John Bull in a China shop

So, I arrived in Guangzhou airport very late on Wednesday night, local time. There was someone with a big board saying "World Memory Championships" to guide competitors, but there was also the Japanese film crew to give me a lift to the hotel, so I went along with them. Unlike a lot of film crews, the director Naoko is an old hand at memory competitions by now, and so knows the right questions to ask to get interesting footage. We had a chat about the upcoming competition on the half-hour drive (plus the extra fifteen minutes trying to get the car away from the vast traffic jam outside the airport), and then when we finally got to the hotel the camera crew scurried inside to film me arriving and pretend they hadn't been with me on the journey. TV documentaries are full of this kind of dishonesty, and I think I should protest about it some time. I'm fed up of pretending to greet people at my door when they've been sitting in my flat for an hour or so planning out the interview.

Anyway, the Mount River Resort Hotel is a very nice building, surrounded by mountain on three sides and with a big reservoir at the front. The side of the mountain had been decorated by the world's biggest mind-map (on a big giant sheet), and the lobby was full of smaller mind-maps too. It's completely in the middle of nowhere, making it a hopeless place to go for a holiday, but a great venue for a competition like this. It's got nice bedrooms, big conference rooms and a lot of genuinely good art dotted around the place. The army of organisers were out in force, even though it was midnight, and they got me checked-in, registered and supplied with 'uniform' in short order.

Yes, uniform. It's not uncommon to get free T-shirts at memory competitions, but this one went a step further and provided trousers, jacket and baseball cap. I wholeheartedly approve of this - I own quite a few T-shirts already, but few pairs of trousers, and although the yellow plastic is a bit garish, I'm sure they'll find their way into my regular rotation. I wore the cap on top of my hat. Someone else gave me a can of tea, which was horrible but had to be drunk because it came from the sponsor.

Someone also came up to me to ask bewildering questions about how many cards were in my packs, and whether I knew it was supposed to be 52. It seems that in China, the idea of removing jokers from the pack is unfathomable, and people will automatically reply "54" if asked how many cards are in a pack (or a 'poker', as they call it). This also caused confusion when I was interviewed by Chinese TV later. Being more than half asleep at this point, I brushed them off and promised to deal with it in the morning.

My room was a luxury suite, horribly decadent though that is, decorated with some really nice little abstract sculptures. I went straight to bed and hoped that the late night would help get over jetlag.

I proved to be wrong in this, since I woke up at midnight on all subsequent nights and had a hard time getting back to sleep, but never mind. I woke up on Friday morning at seven o'clock, mainly because someone had set up an alarm call for me, possibly by mistake. Still, that's a good time to get up, giving me time to go down for breakfast before the opening ceremony.

Having set foot downstairs, I was mobbed by a horde of Chinese people (and occasional foreigners) with cameras, wanting pictures taken with me. This carried on pretty much constantly for the next five days, without so much as a pause for breath, until I'd had my photo taken with the entire population of the country, twice. It's like being a celebrity. Everyone was polite and waited their turn, except the owner of the hotel, who just grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away from my adoring fans to say hello to me. I also got a chance to say hello to the rest of the competitors - a whole lot of Chinese (about 100 altogether), a big squad of Germans and a few miscellaneous others. Britain had just two representatives, me and Andi, although at least we could boast six world championships between us. That was six times as many as the German and Chinese teams put together!

The opening ceremony was long, bilingual and attended by a surprisingly large number of Chinese dignitaries. It involved giant party poppers. The content of the speeches was largely the same as ever, with extra emphasis on this being the first ever World Memory Championship in China, a fact which apparently has 'unparalleled connotation'. The translations from one language to the other maybe weren't quite perfect - I'm pretty sure that at one point Tony was introduced as the 'lifetime president of memory sports country', which sounds like a nice place to live.

In the afternoon, I had a chance to walk up into the town. From the hotel to Guangzhou city centre starts with empty wilderness, then gradually turns into the suburbs, full of little shops and people selling things from garages, and then the buildings gradually get bigger and you're in the city. It's really great to walk around and see the sights.

But then it was time for the first day of competition. We started, as always, with abstract images, and my having actually done some practice for once in this one helped me get a score of 294. Pre-competition favourites Johannes Mallow and Wang Feng set the top scores, with 365 and 360 respectively, opening up a lead over everyone else which they held all the way through the next three days. Li Wei, one of the 'new' Chinese competitors (by which I mean the people I hadn't spoken to before) got third place.

The competition room, incidentally, was big and sufficient for the 126 competitors, without seeming too overcrowded. The desks had been provided with flimsy stand-up cardboard partitions which fell over in a slight breeze, but some genius among the organisers had the idea of weighting them down by sellotaping those cans of tea to the bases, which worked perfectly. This kind of clever thinking on the part of the arbiters was much in evidence all weekend. To drink, for those who don't like cold tea, there were also bottles of something that looked like water but tasted nasty. It came in three varieties, all nasty, and had big posters placed around the room advertising its many good points. Some kind of energy drink, I think, but I can't remember what it was called.

As another example of the clever organisation, the top competitors were grouped into a 'hot zone' at the front centre of the room - everybody who expected to set a good score in any of the ten disciplines had to sit in this area, under the watchful gaze of Dominic (official cheater-spotter-in-chief), or not have their score counted. I didn't hear of anyone being caught cheating, so perhaps the elaborate anti-cheating precautions (something about photocopying the answer sheets and locking them in a safe so nobody could tamper with them during marking, too) worked. Or maybe people just don't cheat at these things.

So anyway, I was fairly happy with my images performance, and starting to feel more confident as we went into binary. However, my lack of preparation caught up with me there, and in the discipline where I always come top, I had a pretty lousy score of 3105. That's a thousand and more less than I expect to get on a good day, and turned out to be only the fourth-best overall (after Wang, Hannes and Gunther) when we got the final scores. Hour numbers, to finish the day, went about the same way, except that I never get the highest score in that one, thus leaving me even further behind.

