Silence in the library

Upstairs in the Science Museum in London, there's a really cool-looking little library room, with double-decker bookcases (there's a sort of ledge half way up that you walk along to see the higher-up shelves, I don't know what the technical name is) and antique furnishings throughout. Although today and tomorrow it's got some modern tables and chairs and a stonking great computer screen set up, for the UK Memory Championship!

We've got a healthy mix of competitors from around Britain and the world, as usual - thirteen altogether, and that's not including the various other people who came along and had a go at one or more disciplines. Foremost among these were journalists from the Times and the Independent, who both tried their hand at 30-minute binary. Both attempted four rows, 120 digits, but while the Times man got them all correct, the Independent made mistakes on three rows, and so only got a score of 30. Make your own judgements about the relative merits of the two newspapers.

Incidentally, I could swear that I've met the man from the Times before. As my readers will know, I rarely remember faces, but his is familiar enough that I'm sure I've had an interview with him in the past. He talked as if he'd never met any of us, though, so maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe the article in tomorrow's paper will say "I went to the UK Memory Championship and nobody remembered me, even though I remembered them." Or maybe all reporters from the Times look the same (young, posh, floppy-haired...) and I spoke to another one of them.

My scores in everything were awful, as I confidently expected. I'm going to need to be careful not to end up with fewer points than James Paterson, and so avoid being not the best British competitor in a championship for the first time since (I think I'm right in saying this) 2004. It's so long since I did a half-hour discipline, in practice or in competition, I really made a mess of binary, and ended up with a score of 2000 or so, attempting 4500 or thereabouts. Abstract images followed a similar pattern, and I was already exhausted by the time we sat down to speed numbers. 30-minute numbers followed after that, and I decided to manage my expectations hugely, and just attempt 680 digits. I'd written them all down within 15 minutes of the recall time, so perhaps I was over-cautious, but I'm fairly sure that really was as much as I could do - my mind was wandering terribly, which is just what you can expect if you don't train for these events.

Incidentally, we know our scores for abstract images (first discipline after lunch) already, thanks to some unusually speedy and efficient marking from the team of arbiters. Kudos to Phil, Chris, David, Gaby, Nathalie, Dominic, Peter, whoever I've forgotten to list (there's always one) and whoever I don't even know is there (some arbiters always lurk in the back room and never come out to say hello to me). Phil's machine that beeps after a specified number of minutes seems to have died (which is very tragic; it's been coming to these competitions longer than I have), so disciplines were timed on a digital watch, but nothing's gone spectacularly wrong yet. Tony opened the competition with a lengthy speech that was mainly about royal jelly, which makes a change from the usual one and kept us all entertained, someone was buzzing around taking photos, several spectators came to see what was happening, science museum people were looking at us suspiciously, it's all the fun of a memory competition!

Jonas von Essen is clearly going to be the runaway winner, although he's producing the kind of scores that elite competitors do when they haven't got any real opposition. That, more than anything, is motivating me to do some more training and pose him a challenge at the World Championship! I copied his habit of taking his groovy shoes off, since my less groovy ones (which I nonetheless love, since they were bought for me by someone special) got soaked in the rain, and went around barefoot all afternoon. We're the Zola Budds of memory sports!

The British contingent are led by James Paterson, Wales's finest, who got the highest score at names & faces, although not quite as high as Phil announced - he accidentally read out James's competitor number, 170. The score printouts all have the competitor numbers on them, which is just confusing for everyone - I keep reading my name and thinking I only scored 29, which is bad for names and faces, but downright horrible for binary! There's also Ryan S Smith, who loves his middle initial enough that he added it onto his nameplate in red pen (we all get toblerone-shaped paper names to put on our desks, with the appropriate national flag and, of course, that competitor number again), Mike Outram and Phill Ash, all warmed up at the Friendly Championship and dipping their toes into two-day International Standard competition, and Jake O'Gorman, at his first competition and saying I'm the one who inspired him to compete. I always worry that I'm a sad disappointment to such people when they meet me in real life. "Who's this short, fat, bald oaf?" they no doubt say to themselves, "I thought Ben Pridmore would be a huge, mighty specimen of humanity, with a big deep booming voice and magic mind-powers of some kind, possibly involving telekinesis!"

