Englishness

An anonymouse asked me in a comment today "Ben, from where are you originally from? You dont look like british..."

I asked why not, and got the following reply:

"I think you are not British for the following reasons:

1.Your First name and Surname are not typical for someone from Britain.

2.You are much smarter than the average Englishman. Here I don’t mean memory and stuff.

3.Then, you are too modest. That is not typical for an Englishman as well.

4.You don’t get drunk and go outside to make some damage (at least I think so), which is common for some English guys.

5.When you wear the hat it reminds me of someone who has cultural backgrounds from southern countries.

That is what I think, and I did not mean to offend anyone."

I'm fascinated to learn that I don't fit the traditional English stereotypes as held by foreigners, but I think we should examine these points in more detail. At least it's my behaviour and not my appearance that strikes the anonymouse as being non-English - I was worried that I'd need to pose for my new passport photo wearing a top hat and gnawing on a joint of roast beef, like all English people do.


1. Pridmore is, according to a website that's almost certainly wrong, the 5171st-most-popular surname in Britain. Okay, it's not exactly top of the charts, and it's not a name that most people have heard of, but it's a genuine English name, like most or all names ending with 'more'. Well, some people suggest that it's Welsh, and others that it might be French (derived from 'Prudhomme', since 'Pridham' also exists, but I don't think that's a very plausible theory), and the origin of the name is unknown. It's a name that has only ever been used by working-class nonentities, and so has never featured in literature, court reports etc, but it's got a long (albeit mostly unrecorded) history, and I'm quite proud of it.

Incidentally, type Pridmore into Google, and you get Pridmore Bookmakers, then johnpridmore.co.uk (John Pridmore, "an ex-London Gangster, turned Christian" whose website describes how God has changed his life. He's no relation. And I assume the "ex" relates to his gangster career, not just to London, but you never know.), then pridmore.co.uk, which belongs to a Shaun Pridmore who as far as I can see has never done anything of note but who presumably was the first Pridmore to discover computers and bags the domain name for his family photos, then the Google Maps location of Alan Pridmore Entertainment, then the Surname Database entry for 'Pridmore', which boldly asserts that the name is a lost place-name (an assertion apparently based on complete guesswork), and then, finally my blog. See, anonymouse - I'm world-famous, and I'm only number six on Google's Pridmore listing!

As for Benjamin, I owe that to my mother's fondness for Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat back in 1976, but it's not an uncommon name in Britain. Lots of famous Bens in this country - Benjamin Britten springs to mind for obvious reasons, but there's lots of others too.


2. I always thought English people had a worldwide reputation for cleverness! What, we're a land of dunces to the world outside? Well, that's disappointing. Anyway, I'm not 'smart'. Not in any sense of the word. Thick as two short planks, me. So obviously I fit right in to the mass of oafish English!


3. And I'm sure that modesty is a quintessentially English trait! Come on, don't we all like to hide our light under a bushel, at least compared to those boastful, swaggering foreigners? The tradition of British understatement? I can see that we need some better ambassadors for the country. And anyway, I'm not modest. I ceaselessly brag about my accomplishments, I just do it in a subtle way, by saying that I'm modest and following it up with "Here's an impression of what I would say if I wasn't modest: I'm really great, for the following detailed and lengthy reasons..."


4. Yep, the English reputation is rather worse than I thought. Can't really argue with this one completely, but we're not all football hooligans over here. Quite a few English people practically never get drunk and damage things. My grandma, for instance, is practically never drunk and disorderly and hasn't assaulted a policeman or carved her name into a public monument for weeks. And while I have been known to damage things when drunk, it's only shot glasses that I tried to juggle to impress my friends, or the ligaments of my knees. Ahh, that was a great weekend...


5. Hey now, there's one thing I'm most emphatically not, and that's southern! My hat's not a southern hat! It's northern, like me! It's probably a Yorkshirehat!


For the record, I am as far as is known an entirely English person. As I've mentioned once or twice before, my family tree is the most boring in the universe, it's full of Yorkshire/Midlands labourers and absolutely nothing else. On the other hand, my strikingly semitic appearance and instinctive fondness for beards and black fedoras leads many people to guess, possibly correctly, that there's a touch of the Jewish in my family history, and I hope there is. It'd make my background ever so slightly more interesting...

Extra post

Because some things can't wait until tomorrow's blogging. I take back everything I've ever said about Wikipedia. You've got to admire the kind of article-writing skill that, in the page about Japanese young children's cartoon Anpanman, describes Anpanman and his enemy Baikinman as "physical representations of moral dualism".

The computer screen that displayed the numbers and things for us to memorise in the MRI machine in Tokyo had a starting display of Anpanman saying "Please wait". I surprised the scientists by knowing who he was.

Of travel I've had my share, man

It's, sadly, passport renewal time. If I want to go abroad next year, my trusty passport will be past its expiry date in June. Just look at all those stamps in it, too - I wasn't sure if I was ever going to use the thing when I first got it. Now, if they gave you a stamp when you went to Europe, the passport would be full to bursting with exotic ink colours. Even so, it's still pretty cool.

The first page has Malaysia, 01 Oct 2003 arriving, 06 Oct 2003 departing. World Memory Championship, I came third and took a lot of people by surprise with how much I'd improved since the previous year (that was the year I debuted the "Ben system"... ahhh, happy memories). Next page has the USA, 26 Feb 2007 - Las Vegas, during my unemployed-waster phase, justifying it to myself by saying that it'd help me write my book if I had a change of scene. The page after that has the USA again, 01 Jul 2009, my recent jaunt to Pittsburgh, and Bahrain in 22 Oct 2008 where I triumphed in the World Championship last year. Blank page, then Japan, 24 Oct 2009 - I never realised it was exactly a year after the WMC - to have my brain scanned and sing karaoke. Six more blanks, then we come to the middle pages, which a lot of passport-stampers seem to favour. USA, July 02 2002, was a trip to Chicago to hang out with Jimi and the gang, wow, seven and a half years ago, and Brazil 09 07 06, for that brilliant TV-star holiday in Rio. The other half of the middle-page spread has two more American stamps - Jan 17 2002 was Las Vegas for the first time, Nov 16 2002 was back to Vegas for the second time because I'd liked the first time so much. Six more blanks, then again with the USA, Mar 05 2009 - New York this spring. Next page is a mostly faded black stamp of some kind, I don't know what, and USA for Feb 21 2005, which was another Vegas trip. I do love Las Vegas, although on that trip I caught the flu and spent the whole time ill in bed, so it wasn't the best holiday I've ever had. Four more blank pages, then we get Bahrain, 29 Aug 2007 to 03 Sep 2007, where I spectacularly failed to win the World Championship but still had a great time. And then on the last page, US Immigration on Oct 21 2000, my first ever trip abroad, visiting Washington DC just for the hell of it. There had been talk of having a housewarming party for CV when he moved over there, that didn't happen, but I eventually resolved to go to Washington anyway, because who says you need a good reason and I'd never been anywhere before. And I'm glad I did!

You don't need to get the renewal form and photos countersigned if you're still recognisable from your previous photo - I think I just about qualify, more or less:

Just look at that young stripling with the naive smile, the smooth chin and the last vestiges of a trendy hairstyle on top of his head. 23 years old, never left the country, never competitively memorised anything, never spontaneously quit his job for a life as a waster... and wearing a cool Zenith badge ("Never trust a hippy") that I wish I still had. I'd try to picture myself looking back on now, ten years in the future, but I really can't imagine getting any older than I am right now. 43? I'm never going to be 43.

We're with the bear

I tell you, there's nothing like staying up till three in the morning when you've got a cold to make you feel all the worse the next day. Actually, I was feeling so yucky last night that I almost decided to skip the phone-answering, but I'm glad I didn't - not only was it fun, it's so mild outside at the moment now that I think a couple of late-night bike rides to work and back made me feel a lot better than wallowing in my germs at home would have done.