When the scores were announced the next morning, several things became clear. Firstly, the weekend was turning into the Wang Feng Show - he had the top score in binary with 3555 (a long way behind my best score, so I'm still apparently the best in the world at that one if I bother to practice), and the top score in hour numbers with 2280 (new world record). Hour numbers seems to be a Chinese speciality - Liu Su had the second-best score, also beating the previous world record, with 2180. No non-Chinese competitor has ever beaten 2000. I got 1516, which is rubbish, but not as rubbish as I might have feared, having not done any training in the hour-long disciplines for a very long time. It was clear at this point that it would be Wang and Mallow fighting it out for first place, and that I needed to buck my ideas up if I was to have any hope of finishing in the top five or so. Simon Reinhard had the third-best hour numbers (1960) and was clearly on much better form than he had been in Germany. Gunther had had an unexpectedly bad hour numbers and was lagging some way behind the leaders, while Andi, despite having come to China confidently expecting to take home some of the prize money, clearly wasn't going to be in contention.

The first day's events had been an hour behind schedule before it even started, and in the best tradition of memory championships, got later and later as it went on. When the second day followed the same pattern, it was obvious that there was going to be a problem - CCTV News was scheduled to do a live broadcast of the hour cards in the afternoon (not the whole hour, obviously, just a snippet) at the time when it was supposed to start. Discussions rumbled on the whole morning about what to do about that. Meanwhile, we eventually started with the names and faces, about which the only interesting thing to say is that most but not all of the Chinese competitors are as bad as me at that. Simon got the best score (157), followed by Boris Konrad (140) and Zheng Caiqian (107). Wang Feng's score was just 47, mine was 64, Hannes got 72.

Speed numbers, and in the first trial I went for my usual safe 360, but had a mistake and ended up with a score of 320. It could be worse. There was then a long, long pause before the second trial - seeing that it was going to take much longer than planned to mark the first trial, I went away and got some lunch while everyone else was waiting around. This didn't seem to help my concentration, because I made a complete mess of the second trial and couldn't improve my score. I didn't wait until the end of the recall period, left early and went up to my room for a power-nap. Well, I was feeling tired and thought it might help. Other competitors had insisted on having a 90-minute lunch break, despite how far behind schedule we were, so I knew I had plenty of time.

I went back downstairs to find that Wang Feng had not just improved his already impressive score, he'd shattered the world record and memorised a perfect 480 digits. Dominic was staring at his recall paper as if unable to believe it, and I can't really blame him. 480 is within the bounds of possibility, but I've never managed it, even at my absolute tip-top best. Johannes was second with 393, and Li Wei bagged himself another third-place position with 324, just ahead of both me and Simon on 320.

Anyway, it was now past time to start the hour cards, the TV cameras were waiting, and we hadn't even done the historic dates yet. After a bit of consultation with the top competitors, it was agreed to do the dates the following morning, and crack on with the cards.

Knowing that I'd done surprisingly well in 30-minute cards in the last two competitions, even when I'd been doing badly in everything else, I had reason to be confident about this one. And this confidence proved justified - I attempted a safe-ish 30 packs, and recalled them all almost flawlessly, with just two packs that somehow didn't seem right, but I couldn't quite reconstruct a correct sequence. That was more than anyone else had attempted - like binary, my system and years of practice seem to still make me the world's best in this one. I went to bed at the end of the second day feeling a bit happier about the way things were going.

The following morning, we had the announcement that I'd broken the world record, with 28 packs. As Tony built up the tension with his announcement of the scores, the crowd of Chinese competitors (and I swear I'm not making this up) started chanting "Ben! Ben! Ben!" I felt quite bad about this. Clearly they'd been waiting all weekend for me to do something spectacular, and all I'd done for the first two days was produce mediocre results. Still, this one discipline out of ten at least gave them something to cheer about.

It was also announced that the live coverage on CCTV (there was also an interview with me, filmed during lunch on the first day) had been a rousing success. At first it was announced that it had been watched by 20 million viewers, which seems pretty respectable for a news channel (there are a lot of TV channels in China, about two dozen under the CCTV - China Central TV, not closed-circuit - label alone). A bit later, Tony told us all that in fact it had been watched by one billion people, a figure which was later revised in the press releases to 1.5 billion. Personally, I find it just a teensy bit unlikely that the entire population of China, plus an extra 200 million or so, chose to watch a news channel's reporting of a minority sport, but never mind. It sounds impressive in a press release, if you don't think about it too hard.

But anyway, I had won the hour cards with 28 packs, followed by Liu Su with 23.5 and Wu Zhenhui with 21-and-a-bit. Wang had 21 exactly, and Hannes 20. So, as we worked out the scores so far, I was a way behind the leaders, but not as far behind as I'd expected.

The postponed historic dates came next, and they went the way they always do nowadays - Hannes beating the world record with 120, and me not far behind with 101. However, our usual dominance was spoiled by Boris, who's clearly been practicing, who got second place with 104. Wang Feng, who despite some evidence to the contrary is human after all, only had 79. He was still quite comfortably in the lead, though.

Random words came next, and the words this time were unusually difficult ones - long and uncommon words, which I'm all in favour of, but it's not what we normally get. The translations, incidentally, were apparently very good. The difficulty level was consistent across all languages, and I didn't hear any complaints about spelling mistakes. Simon didn't seem to have any problem with the difficulty level, winning by miles with 271 (new world record, I think), ahead of Boris with 199 and Zheng with 183. The two leaders and I all had roughly the same score, not far behind that.

These scores weren't announced until quite late in the day, though - by this time computer problems and the hurry to keep up with the schedule had made score-reporting suffer rather, and competitors could be seen making calculations with pen and paper to see what the actual scores were. This, again, always happens at the world memory championships, and it's just part of the fun.

Then came spoken numbers, and again it went quite well for me. I got a perfect 100 in the first trial, a pretty good 123 in the second and a slightly-more-pretty-good 150 in the third. There's usually at least one of the three where I mess things up and forget an early digit somewhere. Wang Feng, again, was even better, getting the top score yet again with 200. Gunther, who'd had an unexceptional championship, was second with 161.

