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.