Anyway, enough whining. What with going out last night, I didn't have a chance to write a blog and tell you about my day on Friday. The highlight, among all the various fund-raising activities going on at the office, was entering a guess the name of the bear competition and winning it! Well, it was obvious, really - the options were Bartholomew and a lot of stupid modern names that people call their children nowadays. So Bartholomew, an extremely cool giant teddy (he'd come up about to my waist if he stood up, which he can't do since his legs are stuck in a sitting position) is now making friends with all my much smaller cuddly toys in my bedroom. I hope he's not bullying them.

There was also a second, less cool, part of the prize - a pair of "designer sunglasses". Funnily enough, they look exactly like my cheap Specsavers prescription sunglasses that I rarely wear, except they've got "Police" written on them in small letters. I don't really need these designer shades, and there doesn't seem much point in going to the effort of getting prescription lenses put in them so I don't have to wear them on top of my normal glasses, so somebody can expect them as a Christmas present from me.

Not somebody I like all that much, obviously, seeing as I've just spent the last paragraph deriding them. I'll give them to one of my enemies, assuming I manage to make any enemies between now and Christmas.

Does a lot of work for charity, doesn't like to talk about it

Remember that thing with helping children learn to read in schools? I am still doing it, it's just taken a little while to get everything arranged. But as of next Tuesday lunchtime, I'm having infants read Magic Key books to me on a one-to-one kind of basis. The school is really keen to get men doing this, because they've got a shortage of male role-models for the kids, apparently. I don't think I'd make a very good role-model, but I suppose beggars can't be choosers.

Also, I'm manning the phones for Children in Need again tomorrow, 9pm until 2am. So call in, and maybe I'll take your money!

And in non-charitable news, here's a memory statistic: If I'd got my 25.97-second pack and Simon had got his 20.93, I would have won the World Championship by 35 championship points. 8058 to 8023. Now that would have been a great finish! We would have had to have demanded a recount...

Stooges and sneezes

I've got a cold and need sympathy, but on the other hand a comments-thread on my blog inspired me to look into the Three Stooges in more detail and watch some of their shorts on YouTube, so now I'm completely hooked on their antics. Heehee, I do love slapstick, I don't know why I've never watched them before. I'm impressed by the remakes and reused footage in their later films, too - I've never seen that kind of thing done outside cartoons...

It's a great comfort to my sore red nose. More of a comfort than these Kleenex Balsam tissues "with protective balm", certainly. I think the whole protective balm thing is just a lie.

Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I met a guy called Rudolf Reinders? Well, if I didn't, that's basically the whole story right there, but I really did. He's German and old and was born before the Red-Nosed Reindeer became a celebrity, so it's just a coincidence. He plays Chinese chess really well.

Allemagne

While making announcements at the WMC, Tony regularly referred to China as what the internet tells me is written Zhōngguó. A couple of times, he also felt that he should do the same for Germany, so described them as Allemagne. But this made me think that if I don't even know how to say 'China' in Chinese, and if I'm probably going there for the WMC next year, and seeing as my brother now lives over there, I really should learn how to speak the language.

So I bought myself a "Teach Yourself Beginner's Mandarin Chinese" course from Waterstone's on my way home one night. While serving me, the man behind the till said something Chinese, possibly "You're welcome" or "Good luck", but I wouldn't know. Enough to demonstrate that everybody speaks the language but me, anyway. However, having started the course, I'm now convinced that I'm never going to be able to speak it. Or even half-attempt to speak it, like I can with Japanese. I'm pretty sure my tongue is too fat and useless to deal with proper Chinese pronunciation, and my voice is too generally silly to cope with intonation. Maybe I'll just concentrate on learning German and assume that the China deal is going to fall through.

In more positive news, thanks to Ray Keene, I can confirm that the WMC trophy is the work of Louis-Ernest Barrias (although this website calls him Eugene), and it's "Fame", or possibly "La Renommé". But how do you say that in Chinese?

Well, I think it's cool

I don't think I've mentioned yet that I've now accomplished that statistic that I was aiming for - I've now won the last eight memory competitions I've competed in, which is a new record. Woo, and hoo, and hooray for me!

In more visually exciting news, I'm sure most of my readers have already checked this out, but there are lots and lots and lots of photos on memory-sports.com - click here and here to see just about everybody who was at the WMC, in the middle of memorising, recalling and generally hanging around. Great work, Florian!

Ahhh, Doctor Who

What better thing to come home to than a new Doctor Who? It's been much too long. And, well, it wasn't an all-time classic, but it was riveting and fun to watch. I'm hopeful that the new series, new actors, new producer next year will move away from the very formulaic stories we've had for the last few years (It's an isolated group of eight ordinary humans facing attack from weird aliens! It's an everyday item (water!) becoming our enemy! It's humans being posessed and turning into eerie aliens! It's a geeky American genius, too!), but sometimes there's nothing wrong with telling the exact same story over and over again if you can still do it well. And tonight's special, being 45 minutes of standard-new-Doctor-Who-plot-#1 followed a little jarringly by 10 minutes of foreshadowing for the upcoming climax, was one of the better base-under-siege stories we've seen. The human characters were less annoyingly written and had distinctive personalities, for one thing. And I love David Tennant, and I don't want to see him leave. Let's hope he gets a good send-off at Christmas...

The London Charivari

Just a lot of random things of interest that have happened over the last few days:

As I mentioned earlier, the competitor briefing on Wednesday night went very smoothly indeed. There weren't nearly as many questions and debates about the rules as usual. This is mainly a testament to the organisation of the event, but possibly also due to most competitors' minds being distracted by questions about paper flowers. The briefing being held on November 11th, all the vast contingent of foreign visitors, newly arrived in the country, sought out the rather more scarce British representatives to ask what the poppies were all about. It must be a bit strange, really - you come to a foreign land for a competition, you've read all the guidebooks telling you about everyday life for the average Brit, and then you step off the plane to find everybody wearing a paper poppy in their lapel. Foreigners may want to click here for an explanation.

Foreigners were certainly abundant at the World Memory Championship, as usual. There were 63 competitors, or 64 if Rich Bowdler was in fact there - he was listed on all the score printouts and even had points credited to him in the Hour Numbers, but I didn't see him all weekend. Was he there, or was he a figment of someone's imagination? I never had the time to ask. Twenty of these competitors were German, sixteen were Chinese, whereas Team England could only muster seven or eight entrants, depending on how Bowdlerised it was. The rest came from an eclectic mix of globetrotters, most notably Sweden and Norway, who had a real tussle for fourth place in the team rankings. There was also James from Wales, who probably doesn't count as a foreigner, but was his own one-man national team since Dai wasn't there.

All the articles in newspapers and on the internet (of which here are a few) say there were 74 competitors, but that's presumably what the early press releases said, before everybody had arrived and they'd actually counted the number of people there. Even so, 63 or 64 is nothing to be ashamed of - it comfortably beats the all-time record for the number of competitors, and in terms of average quality too, this championship was light-years ahead of the previous record-holder (2003, 46 competitors but most of them being young Malaysian beginners).

The prizegiving ceremony was as much fun as usual, lots of medals and certificates and applause, and it was interesting to see a wider assortment of competitors sharing the medals between them this year. I was only first place in two of the ten disciplines, second in another three and third in one. I didn't even end up with the top score in Speed Cards - Wang Feng beat me by half a second in the second trial! Just a few years ago, a time under 40 seconds was a remarkable achievement, now it's a pretty commonplace kind of thing.

The head honcho of next year's World Championship in China gave a speech - very impressively, since he apparently speaks no English and was reading from a script - telling us all what a great event it was going to be. It does sound like it'll be a good one, although I need to improve a LOT if I'm going to have any chance of winning again. I can't keep relying on scraping through with a good speed cards.

