it started, because I'm really no good at walking in that kind of stuff.

Earth-2

Just a quick primer for those not quite as obsessive about superheroes as I am: Superhero comics were huge in America in the 1940s, nearly died out through lack of interest in the 1950s, then sprang back to life at the end of the fifties when DC Comics launched all-new superheroes named after their Golden Age counterparts, the Flash and the Green Lantern, who had the same basic superpowers but were otherwise entirely different characters.

Soon enough, the DC Universe of superhero comics revealed that the characters from the thirties and forties actually lived on an alternate world, Earth-2, and were still going strong, if a little grey around the temples. The two worlds used to regularly interact in the pages of 1960s comics.

This posed an interesting question for comics fans - Superman and Batman had remained popular enough to be continually in print during the dark days of the fifties, and yet now their comics were depicting the adventures of the Earth-1 versions of the heroes. So, exactly at what point did the comics switch from chronicling Earth-2 to chronicling Earth-1?

I only mention this because, if you're not as obsessive about the Beano as I am, you might not have noticed that the fathers of the central characters have had a makeover recently. The core Beano characters first appeared in the early fifties (the same time that American superheroes were disappearing, funnily enough), and their dads were traditionally bald, grey-haired and decidedly elderly-looking. Perhaps men didn't have children until they were sixty back then, I don't know. But now, in line with parenting habits of the 21st century, Mr The Menace, Mr The Minx and Mr The Dodger have all become much more youthful, with full heads of hair and not a moustache or a wrinkle to be seen on their faces.

The really fun part is in a Dennis The Menace story on the shelves now, when he looks through old photos with his granny, and sees that his dad was exactly like him as a boy (except that his jumper was black and red instead of red and black), AND that his dad's dad looked exactly like the old character model for Dennis's Dad! And even more, that his granddad was also identical to Dennis, during the war! It's fun stuff for the old-time fans. I want to see more adventures of Earth-2 Dennis.

The Bash Street Kids did the same thing many years ago, incidentally - their teacher was called Mr Brown in the fifties, before sliding into just being called Teacher, and then a story in the seventies or eighties revealed that the Kids' parents were all former pupils, and that their teacher was Mr Brown - who made an appearance, aged somewhat but looking like he used to in the olden days. And another Bash Street Kids story around the same time revealed that they all have younger siblings who look exactly like them, just smaller... you could have a lot of fun working out which generation of Beano characters you're reading about at any given time!

The writer deserves praise, whoever it was. Nigel Parkinson was the artist, and he always deserves praise anyway, so unless I hear otherwise I'm going to credit him with all the cleverness.

Other memory competitions are available

Having publicised the Friendly Memory Championship, I feel I should tell you all about the other memory competitions coming up in the next few months.

USA Memory Championship - Saturday March 16, Con Edison building, New York

Only open to US citizens, and apparently only to people over 12 years old too - the usual fun format with an exciting finale on stage in front of the audience. This will be the 16th US championship!

Italian Memory Championship - Friday/Saturday March 22/23, Italy?

I don't know much about this one, if it's still happening. Anyone got the details?

Welsh Memory Championship - Saturday March 30, Llanover, Wales

The fifth Welsh Open - anyone can take part, you don't have to be Welsh. Exactly the same format as the Friendly/Cambridge competition - let Dai know if you're coming, on the Facebook page or with an email.

North German Championship - Saturday April 13, Magdeburg, Germany

Only open to people from the north of Germany, a Regional Standard competition, which means exactly the same as Wales, but without the 15-minute numbers, 10-minute cards or spoken numbers.

South German Championship - Friday/Saturday April 29/30 - Karlsruhe, Germany

Saturday is exactly the same as the North German Championship, but only open to people from the South. However, people from everywhere else can compete on the Friday, with those extra three disciplines, and Saturday both, making it a National Standard, Open championship.


If you believe in long-range planning, there'll be the bigger championships in the summer - Germany in July, UK in August, probably - then Sweden in September, Hong Kong and Australia both planned for that kind of timeframe too, and no doubt a World Championship somewhere, somewhen, later on in the year!