And so we come down to the speed cards. The final discipline, everyone's favourite, and the promise of an exciting conclusion! After a lengthy period of working out the scores, complaining that the officially-announced scores weren't right, getting them fixed and so on, we could see the situation was like this:

1) Wang Feng 8247
2) Johannes Mallow 7989
3) Simon Reinhard 7609
4) Ben Pridmore 7579
5) Gunther Karsten 6067

In other words, I was safe in the top 4 (unless Gunther was going to do a time faster than 20 seconds, which he wasn't). So there was no point in me doing a 'safe' time of one minute or so, I might as well just go for something fast. But how fast? I was just under 45 seconds behind Wang (that is, if he completely failed to memorise a pack both times, and I did a pack in just under 45 seconds, I would win), whereas a 25-second pack would still not be enough if he did anything under a minute. It made more sense to concentrate on beating Simon's time and taking third place, and maybe in the process stealing second from Hannes, who's not as hot as the other three of us when it comes to speed cards. But how do you plan to beat Simon's time when he's capable of 22 seconds? I decided to just go for 30 seconds or so, and see what happened.

What happened was I stopped the clock at 32 seconds, but got the recall wrong. Simon, trying for 25 or so, also didn't get it. Hannes did a safe 1 minute or thereabouts, and Wang... did 27 seconds without showing the slightest sign of pressure. Really, he never showed any sign of pressure all through the three days, he was consistently brilliant all along, and he's a very worthy world champion.

Safe in the knowledge that he was already the unassailable champion, he followed it up in the second trial with 24.21 seconds - now that's just showing off. I decided to go slowly and carefully and just make sure I got some kind of time on the board. My continual failures at speed cards was starting to get on my nerves. I went very slowly, as it turned out - 37.56 seconds - but the recall went smoothly and easily, and I got it all right. That breaks that pattern, at least, and maybe in the next competition I can actually do a fast pack again. Luckily for me, Simon had again failed to memorise his pack, landing me in third place overall. Hannes had 46.01 seconds for a comfortable runner-up position.

Full scores can be seen here, if you're interested.

So, we have a new world champion, with a score far higher than ever recorded before, and a new number one on the world ranking list (Hannes held that position for a world-record shortest period of three weeks). I'm down to number 3, for the first time since before the world championship 2004. My third-place score, incidentally, was higher than the score I won the world championship with last year - it's not that I'd got worse, it's just that I hadn't got better as much as you have to do in memory competitions if you want to stay at the top.

All through the competition, I'd been comparing Wang's scores with the scores of best-possible-me, that mythical figure who gets the score I would be capable of in each if I was achieving what I know I'm currently capable of under optimal conditions. I think Wang beats him by a slender margin of about a hundred points. I believe that I can win the title back next year with a lot of hard work and a new system for numbers, but I'll talk about that in more detail in future blogs.

All that was left was the closing ceremony, which started about an hour and a half later than it was supposed to, and went on for a long, long, long, long time. The room quietly emptied as it dragged on past midnight - I stayed to the end, but I was pretty much asleep in my chair. The problem was a) that everything was done in two languages, and b) the translator was sadly a long way out of her depth. I did feel sorry for her, but it was not a riveting spectacle.

There were, however, lots of medals, trophies and big cardboard cheques - mine added up to $11,200, which is pretty incredibly awesome for a third place and an unusually low number of top-three finishes in individual disciplines. It always astonishes me when people are prepared to give money to people who memorise numbers. It just seems contrary to all common sense, but I'm not complaining. (I haven't actually got the money yet, so I will be complaining if I don't, but that doesn't change the fact that I'd gladly do this kind of thing for free if the prize money wasn't there).

Very nice trophy, incidentally - we're back to the silver-effect cups rather than the stylish glass things, but this one was a nice-looking one, with red, white and blue ribbons too. The 'permanent' trophy from last year didn't make a reappearance, though. The medals were also nice, and fancier than the usual ones. Ray Keene said to me "I think that's jade, you know," which made me think "oh yes, that makes more sense, I was wondering why they were decorated with green plastic..."

The team competition, which was taken very seriously by the Germans and Chinese, was eventually won by Germany. I'm thinking that the rest of the Chinese team will be inspired by their world champion's performance and will fight back next year. Team Britain (me and a half-hearted Andi who completely skipped two disciplines and didn't make much effort in some of the others) managed third place, and (Andi having already left by that point) I waved the certificate around with a certain amount of embarrassment.

Here's a news report about the competition.

After that, it was a day of exploring Guangzhou, and then a day of travelling home. I did get to share part of the journey with Andi, giving us the opportunity for a chat about the strange media interviews you occasionally get when you're a world memory champion. There aren't many people you can talk about that kind of thing with. My mind was already plotting new systems and how to come back and win next year. It's early days yet, but I think that motivation problem might have been solved...

Language!

No time to write a full report of the world championship tonight, I'm afraid - it's the office Christmas do, in (funnily enough) a Chinese restaurant. Having eaten genuine Chinese food for the last week, I'd prefer somewhere else, but never mind. The account of the other things I've done for the last week will have to wait until the weekend, assuming I can still remember it then.

But among the things I've resolved to do before the next world championship (and there are many such things, and a lot of them involve memory training) is learning Chinese. Even if the next world championship isn't in China after all, it's a thing that I feel I should do. All through the WMC, Chinese competitors' names were horribly mispronounced by the non-Chinese-speakers, and the non-Chinese-speakers had their names similarly mangled by the Chinese-speakers. Everyone needs to have some kind of crash course in pronunciation before next time, it will make communication so much easier.

