Postcard from Darmstadt

German keyboards are particularly difficult to get to grips with when your name´s Zoomy. The Y and Z are in the wrong places. Also, the backspace button is too small, so I keep hitting the # when I want to correct a Y or Z. And the apostrophe is in the wrong place too.

All whining aside, though, I´m in a really good mood. It´s Saturday evening and the German Memo Open has just finished. Clemens won, in some style, with Gunther second, and I generally did very badly, but then cheered myself up no end by breaking the world record in the final discipline, speed cards. 32.13 seconds! Woo!

That aside, though, Clemens was the star of the show. If I´d been at my best (which I certainly wasn´t), and had English translations of all the word-based disciplines, it would have been very close. I have a feeling he might still have won. Gunther was also very much back on form, which means that the WMC might still be a great contest, even without Astrid, Andi and others. That´s just assuming Andi won´t be there, which I actually have no evidence of at all. He might come back better than ever and win by miles.

Anyway, going from memory, Clemens had a world record in the 30-minute numbers and Gunther in the 30-minute cards. I tried 15 packs, which I could do last year and had assumed (based on a single practice run with 12 packs) that I could still do now. I made a complete mess of it and ended up getting three right. I also did much worse with the binary than I´ve done for years, including practice over the last two weeks. I wasn´t confident of having memorised the numbers well enough after two runs through, so I only attempted 3000 and went through them a third time. And I still only ended up with a score of around 2000. I blame tiredness and the wrong mental attitude. Gunther broke his own record (but not quite mine) with just under 3500.

A bit of sleep later, today´s events were a bit of a blur. Clemens and Boris both got 71 on the historic dates, which is worrying. Looks like I might not have that much of an advantage there any more. Clemens also beat the world record on names and faces (poor Andi´s lost all his records now, we think[EDIT: of course he hasn't. He still holds the records in hour cards and spoken numbers]), and generally did well on everything else. He got 44 seconds in the cards and he´s capable of better.

So, can I win the world championship? I don´t think I´ve got any real chance, but I´m going to give it the old college try. I´ll rearrange my holidays and take three days somewhere over the next three weeks for some proper training - that way I can still go to Lursa´s so as not to upset Jenny, go and look at steam trains with my dad, and talk to the American reporter who´s been following us around all weekend. If I could refrain from promising to do things like this, I might be a better memory man, although I would have even less of a life than I do as it is, so I shouldn´t complain.

In other news, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is just as good as the rest. Damn, I wish I could write like that. I must write something else and make an effort to get it published while I´m still a tiny bit famous...