Memory Lane Again

The combination of snow here this morning and the squirrel calendar I got for Christmas got me in reminiscent mood about the Austrian Memory Championship 2004. January's picture is a red squirrel in the snow, you see, and the Austrian championship that year gave me the most amazingly pretty scenic view I've ever had from any hotel window before or since - it looked out on a grassy garden leading down to a little group of trees further away, there was a light coat of snow, and a whole lot of red squirrels skipping around and apparently just having fun in the winter weather.

The Austrian Open is a much-missed part of the memory calendar. If you're new to memory competitions (or just have a bad memory), you might not think of Austria as having been a major player, but back in 2004 it certainly was. We'd just had a World Championship with four Austrians in the top ten and two in the top three, and all the talk was about Austria, rather than Germany, being the country poised to put an end to Britain's monopoly on the World Memory Champion title.

The 'buzz' (ie a single brief article on the internet somewhere) about the Austrian championship in November was that it would be a rematch between me and Astrid Plessl after our heroic tussle at the WMC in August, but since I hadn't done any training since then, and neither had Astrid, apparently, it was a bit of a disappointment on that front.

There were in fact two competitions taking place simultaneously in Vienna - an adult and a junior competition. Joachim Thaler, third place in the WMC that year, had reluctantly decided to compete in the latter, which had better prize money and a pretty much guaranteed first place for him, rather than testing himself against the grown-ups - can't really blame him for that, since he did need the money, but it was a shame to lose one of the top contenders.

The scores of the junior championship, for some reason, aren't on either Memocamp or World Memory Statistics - I can only assume we couldn't find them when we were putting the latter website together, but they are in fact still available on the ancient Austrian Championship website, which is still up there on the internet after all these years! Click here for Junior results and Click here for adults - both are pdfs.

My memories of the competition itself aren't actually very clear at all, compared to a lot of competitions. I suspect this had something to do with the beer available to competitors afterwards (possibly it was free, or someone bought it for me, I honestly don't recall), and the presence of Ed Cooke and Lukas Amsüss and their memory-themed challenges. I remember at one point announcing that I'd memorise multiple packs of cards, a long number and drink a pint of beer, all in the space of five minutes. I didn't succeed.

The Junior championship pulled in seventeen young Austrian memorisers from all over the country - Joachim basically took everyone else to the cleaners, but the runner-up was Corinna Draschl, who also did well and is still involved in memory competitions to this day! In fact, the two of them were first and second respectively in almost every discipline.

The Austrian Open, meanwhile, attracted eleven competitors in a very international field. Just the two non-junior Austrians, in Astrid and Lukas, but five Germans - Florian Dellé, Boris Konrad, Ferdinand Krause, Clemens Mayer and Martina Mayer-Lauingen - myself and Ed from England, Idriz Zogaj from Sweden and Trevor Nell all the way from South Africa! That included five of the top ten from the recent world championship, and I'm pretty sure Luise Sommer (10th in the WMC) was there too, but helping to organise the junior competition instead of competing.

We started with the Poem, that much-missed memory discipline that was a lot of fun but admittedly impossible to organize fairly in multiple languages. I had previously been the world's best at that, but Astrid by 2004 was widely acknowldeged as being much, much better than me, so it was a pleasant surprise when she produced a bad score this time and I ended up winning. Lukas missed the first discipline, having overslept - maybe Astrid had a late night too?

In five-minute binary, I broke the world record - in fact, it was announced that I'd got a world-beating score of 810, and I had to hassle Hubert Krenn into going back and checking it, because I knew I'd only written down 780 digits. They were all right, though, and 780 was still considered exceptional, way back then.

Names and faces was won comfortably by Clemens, who'd come fourth in the WMC and seemed seriously committed to doing better in the future - legend has it that he'd been corresponding with Gunther Karsten back in 2003, and said he wasn't ready to enter real competitions, because his scores in practice weren't good enough. Gunther pointed out that the scores he said he'd got were better than almost anyone in the world had achieved before, and that he really should think about actually competing, and the rest is history...