We need to ask Martian Kid for help, I think. The best cartoon I found on Chinese TV (I had surprisingly little time to watch cartoons all weekend) was an educational show involving five children called AA, EE, II, OO and UU, with the appropriate vowels on their shirts and hats, who have surprisingly exciting 3D-computer-animated adventures with a Martian kid, a robot and their enemy, a purple bear. Interrupting these adventures at regular intervals are 2D segments titled "Martian kid teachs your English" (sic), in which the audience are taught a few English words and the cast enact scenes illustrating them in memorable ways. I tried to use it to learn some Chinese words, but didn't get very far. The sports-themed one, having illustrated the English names of a wide range of games (but not memory), intriguingly ended by presenting the phrase "Both are hurt", without elaborating further. Is that really the number one phrase you use when talking about sporting contests?

Also, I've had 32 pageviews here today from Moldova, which I think deserves a hello. Hello, Moldova!

Have you heard the one about the Englishman, the Chinaman and the German?

I haven't, but I'm pretty sure the Englishman has the worst of it. But I'm home now at last, after two long flights (Guangzhou-Dubai and Dubai-Birmingham, setting the clocks back four hours for each one), I've had no sleep for a day and a half by my body clock, I've had about half a dozen breakfasts in that time, and I'm very confused about what time and date it is at the moment. There will be sleep, followed by full reporting of the 19th World Memory Championship as and when I can fit it around the excessive work I'm going to need to do at my day job for the next two days.

In summary, Wang Feng is awesome. Johannes Mallow is also awesome, and I was a lot less non-awesome than I expected to be, so I'm a quite satisfied bronze-medallist right now. Thanks for all the messages of support and congratulation, everyone!

Birmingham Airport again

They're still playing the Beautiful South in Burger King, but now they've moved on to the obscure early albums rather than the greatest hits. Some Birmingham-based burger-baron has really excellent taste in music.

Anyway, I'm off to China. My plane's only 25 minutes late (so far) this time, so that's probably a good omen. Sorry I haven't blogged at all for the last eight years or so, but I've been busy. Not busy practicing memory, busy doing other important things. Sleeping, mostly.

Fascinating comickery

I found the Topper Book 1973 in a charity shop today and was intrigued to see among the adventures of Nick Kelly and Cedric, Desert Island Dick, Mickey the Monkey, Tiny the World's Biggest Dog, Beryl the Peril and the always awesome Whizzers from Ozz, there are two "Nancy" strips by Ernie Bushmiller, and one "Captain and the Kids" retitled "The Bustem Boys on Bunkum Island" but still with Rudolph Dirks's signature - both American and both dating from the forties or fifties. I had no idea these things had shown up in D C Thomson annuals. The internet seems only barely aware of the fact, too, so I thought I should share the news with everyone who reads my blog, just in case anyone cares.

Cough, cough, whine, whine, I want sympathy

There's some kind of horrific virus rampaging through our office this week, and everyone's either off with the flu or manfully carrying on with their work and memory training despite runny noses and coughs. I think everyone who does the latter deserves some kind of medal, or possibly deserves locking up somewhere as an incurable loony.

Actually, I think the last time I had a cold was last year around Children in Need time, because I remember whining about it then. So I was probably overdue for some kind of infection.

This is what I wrote last Sunday

Pen-and-ink, Sunday morning

Well, that was irritating. Having got passable-ish scores in dates, words, speed numbers and names on Saturday, I found myself tussling with Gunther and the unexpectedly even-more-awesome-than-last-year Christian Schäfer for second place. Hannes, who was in a league of his own all weekend, was miles in front.

So it came down to speed cards, and although I calculated that I could win with a time of 20 seconds or so if Hannes completely failed to remember anything, I decided to just go for a fast-ish time and finish second. Losing to Christian (who sadly can't go to China because he's got to go to school) would be embarrassing, and losing to Gunther would make all those Mentalists-watchers say "Ahh, the arch-rival beats you again!"

First trial went faster than I expected, I stopped the clock at 22.77 seconds, and nearly-but-not-quite recalled it correctly. Second time round, I played it safe, took 35 seconds to look through the pack, and was nowhere NEAR remembering it! After I put the pack down and stopped the clock, I realised that I'd memorised the last two images as 'murble burble' or some such gibberish, and had no idea what they were supposed to be.

I think this is three memory championships in a row in which I've failed to memorise a pack of cards on both attempts. Speed cards used to be my forté, it's really infuriating.

So, in the final analysis, Hannes won by miles and miles and miles, knocking me off the top of the world ranking list in the process. Gunther came second, just ahead of Christian, and Boris overtook me in fourth place. Lots of world records, as usual (by contrast, there are always very few world records broken at the world championship) and we now know who's the hot favourite for Guangzhou.

I can't remember the last time I came fifth in a memory competition. 2005? 2006? 2006 was also the last time I was beated by a schoolchild (Joachim). 2008 was the last time I wasn't number one on the ranking list. I need to work on my memory, it seems.

[Right, now this is me writing on Wednesday night, back in the present day. I'm less grumpy now than I was when I wrote this, and I can correct a few technical errors - Hannes's new world record in 30-minute numbers was 1284, not "1240 or so" (this is the fault of the German language for saying four-and-eighty, not the fault of my memory), Christian's awesome performance in Cambridge wasn't "last year", it was only back in May, the last time I came fifth (actually, sixth!) in a championship was Germany 2006, the MemoryXL championship that wasn't technically the German championship, where I was utter rubbish.

I have, however, been training quite a lot since I got home, particularly in images and binary, which I think need the most work. But if I'm to have a chance of winning the WMC, I need to practice the hour-long disciplines, and when am I going to have the time? It's Children in Need on Friday and I'm answering phones until two in the morning, so I'll spend the whole of Saturday in bed, and next weekend it's either the Othello Christmas tournament or a Christmas Fayre playing ukulele with the club, depending which I decide to do (incidentally, it's still November next weekend. What's with all the Christmas things?) and the weekend after that, we'll be half-way through the World Memory Championship, so it'll be a bit late for practice then.

Hannes is my tip for the WMC - Simon (who came 7th in Heilbronn) seems to be out of shape too, but you never know who might turn up on top form, including multiple Chinese memorisers on their home turf. Bet on me to finish second - I'm more optimistic now than I was a couple of weeks ago, but I'm still being realistic.]