I got some great souvenirs, too - check it out:

A cool knotty-thing from China, and a pack of My Neighbour Totoro cards from the Japanese film crew! I've said it before and I'll say it again, the Japanese team are by far the best documentary people I've ever worked with (and I did really like quite a lot of the other ones I've worked with before). I can't wait to see the final product, although I will have to wait until January.

There is also a new permanent trophy for the World Memory Championship - a hefty great bronze statuette by some 19th-century sculptor who, in Ray Keene's words, was regarded as better than Rodin in his day. I can't remember his name (and nor could Tony Buzan when he presented me with the trophy), and I'm not much of a sculpture expert - if there are any such people out there, could you suggest who it might have been? I think it started with B. And could you tell me whether 'regarded as better than Rodin in his day' is actually a good thing to be? Wasn't Rodin a classic example of unappreciated-in-his-lifetime?

The statue is of a winged woman, possibly Mnemosyne but probably just some woman with wings, and I only 'won' it in the sense that I was allowed to lift it up and show it to the TV cameras. It's like the Wimbledon trophy, Ray explained, although I think the Wimbledon trophy is on display at Wimbledon all year round, whereas this one presumably just goes back to wherever it normally lives - Ray's house? Some museum somewhere? Some other championship for which it also serves as the trophy? Anyway, in all seriousness, it is a very nice piece of work, and I can see why Mr B the sculptor was so admired by Rodin-haters.

I did genuinely win (and was allowed to take home) a very tasteful and stylish glass trophy, much nicer than last year's, proclaiming that I'm the World Memory Champion. I also collected my UK Championship trophy which I'd left behind in August when I went home early. And that one is a really beautiful work of art, I really love it. Trophies nowadays are so much cooler than the ugly tin cups I won in memory competitions in the olden days, and I'm very grateful to the organisers.

So, for those who haven't been paying attention, I'm now the World Memory Champion for the third time, equalling Andi Bell's achievement and second only to Dominic O'Brien's eight titles. And without meaning to detract from Dominic's genuine awesomeness, it was so very much easier to win the World Championship in his heyday that I don't think anybody's ever going to equal that record now. There are just so many very, very, very good memorisers out there now!

Numerologists might be interested to note that my wins follow exactly the same pattern as Andi's (1998, 2002, 2003) - the second win was four years after the first, and then the third was the year after that. Andi never won it again, of course, which might be seen as a bad omen for me, but then Andi by that stage of his memory career was publicly calling the organisers corrupt, dishonest and suchlike and trying to set up his own breakaway championship, and I haven't quite gone that far just yet, so maybe I'm still good for a couple more world titles.

I would like to win a team title too, though. We need more English memorisers! When the top ten in this year's championship came up on stage at the end, I was flanked by five Germans and four Chinese. England was a distant third in the team standings - there are Englanders out there who are quite good at the whole memory thing but who didn't come this year, like Andi, Ed, Katie, James Ponder and so on, but still, let's recruit some more people this year and stop the newspapers talking about the Germans and Chinese taking over 'our' sport!

That will do for now, I think. I'm sure you're all getting tired of world memory championship news by now. Let's just finish by saying a big thank you to all the other competitors for making this the toughest and most exciting competition ever (it's replaced 2003 as my favourite WMC of all time), a huuuuuge thank you to all the arbiters and organisers, especially Chris Day because I called him 'Phil' while giving my speech at the end of the prize ceremony (it was late and I was tired) and Phil Chambers because I confused him with Chris Day. Names and faces will never be my speciality, I'm afraid.

And we'll keep on fighting to the end

Sheeeeeeeesh, that was close.

In brief, because I'm just snatching five minutes in an internet cafe before the prizegiving ceremony, I only ended up with 167 words, and then in spoken numbers it turned out I'd got the ninth digit wrong, so I just ended up with my score of 67 from the first trial. When they read the scores out, I shouted "Damn it!", quite loudly. I get stressed at these events. So going into the speed cards, I was 368 championship points behind Hannes, with Simon and Gunther no more than a few hundred points behind me.

That meant I had to go for a fast time - there was no point doing a safe 1-minute pack and guaranteeing 4th or 5th place. So I went for, and got, 31.55 seconds in the first trial. Simon managed a 54.81, Gunther 66 seconds or so and Hannes attempted a time of about a minute, but didn't recall it correctly.

So then it was calculation time, scribbling with pen and paper. Who says you never need long division after you leave school? I calculated that if I didn't improve my time, Hannes would win with a pack in 51.5 seconds. And if I managed a 25-second pack in the second trial, Hannes would need about 36 seconds.

What about Simon, somebody asked me. "He's too far behind," I confidently said. There was a chorus of no-he-isn'ts, and I sat down with my pen and paper again and confirmed that if I didn't improve my score, he could still win with a time of 26.2 seconds. He's done 28-point-something before. So great, more pressure.

Anyway, I whizzed through my second pack in 25.97, and the recall went very smoothly, except that I'd memorised the ace of diamonds twice and the ace of hearts not at all. Drat, I thought to myself, but I bet where I went wrong was right at the end. The last two cards were ace-of-diamonds, jack-of-diamonds, and I only gave them a very quick glance as I was putting the pack down, I must have mistaken a heart for a diamond. Turns out it was the other one, near the start, that I got wrong.

Luckily for me, though, Hannes didn't manage to get his 40-something second pack right - he would have won it if he had. And likewise, Simon, having intended to do around 25 seconds, actually stopped the clock at 20, but didn't quite recall it correctly. So I win the world championship, slightly by default rather than brilliance, but even so, wowee. This has been the most thrilling competition I've participated in - I think it's replaced Kuala Lumpur 2003 as my all-time favourite.

I feel a little dissatisfied, still, because I wasn't quite at my best and I could easily have blown it. But I didn't, and woo, I'm still the World Memory Champion! Woo!

Now I need to go to the prize ceremony and then to bed for the next week. See you all when I wake up.

If I do this and he does this and he does that...

Boo, Bahrain lost their all-important game against New Zealand. That's probably a bad omen, but it would have to be a bad omen for memory competitions in general rather than for me in particular, and since it's unquestionably worse for the mind sport of memory to have the same old boring world champion win it again, I'm taking this as a good omen for me.

Plus my brother emailed to say he's arrived safely in Harbin, China and is settling in nicely, and that's something that's been concerning me just slightly in amongst all this memorising, so that's a good omen too. And just for me, not for any of the others, because few if any of them have even met my brother.

Anyway, I ended up with 22 packs of cards when we got the results this morning, and Hannes got something like 15½, or maybe it was 17½, I don't know. Go and check memory-sports.com or worldmemorychampionship.com. What this meant was that I'm 89 championship points behind Hannes, and about 350 ahead of Gunther in third place.

This morning we had random words, in which I fervently hope I got all 187 words I attempted right. Hannes reckons he might have got 210. And then spoken numbers, in which I think I got 135, and Hannes something a bit less than that. So there are various permutations, but what it's going to all boil down to is of course the final discipline, Speed Cards. It's great when a memory championship ends like that. Except that this means there's a sporting chance that I'll make a mess of everything and maybe not even finish in the top five or six. Still, fingers crossed, eh?

This morning, while we were waiting for the start, I looked around me and wrote what I could see:

Gunther makes sure his little German flag (with eagle) is standing up on his desk, while his juggling balls sit next to it. Simon has a big green pepper on his (during the morning, he munched his way through a green one and an orange one - presumably the red one is for the afternoon). Ruiqiao is late (lateness in the morning is his 'thing', obviously). Boris has his printed plan for the competition (what score to attempt in each discipline, what result would be good, acceptable or great and what total scores that would give him...) Cornelia's desk is cluttered with jacket, bottles of water, carrier bag and little cuddly lobster. Hannes has a sandwich, bag of some kind of snack food and lots of apple juice. I've just got my hat, watch and a bottle of water on mine.