International guests are Jonas; James's Russian student Sergey; Raj who spends so much time in England competing in memory competitions that he hardly counts as Indian any more; Søren from Denmark; Rick from Holland; Joona from Finland who was at the WMC last year but who for some reason I never got round to saying hello to; and a newcomer from Spain who I'm sure introduced himself to me as Javier, but is called Francisco on the scoresheets and nameplate (with different surnames on each). He might be a spy. Or I might just be bad at remembering names.

I'm on a train

Another thing I'm on is my way to London, and another is cloud nine, because I'm off work for the next week and a half, and I've been working much too much, for not nearly enough money, these last few months. The job, which I'm still enjoying a lot more than I should, was unfeasibly busy for the last month or so, but things have calmed down now and I can safely take time off without worrying that the world will come to an end. And I'll turn my attention to the important things I've been neglecting, like writing about memory on the internet and maybe even training in the use of those memory techniques I used to know about. It might be a little late to get in full match fitness for the UK Championship tomorrow morning, but you never know what I might accomplish between now and the World Championship in December, if it happens. There'll always be more memory competitions out there, anyway - a fun one in 2014, hopefully, that there'll be more news on soon...

Memorable stories

Last week, looking through my bookcases for something to read on the train to work, I grabbed Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King. And then grabbed my rucksack, since the book's too big to fit in my jacket pocket. But when I came to open the book, I realised I'd never actually read the fourth of the four medium-ish-length stories in it. I must have bought the book to read on a plane journey, and arrived at wherever I was going before I'd finished reading.

Either that, or the story (A Good Marriage) is just magically forgettable - today I found myself trying to remember what it was about, and couldn't think of even the slightest detail. The best I could do was a vague idea that it was about a husband and wife somehow. It's not actually a bad story at all, and I'll probably remember it now I've refreshed my memory, but then again maybe tomorrow I'll be oblivious again. Maybe I did read it on that plane journey, and several times again since then. Maybe I wrote it, and maybe I actually am Stephen King? You can never tell with memory.

Fantasy island, all I ever dreamed of

It's always great to have the football back after a long summer without, isn't it? And this season, in addition to enjoying the games and occasionally having a bet on the weekend's premier league matches (I never win, so this is a very, very occasionally kind of thing that I strictly limit to days when I've got quite a lot of spare money kicking around) I'm doing Fantasy Premier League, in competition with people from work.

Fantasy football has moved on since the days when I last did it. No longer do you just pick a list of names and check the newspaper on Monday to see how many points they've scored, now it's interactive with weekly transfers and the ability to pick what colour your virtual team's virtual socks should be. I worry that I could get addicted to it, and that then it'll be even more embarrassing when I come bottom of the league, as I inevitably will. Anyone else out there in zoomyland got a team?

Take a look at the kids on the street, no they never miss a beat

Even though the whole town of Beeston is in the process of being demolished to make way for the trams, it's actually really cool around here. For example, coming into the town centre today and picking my way through the rubble that used to be The Square, I heard the sound of drums coming from the marquee where they regularly have musical events. Actually, I thought to myself, that's really good drumming - the kind of sound made by someone who actually knows what they're doing, rather than someone who's just waving drumsticks around and hoping for the best. Then an equally good guitar chimed in, so I went over to check out what turned out to be Parasight - a really cool band composed of four teenagers, who you should definitely check out if you get the chance. The guitar playing when they did Sweet Child Of Mine was either a recording that they were miming to or genuinely that awesome, I couldn't quite decide. Someone who I assume was the lead singer's mum was singing along to the songs and handing out cards with the website address on, but only slightly diminishing their coolness; that's how cool they were.

Meanwhile, I need to be cleaning my flat up a bit. Or a lot. On Wednesday night I'm going down to London straight after work for the memory competition at the Science Museum, then staying there for the weekend. On Monday I'm meeting a friend who's flying in from America to stay for the week (I think a few years ago I referred to him in this blog as Weird Internet Friend #2, so that's his name for every subsequent mention on here, I'm afraid), then on Tuesday I'm abandoning him to his own devices and flying to Germany for a sort of pre-filming thing for a TV show that will be really totally and completely awesome if it does come about, later in the year. Back here on Wednesday, and not back to work until the Monday after - it's a busy life.

But it doesn't leave me much time to clear up the filth lying around this place, especially since I can't be bothered. Maybe I should hire a cleaner - there's a card in the post office window that really made me laugh. "Cleaning Work Wanted", it says, and follows it up with "I am from Thailand, where we were brought up to keep our homes clean and tidy." I assume the intention was to stress what a good cleaner she is because of her upbringing, but it really comes across as "you filthy English people don't know how to clean your houses, so let me do it for you." Assuming she'll work for free, since I've still got no money, I'll have to give her a call - I could do with a cleaner who'll also give me a stern lecture on how I wasn't brung up right.