30-minute numbers (this was a strangely non-standard-format competition, half-way between a National Standard and International Standard - regulations were a bit looser back then) was also won by Clemens, with a fairly mind-blowing 1000; I came fourth and was realising that my concentration wasn't what it should have been.

I then totally made a mess of ten-minute cards, only getting one pack right, and then speed numbers, where I got just 163, and with Clemens winning both of those too, I had to admit that I wasn't going to add "Austrian Open Champion" to my list of achievements. This was followed by another terrible performance in 15-minute words, which Astrid won handily - that was another of her specialities. Boris was second, in the discipline he'd soon come to rule the world in.

Clemens also won historic dates, which I was supposed to be far and away the world's best at (at the world championship that year I flabbergasted everyone with an enormous score of 80 - those were the days), following which we had a rather eccentric version of spoken numbers.

Most memory competitions, when asked to provide 100 digits spoken at a rate of one per second, make some kind of recording. This competition had a man reading the numbers from a sheet of paper, while another man looked at his watch and waved his finger once a second to show the other when to speak. I don't remember it being a huge disaster, but nobody got a score higher than 60 in either of the two trials.

Finally we came to speed cards, and Lukas, a real speed cards specialist, did a pack in 35.62 seconds. I think he was one of only four people who had ever broken the 40-seconds barrier at that point - the number four sounds right to me, anyway, though I'm racking my brain and can't think who the other one would have been apart from Lukas, me and Andi Bell. Anyone? Anyway, I was well and truly brain-drained by that point and didn't manage to get a pack correct.

That left Clemens the overall winner by some distance, followed by Astrid, Ed, Boris and me. Lukas was a tiny 35 championship points further adrift in sixth, which means I only just scraped into the prize money places - I took €100 home with me, which only barely made me feel better about losing to Ed and Boris just three months after I'd beaten them by miles in the world championship. But that's what happens when you don't practice - after winning the WMC, my motivation dropped off completely, and it was nearly a whole year before I even picked up a pack of cards at home again!

For Clemens, this was the start of seven consecutive memory competition wins, an unbeaten streak that ran right through 2005 and 2006. For Astrid it was the last competition she entered, although she never properly 'retired' and kept talking about coming back for years thereafter. She was much missed, as was the Austrian Memory Championship - 2004 was the last one, and that burgeoning Austrian dominance of memory sports just sort of fizzled out. It's a shame. I want to go back there and see the squirrels!

Friendly Memory Championship 2013

Springtime is the time when people like to get together in a scenic part of the world and have a short, one-day-long memory competition particularly welcoming to beginners, and so I'm pleased to announce that the Friendly Memory Championship is returning to its traditional spot in the schedule in 2013.

The competition will be held in the beautiful surroundings of Attenborough Nature Centre, in Attenborough, near Nottingham, on Sunday 26 May 2013.

Anybody wanting to attend is welcome to stay at my house overnight on Saturday or Sunday - the Monday is a public holiday in Britain, so if you live in this country, you won't need to go to work the next day, probably. There is plenty of other nearby accommodation in Beeston, Attenborough or Chilwell if you want to look for it on the internet - the Rockaway Hotel, just over the road from my place, was heartily recommended by someone who stayed there last year.

The competition will start at 9:00am, promptly, and finish by 6:00pm. It's a rather intense, draining kind of day's work, but there's plenty of opportunity to chat with other memory-competition enthusiasts and have a lot of fun! The entry fee is £30, which includes a hot lunch (very nice hot lunch, at that) at the nature centre - the entry is free to anyone who has never competed at a memory championship before, and the £30 might be significantly reduced for everyone else if we get a lot of people taking part this year (it's to pay for the room hire and expenses, not to make a profit for me!)

The Facebook page contains all the useful information about the event, and is a good place to chat with other people who are coming.

The competition will go something like this...

9:00am - Random Words

You get a sheet of paper with random words on it, and have 5 minutes to memorise them, then you get another sheet of paper with blank spaces, and have 15 minutes to fill in the words you remember. This is the basic format that all ten disciplines follow.