Hoo-boy

I'm tired. The kind of transcending-all-other-experience-of-tiredness tired that I only get at the World Memory Championship. It's great.

What isn't great, though, is my performance. It's okay, but it's not great. We've just finished the Hour Cards, and I only attempted 23 packs, because I kept getting distracted and wasn't quite with it, and when I got to pack 23 and realised I'd missed out a big chunk of my journey (confusing room 5 at QEGS with room 2, for any former schoolmates who might be interested), I decided to give it up as a bad job and just try to make sure I got those 23 right. And I think I did, barring the inevitable stupid mistake here and there. I'd be happy-ish with a final result of 20.

I finished second to Hannes in Speed Numbers and Historic Dates, which is about par for the course, and nowhere to speak of in Names and Faces (which Simon won). Haven't got the results of the Hour Cards yet (those poor arbiters have to stay up all night marking them - I must remember to thank them all tomorrow), but after six events, it goes:

1 Hannes 5171
2 Me 4782
3 Gunther 4559
4 Simon 4232
5 Chuanwei 4007
6 Feng 3981
7 Boris 3965
8 Cornelia 3709
9 Ruiqiao 3634
10 Dorothea 3454

Worrying, because I'm ALWAYS in the lead after Historic Dates. Even in the years when I'm doing badly. Still, I probably beat Hannes in Hour Cards, so it's going to be tight tomorrow.

There's a good article in the Times today, incidentally, although the title "Britain tries to regain lost glory in memory sports" is a bit misleading. I would have said we're still hanging on to a little bit of glory, seeing as how I'm still the world champion and everything...

Very quick update

I got a disappointing 1756 or something like that in Hour Numbers, but it was still the third-best score, narrowly beating Gunther. But Wang Feng, who I've never heard of before this competition, got a record-beating 1980-something and Su Ruiqiao got 2080. That leaves me in second place overall after three disciplines, behind Gunther (who, as I've said before, is always in the lead at this point) but only fractionally ahead of a whole gang of other people.

Names and faces went as badly as usual for me, speed numbers I got 360, which was the second-best (after Hannes) in the first trial - Ruiqiao, attempting 680, got 52 or something bad like that, so hopefully no sensational new record there in the second trial. Historic dates I got 90-something. Hour Cards this afternoon, I need to do something cool if I'm going to win this competition. Now I've got to go and talk to CBS. I'm not even sure who CBS are - Americans? The man who wants to talk to me is English...

Latest news

Well, I did worse than I expected in Abstract Images, ending up with only 159 and joint 13th place (I think last year that score would have put me in the top five - the scores are going to be scary this year, I suspect). Gunther broke the world record with something like 318. But then I made up for it in the Binary, getting a better-than-expected 4105 (just short of the world record but since when I'd finished I reckoned I'd got somewhere in the high 3000s, I'm not disappointed), while Gunther had a disappointing-by-his-standards score of around 2500. That leaves Gunther in the lead after two disciplines, as he always is, but it's very close behind him - I'm in second, but only just.

When we get the Hour Numbers results tomorrow morning, then we'll be able to see who's really on form and start speculating about the end result. All I can say is that if I didn't make too many stupid mistakes, it's possible (not probable, but possible) that I got a score of over 2000. Gunther, Hannes, Chuanwei, Ruiqiao and probably some others too are also saying they might have beaten the magic 2000 that's eluded us all for so long. I might quite possibly not have made the top ten in this discipline either, we'll just have to wait and see. Boris summed it up nicely just now - "I'm in ninth place, and I think this is the highest score I've ever had after two disciplines!"

Now I'm off to eat something unhealthy and get an early night. Tomorrow, it's Names and Faces (yay), 5-Minute Numbers, Historic Dates and Hour Cards. Stay tuned to memory-sports.com!

London blogging

Written last night in old-fashioned pen-and-paper style:

Evening of day 0. Got to London okay, even enough time to drop my bag off at my cheap-and-nasty hotel before making my way to the expensive-and-nice hotel on the Strand for the registration and competitor briefing. I also stopped in a couple of shops along the way, looking for a towel - unsure whether the cheap-and-nasty hotel was nice enough to provide towels and shampoo, I decided to bring the latter and not the former. A strange decision, but it seemed sensible at the time, as my big towel wouldn't have fitted in my little rucksack. Interestingly, gift shops don't seem to sell Union Jack towels, the M&S on Edgware Road doesn't sell towels, and the useful-household-things shop on the Strand sells pretty much everything except towels. So I bought a cheap 3-pack of teatowels and made do.

Nothing too exciting happened at the briefing. The Japanese crew insisted that I sit right at the front of the room, next to the aisle, but I would probably have sat there anyway (the top ten competitors get big desks at the front, the rest crowd into smaller partitioned cubicles at the back - it's a good turnout, probably record-breaking, and although the room is too small, it's not excessively so). No Tony Buzan, who's not been well lately, but who will be there tomorrow. There was a Ray Keene, which is unusual - his work for the WMSC is normally so far behind the scenes that a lot of competitors don't know he exists. Otherwise, it was Phil, Chris, Jennifer and Dominic with a very impressive computerised presentation explaining the rules. The projector broke down halfway through, but otherwise it went without a hitch, and there weren't even very many questions. No arguments, either!

The most interesting part was the revelation that Su Ruiqiao has requested 4000 digits in Hour Numbers and 680 digits in 5-Minute Numbers. The world records are 1949and 405 respectively, so this seems a little excessive, to say the least. And 680 is a very specific big number to request, don't you think? I suspect mindgames. Or an Andi-Bell-esque approach of trying to memorise enormous amounts and getting 60% of it wrong. We shall see.

Day 1 brings Abstract Images, Binary and Hour Numbers. Gunther is very good at all three and usually expects to take an early lead. But we shall see about that, too.


Scribbled this morning while waiting for Images to start:

Day 1 - Bakerloo line closed, but I managed to get here on time. Left my hat in the hotel room and didn't realise until I was half way there. The usual opening ceremony, Tony's standard speech. Ruiqiao, having picked the seat behind me, was late, but still in time for the Images. Chuanwei keeps moving desks, he's settled somewhere in the middle of the room now. We're just waiting for the start...


Live blogging right now:

It's lunchtime, I've escaped the camera crews for a little while and headed straight for the internet. I'm a geek. After Tony's exciting announcement that in 1994, scientists predicted that nobody would ever be able to remember 30 spoken numbers etc etc, we got into Abstract Images, followed by Binary. Both went pretty well for me, I think I got fairly decent scores, but the fun comes when you see how everybody else has done. Nobody has been going around boasting that they've shattered world records, but nobody seems terribly depressed about their performance either. Time to head back to the Strand Palace to hear the first scores and then see what I can do in Hour Numbers. I would really like to beat 2000 in that, but I never quite seem to achieve my best in this one. We shall, as the saying goes, see. Keep reading memory-sports.com for the latest!

This is why I'm not a writer

Yes, I still haven't finished that appraisal of the top contenders for the World Memory Championship. And it's pretty unlikely that I'm going to finish it now, seeing as I'm working tomorrow and then quickly scurrying down to London for the competitor briefing in the evening, without so much as an hour or two to spare for sitting around blogging. In brief, if I don't win, place your metaphorical bets on Simon Reinhard, who's generally good at everything and doesn't tend to make mistakes, but just maybe lacks experience of the hour-long disciplines. Failing that, Johannes Mallow is a whiz with numbers, unbeatable at historic dates, has reportedly been training very hard and scared everyone last year by being better than expected. Gunther Karsten is always a force to be reckoned with, so don't rule him out, expect world records in names and words from the inevitable Boris Konrad, beware of Guo Chuanwei and Liu Ping and the underrated Su Ruiqiao coming from the mysterious East (where, incidentally, my brother is finally emigrating to tomorrow), hope for surprises from someone completely unexpected, because that's always fun, and wish everyone the best of British luck!