Two hours of pushing broom

Reminiscences of Germany will continue tomorrow, if I've got the time. For now, here's a conversation I've had with China (in the person of Chuanwei Guo):

China: I've booked you a single room in the hotel for the competition.
Me: Is that a single room, or a suite?
China: It's a single room. I can book you a suite if you want, but you'll have to pay money.
Me: No no, that's okay, I was just asking because we were promised suites as prizes for finishing in the top three last year.
China: Yes, it is a suite.

This competition has turned me into the kind of person who complains because he isn't being given a luxury hotel suite for free!

On the other hand, watching repeats of Allo Allo tonight, I successfully remembered the name of the second actor to play Captain Bertorelli with no more than five minutes of brain-racking. I really am a memory champion! Roger Kitter, you know.

It's last Friday again

[Pen-and-paper blog, Friday night.]

So, what have we learnt today?

1) I'm not nearly good enough to win the world championship; and
2) I'm much better at 30-minute cards than I always think I am.

You might remember that in London in July (or whenever it was. August.) I attempted a super-safe 12 packs in 30 minutes and finished the recall with plenty of time to spare. Well, today I tried a normal-safe 15 packs, and I STILL finished recalling them with half an hour left. Which suggests that I could have gone for 18 and had a sporting chance of beating the world record.

And that's quite strange, really, because I was nowhere NEAR world-record-breaking levels in the first four disciplines today, and the cards came at the end of a long, long day when I wasn't entirely sure I'd be able to stay awake until the end.

So, to start from the beginning, I eventually got to Heilbronn last night (my train was half an hour late, too, which very rarely happens in Germany) and got a good night's sleep, although I have a feeling that I woke myself up by snoring too loudly. This morning I decided to pass on the hotel breakfast (cold meats and suchlike - typical German fare) and walked into the city centre (it's officially a city, I believe, but it's a small one) to find a McDonald's. And I couldn't! What kind of town doesn't have a McDonald's prominently in the town centre? I passed TWO C&As looking for one!

So, after that disappointment, I went back to the Experimenta, venue for the 13th German Memory Championship. It's a smaller-scale kind of affair this year, no free T-shirt, less of a gigantic press conference to kick it off, and an unusually low turnout in the junior competitions (probably because it's not the summer holidays). But the adults' championship is super-ultra-mega-world-class, as always!

The seats were arranged with me and Simon at the front, Hannes, Cornelia and Gunther behind us, and Boris, Christian and Jürgen behind them. As Boris put it, the score you need to finish eighth in the German Championship would win any other national competition outside Britain and China. It's true, because there were several more rows of up-and-coming German memorisers behind the top seeds.

Incidentally, I don't know exactly what the Experimenta is. Some kind of science museum, it seems, but the memory championship took place on the fifth floor in what seems to be a school chemistry lab. Ample space for the 19 competitors, horde of efficient and experienced arbiters and German and Japanese media (Naoko from NHK again - looks like last year's coverage really did go down well!)

The timetable was different this year - instead of just the three "marathons" on the first day, we had abstract images and spoken numbers too. It was an ambitious schedule, and true to form it ran more than an hour late by the end, meaning the day took about twelve hours from start to finish.

The first event was images, and I got what I think is actually a personal-best 232, although that's nothing to be proud of as several of my rivals topped 300 and Gunther beat his own world record with 350. Two lessons for us here - 1) I should have spent less time whining about the whole discipline and more time practicing, and 2) We need to change the 1000-points standard, fast. It's becoming as silly as historic dates was, back in 2004, only it's much worse this time because it isn't ME getting the stupidly large number of points.

In 30-minute numbers my lack of preparation really showed - I accidentally skipped a journey-and-a-half (teleporting myself from Sleeperz hotel to the Lubbock Room as I went around Cambridge) and got horribly confused. Ended up with a score of 913, which could be worse, but if I don't get over 1000 in this one it counts as a rotten performance to me. Hannes performed splendidly, though, narrowly beating his own world record (again) with 1240 or so.

Spoken numbers (in German) was Simon's turn to shine - beating someone else's (Gunther's) world record this time, with an awesome 240. Simon had been below par, just like me, in the first two disciplines, and said he hadn't been training at all either, but this showed he's still up there with the world-beaters. I, meanwhile, was frustrated. In the first trial I memorised the whole 100 digits without a hitch, I thought, but when it came to write them down, I couldn't remember ANYTHING! I had to leave the first 24 spaces blank before I picked up the thread and recalled anything. Some of the missing images came back to me within the five minutes, but not all.

So with three world records in three disciplines, people asked me if there'd be another in the binary. No, I said confidently, there won't. The me of 2008-2009 is the unquestioned world's best at binary, but the me of today isn't quite up to his standard. I think I got a mediocre 3000-and-something, so if there's going to be a world record (we haven't got the results yet), someone else will have to get it. I hope they don't. I take great pride in being the best in the world at memorising ones and noughts.

And then, finally, it was the cards, at which I was unexpectedly awesome. I've probably caught up a little with the leaders, but I'm sure to still be a long way back. Not going to retain my German Memo Open title this year, it seems.

Still, it really is the taking part that counts. And it's been fun!

[Postscript - the McDonald's is tucked away sort of down a back street. That whole global domination thing still needs work.]

The wanderer returns

Getting back from Germany to Birmingham was no trouble, but getting a train back to Beeston was a long story. Big signal failures in the Rugby/Milton Keynes area, apparently, meaning that all the noticeboards had the ominously non-specific "Delayed" alongside every train. Although the cancelling of trains from Birmingham to Nottingham was for unrelated reasons, it seems. Still, I got home in the end. I've written two blog entries' worth of scrawls on paper about the German Championship - one long and optimistic one after the first day, one short and sulky one after the second - and I'll transcribe them when I get a moment.

But now, I should go to bed. I remember deciding that I need to be in the office early tomorrow, but can't for the life of me think exactly why. So that'll be a pleasant surprise.