The importance of blogging

Yes, I haven't posted anything here for a month, and I'm terribly sorry about that. But I just checked back in the old posts to see if I've stayed in Rosebery Hall student accommodation before, and it turns out I have, so I'm more convinced than ever of the importance of writing on the internet about everything I do.

I realise I could just keep a diary and not share it with everyone on the internet, but it's more fun this way.

So anyway, I'm going down to London at the end of the month for the UK Memory Championship! Yay! And staying in Rosebery Hall, since it seems to have satisfied me three years ago! I'm currently sort-of in training, in that I haven't done any real training for ages, but I'm doing a nightly Online Memory Challenge, at 8pm British Summer Time, so please come along and join me if you want a chat and a quick test of memory or two!

And I'll start blogging more frequently, just in case I need to refer back to it in future.

Win the ultimate sporting experience

Occasionally I see those competitions on ITV football where the prize is excessively huge - a month-long globe-trotting holiday to see the Champions League, Europa League, FA Cup finals and so forth, luxury hotels and spending money and everything. Well, it seems they do the same in Australia, and one person who won a massive extravagant holiday in England to watch the cricket this summer is Russell Bauer, the 2002 Australian Memory Champion! I've just met up with him while he's in Nottingham to watch the first test, and it's always great to meet another memoriser and find the similarities. I'm working on a theory that all the people with the best memories think David Tennant was awesome in Doctor Who...

Where the cool kids hang out

If you're interested in memory talk but hadn't heard the latest news, get over to Mnemotechnics.org, where I'm answering any question people want to ask about memory stuff. And also comparing the personality flaws of two different cartoon pterodactyls, even though nobody asked me to.

I will shortly be posting a full and graphic account of the 2003 World Memory Championship in Kuala Lumpur, so keep your eyes peeled!

Incidentally, while I'm on the subject of memory competitions, it's the UK Championship at the Science Museum in London on August 22-23, and if you like memory competitions but are too scared to take part, why not come and help out as an arbiter? Meet and hang out with new and interesting people and have a lot of fun! I recommend it!

The solution to everything

You've got to feel a bit sorry for David Ferrer. He's really awesome at tennis, but he doesn't get to be Spain's national hero because Rafael Nadal's that little bit better. And he's playing better than ever at the age of 31, but nobody really notices that because Roger Federer's eight months older and slightly better.

What he needs to do, clearly, is wear a stylish hat. Then he can be the world's best stylish-hat-wearing tennis player!

(Ferrer for the last few years has been consistently the world number 5 in tennis - I see him as a kindred spirit)

I'm not lazy, I've got a good excuse

Writer's block. Of a very psychological kind. See, I agreed to write memory-related things in return for money, and the idea seems to have horrified me so much that I've been completely unable to do anything even slightly like that ever since. But I'm determined to get over it, this weekend. I'll try getting drunk - I've been told that alcohol is the solution to all the world's problems.

It's a fine art

The Quad in Derby is launching a season on the theme of memory, and an exhibition of the works of William Kentridge. And seeing as I've got connections to Derby, memory and (tenuously) art, they asked me along to the opening night to recite the titles of all the artwork on display and try to impress people with the artistic way that people memorise things.

It was a lot of fun, too! And I met a hypnotist who's doing a talk on memory there next month, that I might go along to. Anything to help with the motivation to memorise things!

I'm inclined to blog about tonight in the form of contemporary art, rather than writing, but I'm too lazy. It would be a collage, superimposed on a page ripped out of my collection of Synapsia magazines, and would include a black cat, a joint of ham, a stopwatch and the panel from From Hell of Melville MacNaghten saying "Few too many art-wallahs for my taste".

What's my age again?

Someone I know was convinced that it was his 38th birthday the other day, until I pointed out that if he was born in 1976, same as me, that would mean he just turned 37.

Funnily enough, I've also really struggled for the last few months to remember that I'm 36 and not 37. The number 37 has always sort of rattled around my subconscious mind in a disturbing way, but since I'm currently re-reading Thief Of Time, by Terry Pratchett, on the train to work, I can't help suspecting that someone has stolen a year of everyone's lives, or just stuck time back together in the wrong way, so that I'm currently 37 but will turn 36 in October. If so, I think that's probably a great improvement.

