Contributing to the development of memory sports

 The Memory League World Championship is happening right now, and I haven't even been paying any attention to it for the last three days, because I've been in London, working on promoting a sensational, spectacular, tangentially-memory-related thing that will burst onto the world on Thursday 19th January! I even dragged Simon Orton (who, as always, has been working twenty-four hours a day behind the scenes to make the world championship run so seemingly effortlessly smoothly) away from his endeavours to help me out - but I think the end result is worth it, as when I demonstrated Memory League to a couple of dozen international media-related people, they all loved it and couldn't stop playing! The excitement of advancing to a new level really gripped the whole room!

It says something about my status in the modern memory-sports community that I spend my time doing this and not playing in the world championship itself, doesn't it? Hey, remember when they expanded the football World Cup to 24 teams instead of 16, and everyone thought that was a great improvement? Do you think Memory League might also benefit from doing that and, for example, having someone ranked 23 in the world joining the fun?

In fact, maybe Memory League could follow football's future plans, and expand to 32, because let's face it, my world ranking is likely to go down a few more notches...

Oh, the things you can find in a charity shop

 Check it out! "Oswald Bastable, and others" by E. Nesbit! First edition, 1905, poor condition but still intact!

I read The Story of the Treasure Seekers when I was very small (and felt jolly clever for working out that the narrator was Oswald before he told us), followed by the sequels and E. Nesbit's other major works, but I've never read these ones before, and I'm rediscovering the delights of an author who not only influenced so many other later works but was just about the only writer in history to put a character called Pridmore in a story. She was also a fine poet, which makes it all the more impressive that she was able to pen Noël's masterpieces...

 

I've read the first story, and will save the rest for my train journey tomorrow - I'm going down to London, for reasons I'll be allowed to tell you about in a week or so's time. The secret will be revealed at last, but it really won't be entirely worth waiting for, so I'm sorry for building it up like this.