In other news, I had the Japanese film crew briefly filming me at work today. You know, these guys are by far the most likeable TV people I've ever dealt with (and I did actually really like some of the others I've worked with in the past), and they really know how to keep things brief and not waste time - they promised to only be there for an hour, and in the event they were even quicker than that! This is going to be a great documentary, I can't wait to see it.

Bumbershoot

It occurred to me, mainly as a result of reading Chris's annual Mindzine blog post, that I've never actually played monopoly, ever, in my life. I feel like I'm missing out on something here. Actually, I only had a vague idea of what the rules were, so I found them on the internet and read them tonight. Sounds like fun, I must have a game with someone, some time when I've got a few hours to spare.

Actually, I must confess, it's only a few years ago that I discovered that monopoly is actually an American game. Despite it not featuring in my childhood at all, I'd still managed to acquire the impression that it's an original English invention, and the London-based version was the first one. First impressions being hard to shake off, I still find it quite difficult to believe that it's a foreign game.

Oh, and the title of this blog is an old American word for 'umbrella', which many Americans inexplicably believe to be a British expression. You see, my ego can't cope with admitting that I spent the first thirty years of my life mistakenly attributing something American to Britain without compensating for it by jeering at the way those foolish transatlantic types (like the writers of one episode of Frasier, for example) are always mistakenly attributing American things to Britain. What a bunch of oafs they are over there. They all think we measure distance in kilometers, too.

Also, just to reassert how clever and knowledgeable I am (that ego of mine is terribly fragile, you know, especially in moments of stress about upcoming World Memory Championships), can I point out that although this website speculates that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is to blame for the bumbershoot confusion (understandable, seeing as so many Americans do think Dick Van Dyke is an authentic Englishman), there was in fact a character in the popular 1960s war comic "Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos", four years before Dick Van Dyke sang that song, called Percival 'Pinky' Pinkerton, who was the token English character, and who always carried his trusty bumbershoot around with him on his commando missions. Seriously, he did.

It's the final countdown

Okay, I've done a last bit of cards practice today - it's a bit closer to the competition than I usually keep training, you have to rest your brain and your journeys for a few days at least, but I still don't feel completely like I've done enough training, and I wanted to experiment with slowing down a little on the second viewing (I've taken to doing that with numbers, and I think it helps, a bit). But now I'm all done, except for a bit of abstract-image and random-words practice I'm planning to do over the next few evenings, because I'm operating on the dubious theory that it's good to keep practicing those right up to the start of the competition.

I've also devoted a tedious amount of time to shuffling cards and writing labels for them, and realising that I forgot to buy rubber bands (to hold the cards together and stop them falling out all over my bag or the floor). I'll have to see if I can pilfer some from the office, but getting stationery there can be a bit like borrowing gold from Fort Knox. I've got to work on Wednesday, hopefully knocking off early enough to get to the competitor briefing in London at 6pm, and I'm probably not going to have time to pop to the shops and find rubber bands...

It's the trivial little things that cause people to lose the World Memory Championship, you know.

Entertainment like it used to be

I'm listening to the boxing on the radio. Not something I've ever done before - officially I disapprove of boxing, but I like to watch it on TV from time to time - and it seems a strange thing to do, seeing as boxing is such a very visual thing. You'd think that boxing on the radio would be the equivalent of memory competitions on the telly - nobody can see what's happening. But old cartoons, comics etc are absolutely full of scenes of people crowding around a radio to listen to the big fight, so this is my sort of tribute to that, and also to the fact that there's nothing good on TV. I hope Valuev wins - I hate it when a plucky underdog beats the hot favourite.

Interlude

While we wait for me to finish writing that WMC competitors analysis I promised you yesterday (that's a weekend job if ever I saw one), let's keep up the memory theme by telling the world that Sainsbury's want to use me in some kind of "PR story", helping staff memorise the location of their products so as to help customers. It sounds like fun, although in the email they asked me to 'please let me know your rate for PR activity', which is a question I never enjoy being asked. It's sort of embarrassing to reply that I haven't got a standard rate, because I very rarely do that kind of thing, and when I do I normally don't get paid. I'd do this for free Sainsbury's own brand groceries. This is why I really need an agent, you see. They could price me right out of the market and reject all this kind of offer without even telling me about it! That would give me so much more free time!

Also, I notice we haven't got any British people in the semi-finals of the World Othello Championship. It's another nearly-all-Japanese affair again, including one Japanese player who pretends to be from Singapore nowadays, and also Matthias Berg, who probably counts as an honorary Japanese player by now, since he always gets to the semi-finals of the world championship. Maybe next year I'll qualify and show them all how it's done.

Runners and riders

Well, it's a week until the World Memory Championship 2009 kicks off, I've just spent the evening experimenting with a new approach to memorising binary digits (which is, of course, a ridiculous thing to do a week before a world championship, when you might argue that it's a bit too late to be trying new things, but hey, I'm a ridiculous kind of person), the WMSC have just made an announcement about prizes, interestingly not mentioning the prizes that Memory XL have promised to provide on top, and I'm feeling like this would be a good time to do that run-down of the top competitors in this year's event, so all my faithful blog-followers know who to look out for. Well, it's that or go out and watch the fireworks, and I'm doing that tomorrow. I've written part of it already, the finished article will be with you at some point over the next seven days.

(Incidentally, you probably also want to know where to look out for them - up to the minute coverage will hopefully be available on the ever-awesome memory-sports.com. Sorry, everyone who keeps asking me this question, it's not going to be on telly. Not even on some obscure cable channel.)

But let's talk about those prizes before we start - in the absence of a sponsor for this year, the coolest prizes are the promise of free trips to next year's championship, in China. Free hotel rooms for places four to ten, free flights and hotel suites for the top three (hotel SUITES? Okay, not all the competitors are working class heroes like me, but I'm sure all the potential top-three would be happy to take a normal room, and have the spare cash go back into the prize fund for everyone. The entire German team this year are crowding into about three rooms, last I heard, we're used to non-luxurious accommodation!). Still, these prizes are extremely groovy, and I hope they do come about. It's generally a good idea to be sceptical about plans for future world memory championships at this stage, but the Chinese organisers seem very keen to put on a good show.

There's also a promise of lots of prize money for 2010, but I'm not going to be making plans for that money just yet. A lot of things could happen in the next twelve months.

Anyway, the point of memory competitions really isn't the prizes - it's the fun of the competition. Prizes are a nice bonus, but we'd all compete if there never were any, and we'd still have a good time doing it. (Well, unless there was a wealthy sponsor spending lots of money, but the organisers were pocketing it all. Then we might complain a bit.) But I'm completely in the mood for an exciting World Memory Championship now. Roll on next Thursday!

WOCaday

The World Othello Championship kicks off tomorrow in Ghent. In accordance with tradition, the draw for the first round has been made the night before, and you can see it here if you want. Our British contingent (and our Australian chairman) mostly seem to have drawn opponents in the good-but-beatable-players kind of range (Miroslav Voracek, Marcel Peperkamp, Henry Aspenryd), while David Hand and Helen Starkey are up against players I've never heard of before, so there's a chance of a good start for our lads (and ladette) if everyone's on form.

It really is high time we had a British world champion, or even just a British runner-up again. Come on, you Brits! Flip those discs!

Who's going to win?

I am, that's who! You know, I'm just now finally starting to feel confident about the world championship. It's going to be close, but I think I can do it...

A bit more Japan

Remember that "Windows 7 Burger" I mentioned? Boris found pictures! Pictures from the very same Burger King we were in, in fact!

Also, you know how American lightswitches are weird (you flick them up to turn the light on and down to turn it off, as opposed to the normal way of doing things)? Well, Japanese lightswitches are sideways! It really is a strange and scary country, and I think I'm going to have to avoid international travel in future, because things like this really do alarm me.