I want my sundrenched windswept Ingrid Bergman kiss

They're playing the best of the Beautiful South in the Burger King here. Best pop group ever. Anyway, time to catch my plane, but I just felt slightly guilty about not praising Lew Stringer's comics to the skies in my last post. Seriously, he's kept me ceaselessly entertained for 26 years and I think he's very much the Beautiful South of British comics. Which is a compliment, if anyone wasn't sure.

One trip to Birmingham later...

I've been meaning to blog more regularly, anyway - I've got out of the habit of it lately. Anyway, going through security, they searched my bag because it was full of suspicious devices (twenty packs of cards, nine speed cards timers and an old-fashioned alarm clock). I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often, really - I quite regularly travel around the world with these weird things in my bag, and most of the time they just sail through the x-ray machine without anyone batting an eyelid.

So I had to demonstrate the timers and explain what I was going to do with them, which prompted the security man to notice my Blue Peter badge and remember seeing my humiliation on the show three years ago (you don't think of security guards as being Blue Peter fans, but I suppose they can watch whatever they like when they're off duty). So he asked for a very quick demonstration (there was a very long line of people waiting to have their bags poked and prodded), and I obliged by memorising ten cards... and getting the fifth one wrong. It worries me that this security man now has an even lower opinion of my memorising skills than most people. Ideally you want airport security personnel to be so in awe of you that they'd never dream to examine your belongings too closely, but I don't think that's ever going to happen.

Anyway, nearly time to catch my new plane now, only another hour and a half to kill. I've already read the Dandy in Smith's (I decided to subscribe to it to show my approval of the new format, so there's a copy waiting for me at home) and tutted about the joke in Desperate Dan being stolen from the Simpsons and the joke in Postman Prat being stolen from an old Postman Plod (among other sources). And as for Korky the Cat, it seems it really is aiming for the kind of mild (to say the least) humour that hasn't been seen in comics since the days when a drawing of a cat was, in and of itself, entertainment. But is that such a bad thing, now I come to think of it? The target audience isn't jaded 34-year-old comic aficionados, it's 21st-century brats who don't read comics, and actually the new Korky might really work for them!

The Harry Hill strip is, fascinatingly, a Halloween special, suggesting that the relaunch was meant to happen two weeks earlier than it did, but Pre-Skool Prime Minister and Robot on the Run continue to be worth the cover price on their own. And also, the pop culture references in the past two weeks have taken in Avatar and Ben 10, rather than just programmes aimed at adults, so I think they're more attuned to the audience than I gave them credit for in my original lengthy review. I hereby retract certain of the mildly-critical things I said about the Dandy!

I know nobody cares, but this puts me in mind to review one of the old Beanos I've got lying around the house. I've very probably got one from exactly 25 years ago (the era when everything in the world was universally better in every way, because those were the days when I were a lad) and I feel like critically examining it to see if it really was better. I'll do that when I get home.

Sorry to ramble, but I've paid for thirty minutes on the internet and I'm darned if I'm going to let them go to waste. But maybe I'll spend the remaining nine minutes seeing what other people have to say...

How to pass five hours in Birmingham airport?

My flight was cancelled, so I'm sitting around here until two o'clock. Or I suppose I could go out to Birmingham and see the sights - unlike "Nottingham" airport, the city's only ten minutes away on the train. That sounds like a better plan, actually, now I come to think of it. Ignore my whining, everyone, and if you're going to be in Heilbronn, I'll see you when I eventually arrive!

PS It's raining, too. My life is full of things to whine about.

I want to know what codes one and two are

In the Co-Op down the road, if there's a big queue, someone behind a till says "Code Three" on the tannoy, and all available assistants come and start serving people. Once when I was in there I heard a "Code Two", but nothing seemed to happen. I suppose I could ask them what these codes mean, but they probably wouldn't tell me. People who talk in codes tend to be very protective of their secrets.

In other news, the World Othello Championship kicks off in Rome tomorrow. Unless you count the traditional night-before draw for the first round as being the kick-off, in which case it already has. Cheer for our plucky British lads and lasses (in which categories I'm counting Geoff even though he's Danish, and George and Elisabetta on the tenuous grounds that they lived in this country for a little while once). I fervently hope that they all win.

Meanwhile, I'm going to Heilbronn, nearish Stuttgart I think, tomorrow, probably (I only booked my plane tickets last night, and I haven't had a confirmation email yet, so I might not be allowed on the plane). Although I have been doing a little bit of practice lately, I haven't practiced a 30-minute anything for ever such a long time, so my stamina will be sorely lacking. Cheer for me anyway, please, but don't be surprised if I end up a long way behind the eventual winner. The competition is on Friday and Saturday. And hey, it's the German Championship, so I'll get a free T-shirt, if nothing else.

I am AWESOME!

Two consecutive days of what I like to call 'excessive' memory training, and I still fitted in a full day's work at my real job and the watching of a full football match in the evening. Another two months of this and I'll be back to World Memory Championship-winning form!

What's that you say? World championship just one month away? Well, never mind, I'm still awesome.

You know what I like?

Pot Noodles. I've just rediscovered a taste for them. I have a feeling that I've written a blog entry about this before, some time in the past, but I don't care. I can do what I like, I'm the World Memory Champion, and I've done a whole load of training today! If I can keep this up for the next week and a half, I might just get good enough to come fourth in the German championship.

PS: ABSTRACT IMAGES PRACTICE PAPERS!

Ultimatum

Okay, it's November tomorrow. German Memory Championship in two weeks, World Memory Championship three weeks after that. More or less. The last possible minute for starting some serious training came and went quite a long time ago, but an excessively-heavy memorising schedule starting tomorrow might still raise my scores from 'embarrassing' to 'almost respectable'. So that's something to aim for, at least...

Fine and Dandy

The Co-Op down the road was sold out of the newly-relaunched Dandy when I went in on Wednesday night, so I only had a chance to read it today. And since one page of it made me laugh out loud in the middle of W H Smith's, I thought I'd buy it and subject it to a full critical review on my blog too!