To score points, you need to get a complete column of 20 words all correct - if you have one incorrect word or blank space in a column, you just score 10 for that column; two or more errors or blanks and your score for that column is zero. If a word is correctly remembered but spelt wrong, you only lose the point for that word, so scoring 19 for an otherwise correct column.

For some reason, when I created the slide above, I forgot to make a deliberate spelling mistake, but please just use your imagination and assume that the word with a red 'sp' next to it is somehow spelt wrongly.

For the final column that you fill in, you're allowed to stop part-way down the column and score 1 point for each word (9 points in the above picture). One incorrect word or blank space gives half points for that column, rounded up to the nearest whole number (so it would be 5 points if one of the above was wrong); two or more errors or blanks gives zero points for the column again.

The 'raw score' in each discipline (38 points in the example above) is converted to 'championship points' by comparing it to a standard raw score that gives 1000 championship points - in this case the standard is 125, so a raw score of 38 would give you 304 championship points.

Words can be provided in any language of your choice, provided you ask for translations a month in advance of the competition.

The other nine disciplines work in the same kind of way, so I'll be a bit less wordy in describing them unless the basic principles differ from the ones above.

9:30am - Binary Digits

Ones and noughts - all the number disciplines are arranged in rows rather than columns, but otherwise the same principles apply as in words.

10:00am - Names & Faces

You get a lot of photos of faces, each with a first name and surname underneath it. Then you get the faces in a different order, and have to fill in the names.

There are no rows or columns in this one - you can choose which names to memorise, and each first and last name scores one point. Names will be random and come from any language around the world, not matched to the apparent national origin of the faces or to each other. A picture of me could easily have a name like Baozhong Patel.

Names that are phonetically correct but spelt wrong score half a point, names that are phonetically incorrect but reasonably close to the correct name (three letters different at most) score zero, completely wrong names score minus half a point.

10:30am - 15 Minute Numbers

Just like binary, except these come in rows of 40, rather than 30. There are two 'decimal digits' competitions; this one is the longer version.

11:30am - 10 Minute Cards

Rather than information on paper, you're memorising packs of playing cards here. Then they're recalled on paper, as seen above, by filling in the appropriate number or letter (J, Q, K, A) next to the appropriate suit symbol.

Packs of cards will be provided, although you're welcome to bring your own if you prefer.




12:30pm - Lunch Break
They do really good food there.



1:30pm - 5 Minute Numbers

Exactly like 15 Minute Numbers, only shorter.

2:00pm - Abstract Images

The memorisation paper has lots of rows of five shapes and patterns, as seen above. You have to remember which order they are in, and then fill that in on the recall papers.

3:00pm - Historic Dates

A list of fictional 'historic events' with a year next to them - you have to remember the year and match it to the list of events on the recall paper. As with words, you can ask for a translation into your preferred language.

Again, like names and faces, you can pick and choose which ones to memorise.

3:30pm - Spoken Numbers

This time, instead of reading, you're listening to numbers, spoken at the rate of one digit per second (in English - sorry, only one language available here). Recall is on paper, but you only score up to your first mistake. Two trials - one with 100 digits, and one with 400 - and your best score from the two is what counts.

Scoring is a little unusual here - the championship points you get are 70 times the square root of your raw score.

4:30pm - Speed Cards

Rather than having a time limit to memorise as much as possible, here you're memorising a single pack of cards as quickly as you can (5 minutes maximum). Then you get another pack of cards and have to arrange that into the same sequence as the one you've memorised. Scoring is again weird - the formula is 11170 divided by your time in seconds to the power of 0.75.




And there you have it! Any questions, please post them here!

WARM winter ahead!

All of the newspapers are proclaiming that it's going to be freezing cold and snowy and kill everyone (Yahoo news included the phrase "nobody in the UK is safe," which seems a teensy bit melodramatic), but they all said the same thing last winter, which turned out to be really mild.

Consequently, I no longer believe anything that the news says about winter weather, and I'm going to wander around outside in just my pants. If I get hypothermia, it's entirely the fault of the media.