It's funny what you think of at odd moments

I own a hacksaw, or possibly a coping saw, I'm not sure what the difference is. Anyway, I've got one, in one of my old cardboard boxes. It just occurred to me today, apropos of nothing, and I dug it out just to make sure I wasn't imagining it. But I can't for the life of me remember why I bought the thing. I'm not a DIY kind of person and I'm sure I've never used it. I can't think of anything I've ever done that would have required a hacksaw, but I know there was something once upon a time. I wonder if I made a good job of it...

Positive thinking

I'm almost certain that by far the biggest problem with my preparation for the World Memory Championship this year is that I just don't feel like I've done enough training. I'm sure if I could just snap out of that mindset, I would do much, much better at the competition, without actually doing any more training. I've often wondered whether hypnosis would help in this kind of situation - as I always say (usually to justify eating junk food at memory competitions), if I'm in the right frame of mind, I can always memorise a lot better. So having someone wave a shiny watch in front of my eyes and tell me that I believe I am fully prepared and confident that I can win the world championship... might actually make a huge difference.

Where does one find a hypnotist, anyway? I've never looked for one before. Blimey, there's about a million hynotherapists in the Nottingham Yellow Pages alone! Maybe I'll give one of them a call...

Techno-toilet go!

Yes, the toilet in my hotel room in Tokyo had a huge electronic control panel and a variety of hi-tech functions. When you sit down on it, there's a great gurgling sound of water and a green light marked "Preparation" starts flashing. You can then control the seat temperature and spray strength of the "bidet" and "shower" functions. I'm not sure what the "shower" one does, I didn't dare to try it. The toilet at the university we went to for our experiment on Monday had another function as well, marked "Flushing sound". Yes, when you press it a recording of a flushing sound plays from a speaker. I'm not sure exactly what the point of this function is. For those moments when you want to pretend to flush a toilet, but not actually flush it? Perhaps it's one of those cultural things that you have to be Japanese to understand.

Anyway, going to the toilet was only half the fun of the trip, so let's do a more chronological account of what I've been up to for the past week. As I whined in my last blog, my flight was three and a half hours late taking off, and when it's a twelve-hour flight anyway, you really want to minimise the amount of hours you spend sitting around waiting for it to start. Also, it was an overnight flight, and I can never sleep on planes, even though I got upgraded to a slightly nicer still-economy-class-but-better-than-normal-economy-class seat. Still, there was a reasonable range of in-flight entertainment - I got to see Bolt for the first time, and although the 'kids' section of the videos was very sparsely populated, it did contain the downright awesome (and not at all intended for kids) animation "La maison en petits cubes", which was fun.

I did finally arrive in Tokyo at about 7pm, Japanese time (after half an hour spent waiting for my luggage) to be greeted by the very friendly film crew - director Naoko and the camerman and soundman, whose names I can't remember, and there was also a driver who generally just stayed with the minibus and didn't join in with our various adventures. We drove into central Tokyo, checked into my very nice hotel right in the city centre, met up with Boris (who'd arrived a day or so earlier, despite missing the plane he was originally supposed to get, and had got upgraded to a really luxurious business-class seat as a reward) and we went out to eat. At the cameraman's suggestion, we had okonomiyaki, which I was very enthusiastic about, and explained that I was familiar with the concept because it featured prominently in the popular Japanese comic "Ranma ½". The camera crew already knew I was something of a comics and cartoons nut, but hadn't quite realised the full depths of it until I came to Japan and couldn't shut up about them, my tongue having been loosened by the lack of sleep and surfeit of sake (our Japanese hosts were all drinking beer, but I insisted on having a 'real Japanese experience' and drinking sake - it's possible I didn't make the best impression overall, but they all seemed entertained). By the time we'd got to the end of the evening, at about midnight, I had moved on from discussing comics and showing off my ability to read the katakana parts of the menu and had taken to loudly singing songs from Japanese cartoons I enjoy.

You'd think that I would have slept well after all that, but actually I woke up at about four o'clock and couldn't get back to sleep. Throughout all the time I was there, in fact, I had really terrible jetlag, even worse than when I went to Malaysia six years ago and famously missed the start of the final day of the world memory championship. Still, that gave me an opportunity to walk around Shibuya before the shops opened (most shops there don't open till ten or eleven in the morning, but stay open very late), then go back to bed and sleep until two in the afternoon. This set something of a pattern for my stay there, of going to bed when I felt tired, sleeping for three or four hours then getting up and going out again. Probably not good for me, but it seemed to work.

There are plenty of great sights to see in Tokyo, even if you don't go to the temples and museums and stuff and prefer to just tour the city centre. I did go to see the statue of Hachikō the faithful dog at the train station, but that was all the traditional sightseeing. I preferred to admire the many video game arcades (the buildings tended to be taken up mainly by pachinko machines, but there were also some cool places with a wide range of games - the arcade as a concept may be basically dead in Britain, but it's still surviving over there), bookshops (including the invitingly-named "Book Off", which has more manga than I thought even existed in the world) and department stores. All of these were great fun!

In the evening, Boris and I went for a traditional Japanese meal in Burger King, where they were selling a "Windows 7 burger", with no less than seven giant-size meat patties in them. Didn't have one myself, but I saw some people eating them. It's the kind of meal that would probably kill you, but in a fun way. Incidentally, despite the metric system, a quarter pounder is a quarter pounder in Japan.

The following day, it was time for "the experiment". We added a translator to the gang of us in the minibus (not really necessary, since Naoko's English was actually a bit better than the official translator's) and went out to the university, where we were greeted by the very mad-scientist-esque professor who had arranged to scan our brains while we memorised things. This procedure involved being strapped into a big, scary MRI machine, which was quite an experience in itself, complete with mirrors so we could see a computer screen on which were displayed names and faces and then numbers. Being famously bad at names and faces, I was worried about disappointing the professor, but it turned out that that part of the test was really easy, involving multiple-choice answers, and I breezed through it with only one mistake. I even got the same score as Boris, which shows how easy it was!

The lab assistant responsible for strapping us into the machine, incidentally, looked quite strikingly like my brother. Not so much so when you saw him standing up, being more than a foot shorter, with a rounder face and also being Japanese, but when you can only see his face while he's leaning over you and strapping your head down in a very scary plastic cage, the resemblance is quite uncanny. I did wonder if possibly I was having some very strange freudian dream about my brother strapping me to a bed and sealing me in a tubular coffin. Anyway, the next bit of the test was numbers - 30-second numbers, with 50 digits to remember and a fill-in-the-blanks recall test. It was going to be 20 seconds, but Boris thought that wasn't long enough, the big chicken. Actually, even with thirty seconds on the clock I had a few mistakes, but all but one of them came from forgetting which button was which digit (not being able to see a keyboard due to being strapped into the machine, we had control panels with one button under each finger, and it took a bit of getting used to).

It'll take them a week or so to analyse exactly what my brain was doing and whether it's different from what normal people's brains do, but they did generate an extraordinarily groovy 3-D model of my head on the computer screen, which you can sort of slice open to see a cross-section of my brain. I tell you, it was very cool to see. I didn't realise I even had a brain, let alone one that you can analyse with computers.

After that we had another free day, which I spent travelling around all the different parts of Tokyo. It had been raining for the whole time I was there, but the sun started shining that day, and I completely wore myself out walking around the big city.

Next day was part two of the filming, but this was the rather more fun kind of filming that involved playing, eating and singing. We went to Odaiba, where an officious person told us that we weren't allowed to film documentaries without permission, so we spent the day disguised as tourists, with a hand-held camera. We went to Joypolis, the big Sega indoor theme park kind of place, and had a great time. There's a 3-D animation called "Dark Chapel" which is by far the best 3-D I've ever seen - things jump out of the screen and bite you! And lots of fun rides and attractions too!