A very quick summary of what I'm talking about, for the benefit of foreigners: The Dandy is a children's comic, first published in 1937 and still going strong-ish today. It was very popular among kids at the time, but ever since the 1950s it's for one reason or another played second fiddle to its sister title The Beano, which launched in 1938 as a companion to the Dandy but ended up becoming the most popular and well-known kids' comic in Britain.

The Dandy, meanwhile, chugged on cheerfully in its own way, and by the time I learnt to read in around 1980 had settled into a role as the slightly louder and less subtle of the two comics, which absorbed the best characters from DC Thomson's other comics when sales of those comics slumped low enough that they weren't making money any more. I never really read it - I was a Beano fan through and through.

For the last few years, the Dandy's life has been one of constant reinvention and relaunches as the publishers frantically try to get kids to buy it again. The latest incarnation, a fortnightly half-comic-half-magazine called "Dandy Xtreme" seems to have been unsuccessful somehow (gosh, I wonder why? I mean, "Xtreme"? Fifteen years after it stopped being possible to use that word unironically?), and so the new launch this week has gone (sort of) back to basics!

The Dandy is now weekly again, has 32 pages of cheaper paper (I still can't think why anyone believes kids would pay extra for glossy paper, but that's been the official DC Thomson policy lately), of which only one page is an advert and the rest is all funny pictures. And what's more, it's hugely influenced and dominated by the work of Jamie Smart!

Jamie Smart, who's been mentioned on my blog a fair few times in the past, is the funniest thing to happen to British comics in a long, long time. He joined the Dandy about five years ago with a side-splittingly hilarious strip called "My Own Genie", surreal and silly and so much better than everything else in the comic (which at the time, following the latest 'new direction', consisted almost entirely of fart jokes and bogeys), and was funny enough that he eventually was handed the Dandy's most enduringly popular character Desperate Dan, to reinvent in his own style. And for the last couple of years, the only things worth reading in Dandy Xtreme have been Desperate Dan and usually Cuddles and Dimples.

But now, well, the whole comic is like a Jamie Smart strip. Rather than self-contained stories, there's doodles around the pages, joke adverts, silly puzzles and a sort of unifying theme of insanity running through it. It's excellent stuff. Although there's another unifying theme that isn't really a Jamie Smart hallmark and which knocks the comic down a notch or two in my estimation - pop culture references. This comic makes reference to Harry Hill (in a big way), Simon Cowell, Cheryl Cole, Ant and Dec, comparethemeerkat.com, the Queen, Noel Edmonds, Jeremy Clarkson, the Stig, Kylie Minogue, Aled Jones, Alan Sugar, Bruce Forsyth, the Go Compare singer, Wayne Rooney, Paul Scholes, Gary Lineker, Alan Hansen, Mark Lawrenson, Jamie Oliver, three other TV cooks, Kat and Alfie, Barack Obama and Peter Kay. Some might say that's a little bit excessive.

The Beano and Dandy have always done this to a lesser extent, and half the time when I was actually a child rather than a grown-up who reads children's comics, I had no idea what the reference was to. In the new Dandy, they're everywhere! Well, not quite everywhere - Jamie Smart's own stuff is refreshingly free from them, but still. Also, there are still quite a lot of left-over farts and bogeys from the Dandy's previous incarnation. Seriously, people, kids don't actually like that stuff in comics. Grow up.

Let's look through the comic in detail! The cover - the new "Dandy" logo is excellent, a sort of modern version of the classic logo. Jamie Smart's brilliant little doodles are dotted all around the cover, but it's dominated by a big picture of Harry Hill (drawn by Nigel Parkinson), with the words "Exclusive! HARRY HILL! Read his new comic inside!" just to highlight the main appeal of the comic to people who've never even heard of Jamie Smart. Other little captions draw attention to the fact that Cowell, Clarkson and Edmonds can be seen inside, that the comic is now "100% funny!", that it's "New!" and that it's "Only £1.50!" - still more than a comic needs to cost, but an improvement on the recent pricing policy. This week's Beano is £2.25 and packed full of adverts.

Pages 2 and 3 depict the launch party of the all-new Dandy, with a contents page, more assurances that you won't find Harry Hill's new story anywhere else, cameos of most of the other new characters making their debuts here, and lots and lots of Jamie Smart silliness to giggle at.

Pages 4 to 7 are the main feature - Harry Hill's adventures in TV Land, written by the man himself and drawn by the always funny Nigel Parkinson. It's really quite good - Harry Hill is a funny man, although I'm not sure whether the target audience really know who he is or like him all that much, seeing as he's more of an adult comedian who just thinks he appeals to children. It's still funny - jokes about Simon Cowell's trousers were passé ten years ago, but his trouser factory staffed by "boy-band slaves" is a great scene. It might catch on.

Page 8 is "The Mighty Bork", in which a little blue alien comes to Earth and demands ice cream. Artist not credited. It's filler stuff, and this is an introductory story which doesn't give much clue as to what's going to happen in future issues.

Page 9 is the first of several pages of quarter-page, 3-panel strips - a feature of the Dandy in its very earliest days, but not the kind of thing that have been seen lately. "Simples! 101 Ways To Use A Meerkat" is funny, the Phantom Pharter isn't, "Noel Or No Noel" over the course of the issue uses up three of the limited number of ways to contrive a phrase that rhymes with 'Deal or no Deal', so I hope it's not going to reappear in every issue, and "Dr. Doctor!" is an old doctor-doctor joke with weird artwork that doesn't really match the joke that the words are telling.

Page 10 is "Kid Cops" by Lew Stringer (another comic creator I've mentioned once or twice before as being one of my heroes). Bobby and Sergeant Nick are the titular characters, who take revenge on the man from the council who's designed a new fun-park that's safe but no fun. Reminds me of "Kids' Court" in the Whoopee in years gone by, which was funnier, but this is good too. Lew Stringer seems to be working with someone else's character designs for the lead characters, it doesn't look like something he's made up himself, which is a bit strange. I think this is going to be one of the more readable parts of the comic, all in all.

