The Old Man of the Mountain

The coolest thing about the Cambridge International is generally the meals. Okay, there are people who go there wanting to win the othello tournament, but I personally never harbour any illusions about being good enough to consistently beat the best players in Europe. It's a tournament I'd recommend to anyone who likes good food in interesting places with very interesting people, though.

Friday evening, having got away from the office and made my way down to Cambridge, starts with The Salisbury Arms, just down the road from the train station and also just down another road from the hotel I ended up staying in because Cityroomz was full. But not having travelled that road before, I still got hopelessly lost on the way - the road the pub is on is in some kind of spacial topographical anomaly so that it's at right angles to each of two different roads I'm familiar with but which are at right angles to each other. Or that's how it seemed to me, anyway, even before I had anything to drink. Still, it's such a great pub that I thought I should throw in a link to its website. It's a bit excessively real-ale, and wildly expensive compared to pubs around my neck of the woods, but it's got a staggeringly groovy deco, and the best music you can possibly imagine. I'd go along with the website's claim that it "encompasses all that is great about English pubs", more or less, although I wouldn't recommend that you check out the poetry page.

On othello tournament eves, it also plays host to a whole lot of European othelloists crowded around a smallish table, playing othello and variants thereof (four-by-infinity) and suggesting a really quite cool idea for an extra competition we could have at the Cambridge Memory Championship in May (assuming I tell people it's happening - I'll do it next week, promise). Aubrey gets the credit for the othello variant and the memory idea, naturally. A couple of drinks later, I followed some very simple directions back to the main road, and luckily looked over my shoulder to find that I was pointed 180 degrees in the wrong direction now, eventually ending up back at my hotel.

This being a nice hotel, it came with a full English breakfast - self-service buffet with a waitress whose sole job it seems to be to open the metal box things (there's probably a word for them that everyone knows, but I can't think of it) that the bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs etc are in whenever a breakfaster comes towards them, and close them again when they're done. It was very nice. Definitely an improvement on the 'light breakfast' you get with your cheaper room at Cityroomz, which basically consists of a croissant.

Thus fortified, it was down to the Lubbock Room in Peterhouse, just round the corner, where the Cambridge International has been played since time immemorial if like me your memory only goes back to 2002. That's also a very cool place, a big spacious room with pencil sketches of Peterhouse-associated Nobel Prize winners on the walls and, this year at least, a great forest of laptops belonging to players. This is what happens when you advertise wireless internet availability. There was barely room for othello boards among all the laptops. Still, at least nobody had a secret othello computer down their trousers this year.

After the morning's first three games, the leaders were Matthias Berg, Erwin van den Berg and David Beck - a really good morning for people whose surnames start with 'Be', although it was a very bad one for people with 'Be' first names. Before the next tournament, I'll change my name to 'Pan', which Corrie de Graaf thought was my name after mishearing an introduction. It was also a good morning for people with surnames derived from geographical features, and for prompting me to use the blog title above, which is a Betty Boop cartoon - the fact that her name also starts with 'Be' was the clincher in choosing it.

Lunch is traditionally in the university canteen next door. Great food, including a hot pudding with custard - it was treacle tart this year, and it was delicious. Expensive, naturally, despite being a university place. Cambridge is just plain expensive everywhere. It keeps the riff-raff away.

We had an afternoon's othelloing too, although I can't remember exactly what happened to me, let alone to anyone else. I certainly didn't win very many games all weekend, anyway. Still, in the evening it was drinks in the pub down the road, along with debate about whether or not rosé wine is made by mixing red and white wine together, and a really heated argument about the difference between raisins, currants and sultanas. Especially currants. Luckily, it's the 21st century, and everybody had iphones and laptops and access to the source of all knowledge, Wiki Answers. Then away to an Indian restaurant where the conversation (at our table at least) was unprintable in a family blog like this. The food was quite nice, though.

Day two of the competition ended up with me on five wins out of eleven, which could be worse, I suppose. Imre won the final against David Hand, so yay and congratulations to them and everyone else!