Then we went back into the city and ate lots of sushi, while trying to memorise the names. As memory performances go, it wasn't very good, but the food was mostly nice (personally, I don't think that paying a surprisingly large amount of money for an octopus tentacle on a little pile of rice is a good idea, but I wasn't paying, so it was okay. Didn't taste good, though).

And then, because you can't go to Japan and not do this, we went to a karaoke bar in the evening. Not the kind of karaoke bar you get in this country, but a place with private rooms and electronic ordering of songs and drinks and foodstuffs. And also a book literally the size of the yellow pages containing nothing but karaoke versions of songs from cartoons. This really is my kind of country.

I am going to have to improve my singing voice if I go there again, though - I do like a bit of karaoke, and normally when I go out singing, people say I'm quite good compared to some of the people who go up on stage. In Tokyo, though, I was completely put in my place by the director and cameraman, who are both really amazingly great singers. And they even performed the Gatchaman and Evangelion theme tunes for my benefit, and did it really amazingly well! I had a stab at singing "Konya wa Hurricane" from Bubblegum Crisis, which went down well even though I can't read Japanese fast enough to sing it and I could only remember half the words.

And that, sadly, was that. Back home again the next morning, another much-too-long plane journey and then back to work today (I should have been sleeping all day, really, but I had to go in because practically everybody else in the company had the day off and they booked it first). This has been a hugely abridged account of my stay in Tokyo, missing out lots of fun adventures, but I hope it gives you an idea at least. I wish I was still there! Somebody give me another free trip, quick!

Kaerimashita!

Yep, I'm back home with no problems or delays - even getting from the aeroplane at Heathrow to my front door took no more than three hours! Still, I'm extremely tired, so you're not going to get a travelogue tonight, I'm afraid. Just suffice it to say that my trip to Tokyo was by far the most fun I've ever had being filmed for a documentary, and I wish I could stay there for another month at least!

Yes, I know that would mean missing the world championship. I had that much fun. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow!

Ho hum

Well, since my flight's been delayed by three hours (so far) and I've got nothing better to do than hang around Heathrow all night, here's a blog for you.

I'm not short of good books to read, at least, having gone on a shopping spree this morning and bought anything in the Oxfam bookshop that looked like it might be interesting. And also one brand-new book that I couldn't resist - "Return to the Hundred Acre Wood" by David Benedictus, all new Winnie-the-Pooh adventures in the style of A A Milne. I picked it up, thinking 'sacrilege!', but opened it to a random page, found a conversation between Christopher Robin, Pooh and Rabbit that was perfectly, 100%, in character and very funny too, and now I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Hopefully I've still got enough reading matter to keep me going until I eventually end up in Tokyo. This flight is the only one that's been delayed, you know. Apparently the plane's broken down or they forgot to put the wings on or something like that. Still, I get a free meal voucher.

ベン・プリドモーは東京へ行ます

Or words to that effect, anyway. My grasp of Japanese isn't anywhere near sufficient to have a conversation or to read a road sign, but at least I can entertain people by making an attempt.

Rather than planning what sights I'm going to see (I understand Tokyo has a lot of really cool department stores, and that's what I always gravitate towards when I'm in a foreign city - I can see the historical landmarks on telly, thank you very much), I'm wondering whether I'll be able to watch Liverpool play Man Utd in my hotel room. The match starts at 10pm, Japanese time, on Sunday night, and we're doing what they describe as 'the experiment' at the university on the following day, so staying up late at night on top of the jetlag probably isn't a good idea, but I'd quite like to be able to watch a big game like that with Japanese commentators, if possible.

Ooh, I'm excited! Probably won't be blogging while I'm there (haven't decided yet whether to take my laptop - it does mean buying some kind of plug adaptor, and I'm not sure I can cope with all that hassle), so I'll see you all in a week!

PS Nyah, I'm going to Tokyo and you're not.

I demand a recount

The memory-championship rundown won by two votes to one, so I promise I will eventually get round to that. I can't tonight, though, because I need to talk about my alarm clock.

I've been going through alarm clocks at a rate of knots since I moved to this new flat a year or so ago. My trusty old alarm clock (which was bought for me as a joke present by my work colleagues after I was repeatedly late in to work because my previous alarm clock had broken) stopped working shortly after I moved in here - or at least it kept working in the sense that it told the time and the date and temperature and no end of other nifty things, but it stopped making any noise, and I find sound to be an important part of an alarm clock's function.

So I dug out my old clock radio, which sort of works, but has a loose connection so it sometimes makes noise and sometimes doesn't. Which isn't ideal when you want to be woken up every morning, not just every other morning on average. So then I bought a cheap analogue alarm clock from Wilko's, which worked for a while but then stopped, possibly as a result of being crammed into my rucksack so tightly that the front cover broke off and the hands bent. And then I bought another of the same kind of cheap alarm clock (only in a more stylish black, rather than blue-green), which has now also developed a tendency for the second hand to get stuck until you hit it.

So at the weekend, I was in the gadget shop in Nottingham and decided to buy a new alarm clock from the range they sell there. I eventually went for a groovy lighting-up clock that glows a different colour for each hour of the day. It's extremely cool, but unfortunately the beeping of the alarm itself is much too quiet to wake me up. I'm going to need to buy another alarm clock, or possibly just hook this one up to an amplifier of some kind.

So, who IS going to win the thing?

That 'who will win the world championship' post last night got me a surprising volume of comments and emails, considering it was such an insubstantial thing. So, would people like me to do a full run-down of all the top competitors, analysing how I think they'll perform in the WMC next month? I'm not going to do it tonight, obviously, since it's late and I've been up all night learning how to ask for a Godzilla T-shirt in Japanese, but maybe tomorrow I could go into sports commentator mode.

Or I could write a story about an innkeeper and a motorised fishing-net instead. Whichever you prefer.

Who will win the World Championship?

There's a poll on www.brainboard.eu, and at the moment I'm winning it, ahead of Johannes Mallow. Personally, though, I voted for Simon - I couldn't vote for myself, obviously, because that would jinx it and ensure that I finish last with minus twelve million championship points. But I suspect he's going to be the one to beat this year, based on the German championship. Still, I expect it's going to be a really close and exciting competition, and I just hope it doesn't turn into a complete disaster for me...

Flying away

I don't remember actually saying here on my blog what dates I'll be in Japan. I'm flying out on Friday evening, arriving on Saturday, and then flying home again the following Thursday. I've got the day off work on Friday, and I've got all sorts of excessive plans for the day, like getting a haircut, acquiring a guide to things to see and do in Tokyo, doing lots of memory training, learning to speak Japanese, and so on. If I was a better-organised person, I would have remembered to do some of these things before then, but I'm not, so I didn't. And it's too late now, unless I also manage to invent a time machine on Friday.

Jacob's Kriek

Sorry I didn't post anything yesterday - there was no reason, I just didn't. But you can take comfort in the fact that I'm posting something today, even though I've been drinking kriek all afternoon with my brother, who's almost called Jacob.

However, it's something of a pyrrhic victory for my blog readers, because all I'm going to write about tonight is my suspicion that Declan Donnelly is being played by a different actor lately - I've just seen him on an advert, not having watched any of their programmes for a few years, and he looks distinctly different. Older, for one thing. Perhaps they ought to stop trying to look young and cool. Of course, I'm not really one to talk, since they don't look as old as me yet, and I'm a year younger than them.

Not my birthday any more

Boo. But on the other hand, it's another 364 days until I have to be 34. 34 is a terrible age to be. It symbolises being in the middle third of my first hundred years of life, and thus being middle-aged. And I'm not fat enough to be middle aged yet.

Happy birthday!