Cartoon Time

I haven't talked about cartoons on here for a while, so I thought I should place on record that the best cartoons to come along in the last couple of years are Adventure Time and Regular Show.

Adventure Time has a tendency to make me really laugh out loud at times, and not many TV shows do that. Regular Show is downright brilliant in the scope of its imagination and silliness. Both of them should be watched by all my blog readers!

How to pass the time on the train to work

What's a good nickname for a man with a staggeringly 1980s hairstyle, sunglasses whatever the weather and a suede jacket with the sleeves rolled up? He's the boyfriend of Leather Tuscadero, but I don't really want to call him Fonzie...

Can't they pre-tape it?

Twice in a row, the Channel 4 continuity announcer has stumbled over his witty scripted lines. They need to either hire someone who can read from a piece of paper, or stop trying to be funny and go back to just saying "And now The Simpsons". I vote for the latter.

Yes, there are better things I could be doing on a Sunday afternoon, but I don't care.

World rankings

Rafael Nadal and David Ferrer are playing in the French Open final tomorrow. They're currently number 4 and 5 in the world ranking list, but irrespective of the result of tomorrow's game, Ferrer will move up above Nadal in the rankings. That's because tennis world rankings cover the last twelve months, and Nadal's win last year will drop out of the total points, so he can't increase his total score even if he wins, while Ferrer only got to the semi-final last year, so he's guaranteed to increase his total.

Is this a good system? Actually, I think it is pretty good, and any kind of silliness like that is just of academic interest - Nadal will zoom back up to first or second later this year anyway, when he plays in the tournaments he missed through injury in 2012. The really interesting part is that tennis rankings give you a certain number of points in each tournament, depending which round you reach. This I think is less of a good system - if you're a lower-ranking player and you get drawn against the likes of Nadal in the first round, you'll score less points than some other lower-ranking player who gets a lucky draw and gets through to the third or fourth round without playing anyone really good. I'm sure it evens out, but there does seem to be quite a lot of random chance involved.

Or maybe I'm just prejudiced because othello has a cooler system. Your ranking points (there isn't a universally-accepted world ranking, though the one on the French website has gained a lot of support these past few years; the one that British people care about is the British rankings) go up and down depending on the ranking points total of the individual players you win or lose against. Othello doesn't have knockout tournaments, so we couldn't use the tennis-style rankings even if we wanted to, but nothing's stopping tennis from adopting othello-style rankings. Maybe they should.

And othello doesn't claim to have invented that system, I just like to talk in terms of the things I like. Just in case anyone was wondering.

Memory sports, of course, has a different kind of thing altogether. You get a certain amount of points in a competition, and your world ranking score is the highest you've ever achieved in a competition. Even if your best score was donkey's years ago. That's an okay system too, but I'd like to see something based on people's best scores in individual disciplines - perhaps two different ranking lists, in fact - one based on just scores achieved at the world championship, another based on all the disciplines from all the different types of competition. Maybe I'll work these alternatives out and see if there's any way to make my "official world ranking" (another thing about memory competitions is that people freely use the word "official" to describe anything they want) higher than fifth-best in the world!

Social commentary

According to my stats page, Dai's number-themed comment on yesterday's blog post was the 3000th comment published on this blog!

I don't think that's enough, really. Throw me some more comments, people! Get a discussion going in that hidden secret little bit that you get to by clicking at the bottom of my ramblings!

11:11

You know that thing people say, that they only ever look at a clock when it's 11:11? All very psychological. Well, the headlines on the Yahoo news summary that you get when you log in to Yahoo mail, whether you want to or not, have:

Teachers: 11 Not Banned Despite 'Misconduct'

Isle Of Man TT Race Crash: 11 Spectators Hurt

Cyber disputes loom large as Obama meets China's Xi


Not that I paid particular attention to them, but the third one made me stop and think "Obama meets China's Eleven"? What, are they playing cricket or something? It took me ages to readjust my brain into reading "Xi" instead of "XI", all because of those rogue elevens just up above. It's all very psychological.

Legalities

I like overhearing snatches of conversation from people on the street and then speculating on what they might be talking about. I just cycled past a gang of youths as one of them was saying, authoritatively if perhaps slightly drunkenly, "The only way you could be done for attempted murder is if he actually dies..."

I'm not a legal expert, but I'm pretty sure it's usually the other way round. But even so, have I overheard discussion of an actual murder attempt, or a joke? You can usually tell from the tone of voice, but this one really could have gone either way...

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.