Page 11 treats us to a full-page wanted poster for the Phantom Pharter. Enough said, but there's some non-toilet-humour Smart-style silliness around the edges at least.

Page 12 is "The Bogies", a carry-over from Dandy Xtreme which the new-look comic could frankly do without.

Page 13 sees a new take on Dandy stalwart Bananaman. Artwork by him-whose-name-I-can't-remember is not good, and it's not really funny. Maybe it'll improve, because old Mr X can be funny when he really tries.

Page 14, "Count Snotula" by Duncan Scott is, well, more bogies. It does end with the title character being punched in the nose and bleeding, which is quite surprising.

Page 15 is a fake advert of the new iDad, which is actually quite funny. Something different that the Dandy hasn't done before!

Page 16-17, the middle pages (usually reserved for the most hyped strip in a comic bar the front-cover star) is Jamie Smart's "Pre-Skool Prime Minister", which is wonderful. Premise: When everyone grew tired of grown-up politics, a radical new approach was taken... In this issue, the entire world declares war on Britain because they think it's a bit ridiculous to have a four-year-old PM. So does the Defence Minister, but the PM resolves this by launching him out of a big cannon. It's a must-read, believe me.

Page 18 is a Halloween-themed Jamie Smart puzzle page. His art alone makes it worth reading. A maze (Scary Cynthia owns four snakes, but which one is eating her foot?) winds its way around the page, mixing up the other puzzles. You don't get this kind of thing in other comics.

Page 19 is more of those 3-panel strips. Use a meerkat to clean your chimney (not many kids live in houses with chimneys that need sweeping any more, you know), more Phantom Pharter, "squeal or no squeal", and a fun fact about the chicken that crossed the road. Incidentally, the black banners containing the title of each of these strips have lots of little speech bubbles saying ha-ha, hee-hee etc written in black on a black background, which I suspect might have been intended to be more visible than they are.

Page 20, "Shao Lin Punks", a sort of manga-style silly strip is another piece of bland filler by an unknown artist.

Page 21 gives us "Little Simon", the adventures of a young Simon Cowell, by Nigel Parkinson again. It's okay for what it is.

Page 22 is cut-out Celebrity Halloween Disguises, without as many doodles around the edges as I might have expected.

Page 23, "Robot on the Run" is the page that made me laugh in the newsagent's - the artist is Alexander Matthews, but if it's not written by Jamie Smart then it's a perfect and hilarious imitation of his unique sense of humour. The world's first robot is reactivated in the year 5173 (in Ipswich) and, on learning that crisps don't exist any more ("Do you still have crisps in the year 5173? I can't eat crisps being a robot, but I like to look at them. Especially the ones with ridges." "I'm afraid not. Crisps were banned more than a thousand years ago when a really big one fell on the President of the World and slightly hurt him."), goes on the run. I love it.

Page 24 is Lew Stringer's "Postman Prat", who attempts to deliver a skateboard, a dozen eggs and a priceless vase, with predictable results. Slapstick is always funny, but you have to wonder if this is going to be the theme of every week's story...

Page 25 is a peculiar "What's in Cheryl's Hair today?" picture - Harry Hill's style of comedy that I suspect will be a bit lost on young readers.

Page 26 is the funniest advert for subscriptions to a comic that I've ever seen, by far (and Viz has done some good ones over the years). It's that man Smart again, permeating the whole Dandy with his silliness.

Page 27 is "George vs Dragon" by Andy Fanton of occasional-Viz-artist fame. A sort of Road-Runnerish chase strip, which might become a bit of a classic.

Page 28, "Pepperoni Pig" by what's-his-name is the adventures of a pizza-delivery-pig pursued by the Big Bad Wolf. Rather silly, if unexceptional.

Page 29 is our last page of three-panel comics, notable for featuring no Phantom Pharter, his place being taken by "Korky the Cat". Korky is an interesting character - his popularity peaked in the early-forties heyday of funny-animal comics, but he's hung around the Dandy in one form or another ever since, somehow. This latest version, reduced to a quarter of a page, bad art and the kind of joke that was old when the Dandy was new, is weird.

Page 30 is Desperate Dan, unchanged from the Dandy Xtreme but now fitting in much better with the rest of the comic. He desires a giant sausage. It's silly and funny, as always. I honestly can't get enough Jamie Smart.

Page 31 tells us what's coming next week, with more silly doodles running around the page.

And the back cover is the comic's only advert - for a Ben 10 video game. Even this page is invaded by a meerkat doodle in the bottom corner.

All in all - good stuff! I think this has made me a Dandy buyer (as opposed to a reader-of-the-Dandy-in-newsagents'-so-I-can-complain-that-it's-not-funny-any-more), and I'm sure it'll do the same for jaded youngsters around the country! Just phase out the Bogies, the Pharter and the celebrities, and we've got a winner!

More news from China

I can't remember whether I linked to the awesome promotional video for the World Memory Championship. I have a feeling that I forgot to, but you can see it if you go to the website here. While you're there, go on, register to take part in the championship if you haven't already - the hotel is inexpensive, and you can probably get cheapish flights, too (I'm supposed to be getting my flights and accommodation for free, so I haven't checked. I have accountants who pay for it all.)

I also notice that I've had lots of pageviews from China today - beating perennial second-placers the USA into third (although the majority of my blog's views come from my dedicated army of weird British friends, as always). I thought you couldn't even see Blogger from China, but maybe I was wrong. Hello, China! I'm looking forward to visiting you! I'm going to do really terribly in the competition, but this is not down to any kind of disrespect for your country!

(I really do worry about offending people by coming to a memory competition and not winning in spectacular style. I'm not sure whether that's vanity or excessive politeness.)

Ukulele, I kelele, we all kelele

I tell you, I'll be the World Ukulele Champion yet. But perhaps not the World Memory Champion this year. Still, maybe I'll get back into training tomorrow. I did shuffle some cards yesterday in preparation...