World Memory Championship news!

Yes, it looks like there will be a world memory championship this year!


Hi all, Thanks for your patience. We are really pleased to announce the details for the 21st World Memory Championship.

It will return to London for the Olympic and Queen's Jubilee year. The dates are confirmed as December 14 15 and 16, 2012

The venue will be The Lilian Baylis School, Kennington Lane, London.

The area is very close to the centre of London and is furnished with many reasonably priced hotels and restaurants.

Bringing the World Championship to a school in central London creates a magnificent opportunity to inspire and empower the capitals schoolchildren and create role models for young and developing minds.

Further details will be released soon



Say what you like, I think it can only be a good thing for the competition to return to its roots as a low-budget affair in a school's assembly hall - it badly overreached itself in the last couple of years. From this kind of starting point, maybe we can build a more stable and successful regular competition? Anyway, that's your World Championship, I don't know yet if I'll be there, but I'll let you know.

How the cool kids talk

To prepare for a job interview a couple of weeks ago for a job that would require me to speak German (I didn't get it) and also to prepare for the trip to Basel, I got a "Perfect Your German" book-and-CD course. These things always boast "genuine German speakers" doing the talking, but one thing I realised when listening to the recording on this one is that speaking German as a first language is all well and good, but it doesn't necessarily mean the voices are good actors.

When it introduced a dialogue between two seventeen-year-olds and then came the voice of a middle-aged man exclaiming "Mensch, ich bin vielleicht froh, dass die Sommerferien morgen anfangen!" I actually laughed out loud. You can just picture a 40-year-old dressed in trendy clothing and trying to sound cool.

The squirrels are dancing again!

The Victoria Centre in Nottingham has an absolutely beautiful "Time Fountain" decorated with ornate birds and squirrels and things - every fifteen minutes it chimes and the dancing animals spin round to music. Or at least they're supposed to, but it broke down about a year ago and never got fixed. But no more - it's working again now! Dancing squirrels make me feel that all is right with the world again! The birds I can take or leave, but squirrels? Yay!

Oh, and also, while I was cycling back, two young boys with a pedal-powered go-kart challenged me to a race. See, children like me! That one yesterday was probably a grumpy adult in disguise.