So very many people have said that to me today, either face-to-face or electronically, that I really have no choice but to obey and be happy. Thank you, everyone! Special mention to my number one fan, Mike, for this:

And to Steve of the Fact of the day blog, who has made me today's fact, albeit with the assertion that I was born in 1967 rather than 1976.

And, for that matter, that I was born in Derby rather than Boston - my wikipedia page used to say I was born in Derby until Tim the Enchanter deleted all my birth details earlier this year because they were unverifiable. Perhaps I should post my birth certificate online, a la Barack Obama, but I can't really be bothered.

Toothpasteadverts

One of the many things in this world that irritate and infuriate me beyond belief is adverts for toothpaste or toothbrushes where they cut out the little pauses in the professional-sounding person's speech so that they can cram just a tiny little bit more dialogue into it. It just sounds weird.

I was going to write a long speech about the concept of qualifying for the world memory championships, but I found that I couldn't be bothered. Hey, it's my birthday tomorrow, I can do what I want. It's the law.

I... remember... everything!

There really is no need to nag or persecute me about memory training, because I can safely report that this weekend I did a full practice run of abstract images, 30-minute binary, hour numbers and hour cards. First time in a long while that I've managed to do what I used to think of as a full weekend's training.

I really had to force myself to do it, though, and the results I got still weren't up to world-championship-winning standard. In the hour cards, which I did late last night, I seemed to spend the first few packs not fully concentrating on what I was seeing, and being more interested in keeping track of how much time it was taking me, so my recall was pretty poor. I didn't click into proper memorising mode until about a quarter of the way through, and even then I had a lot of gaps. I'm hoping I can click back into real form before the competition - it's just a month away!

And I've got a trip to Japan in between now and then, but that's probably a good thing - I'm going to do an hour cards on the Friday before I leave to catch my plane, and take a lot of numbers along with me to memorise in my hotel in spare moments (I've often taken numbers with me to foreign climes before and never yet found a spare moment in amongst all the sightseeing, but I live in hope...)

Sign up, sign up

Registration for the World Memory Championship is closing tomorrow, so make sure you go to the website and register, otherwise they might not let you in. They probably will, but it's best to be on the safe side. The list of 'registered competitors is nearly a hundred people now, so even if you apply the usual rule of somewhere around 50% of them actually competing, we might just still beat the all-time record!

Come on you reds!

Bahrain could only manage to draw 0-0 with New Zealand in the first leg of their play-off today. So it all comes down to the game in Wellington on November 14th, with a place in the World Cup at stake. I might skive off the World Memory Championship to watch it - we'll probably have finished everything but the speed cards by the time they kick off, and I always mess that up at the WMC anyway.

Slave-driving

This weekend, I'm planning to do a huuuuuge amount of memory training, and also learn to speak and read fluent Japanese. And get my central heating fixed, and read some books and buy a new comb and cheese-grater (might make a good musical instrument, now I come to think of it). It's going to be a very busy weekend and I expect you people out there to give me no end of grief if it turns out that I don't do anything after all.

Someone needs to reinvent the Japanese alphabet

I'm a busy man, and it takes much too long to learn how to tell the difference between シ and ツ. Maybe I'll just be one of those tourists who go around shouting loudly in English instead.

Speaking of beards

I can't believe I didn't notice Aubrey was on telly yesterday, on a brand new BBC4 series, "It's Only A Theory". Luckily, it's available on BBCi, and if you hate and fear the internet, it's also on real TV again tonight at 10:30. Check it out, he's very convincing and also rather a lot more funny than the people on the show who are supposed to be making the jokes.

Also, you're very lucky I don't blog about politics, because I got the most infuriatingly hypocritical and dishonest 'newsletter' from my MP pushed through my letterbox today. Really, it annoys me so much that I'm inclined to send it back with a note threatening to put it in some painful part of his body if he's planning to send this kind of stuff to me constantly for the next seven months. Someone should do something about politicians. I'll write to my MP about it.

Has he a beard, Mr Godot?

There's no denying that my beard is more white than black these days, at the sides at least. I suppose I could disguise it by shaving the side bits and just having one of those annoying semi-beards that trendy people have, but I'm not going to do that. I've never understood people who grow beards but still shave certain parts of their face every morning. What's the point of having a beard if not to save you the hassle of shaving? It's not as if the silly little things look good. There's nothing more stylish and attractive than a full beard. Particularly on bald, chubby, short men. With big noses, and glasses. Really, I'm extremely handsome, if you come to think about it.

Do you think...?

... that I could learn Japanese in the course of the next couple of weeks? If I made a proper effort and didn't do anything else in the evenings? I think probably not, but it's probably worth giving it a go. I hate visiting another country and not being able to make some token attempt to speak the language.

Back from Blackwater

My presentation was quite fun, considering it was essentially written in the 45-minute period immediately before I had to go on stage. As it turned out, I didn't get to most of my carefully-prepared enlightenment on the subject of memory competitions, since the surprisingly large audience of Mensa members (I was on immediately after the discussion forum with the committee, and the only entertainment available at that time for those who didn't want to pay £20 for a trip out to see Concorde or £8 for a trip out to see Bath) bombarded me with questions after I'd recited the first thousand digits of pi almost flawlessly as a thrilling opener. Despite the fact that I forgot to bring my lucky hat, the whole thing seemed to be well-received (very few people walked out halfway through, although again this might be because there wasn't anything else to do and the seats were quite comfortable), although I don't think I really persuaded anyone to take up memory competitions. And since that was essentially my only purpose in doing this presentation, you might argue that the whole weekend was wasted, if you were really the pessimistic type. Luckily, I'm not.

The person solely responsible for my last-second preparation, my hat-forgetting and my general failure to do anything productive on Saturday morning is, of course, Wilkie Collins. The big-bearded, compelling-book-writing, Victorian scoundrel. I've been so completely wrapped up in The Woman In White this weekend that I've ignored everything else as much as possible. Still, it was well worth it, it's a fantastic piece of work and I can see why it was such a sensation back in 1860. Although I was hoping Walter would ditch Laura and just marry Marian. Still, having finished the book, I'll now refrain from buying any more cheap classics until after the WMC. That way I might actually get some training done.

Oh, and remember me mentioning that I ordered some books from Amazon that I thought had got lost in the post? I checked, and actually they were sent to my old address in Derby because I forgot to change it. The punchline to this should probably be that they were books on how to improve your memory, but of course I never read books like that. They were actually the awesomely-illustrated "Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready For Kindergarten" and a couple of its sensational sequels. It occurs to me that I have quite a wide range of tastes in literature.

Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires

My passport expires in June next year, and what with lots of countries insisting you've got six months still to go on it before they let you in, that means I need to sort a new one out as soon as I get back from Tokyo.

It's rather sad, you know, because this current passport of mine was the first one I've ever had - just ten years ago, I never considered that I might ever go abroad. Nowadays, of course, I'm hopping on a plane every week and zooming off to some far-distant land, but back in 2000, going to Washington DC was scary and exciting. Turned out to be fun, though, which is probably a good thing, because I might have never gone anywhere ever again if it had turned out to be nasty. I should write to the city and say thanks.

I'm not going to win the World Memory Championship

Just can't get into training at the moment. I've got to do something this weekend before I set off for the Mensa thing in... Tamworth? Telford? Somewhere that begins with T, anyway. I hope it's Tamworth, that's much closer. But anyway, I need to find the time on Saturday morning (conditional on me having prepared my presentation, although I can always do that on the train or in my hotel room on Saturday night) for a good long memorising session. Because I'm conscious that I haven't practiced enough, and when I feel like that, I do badly at memory competitions. Positive thinking is essential for good memorising. I should mention that in my presentation.

Tell you what, let's save a bit of time by looking up right now exactly where I'm going at the weekend (for a gala dinner on Saturday before the 'Ben Pridmore demonstrates his spectacular talents' bit on Sunday lunchtime - I hate gala dinners, and since that's the only payment I'm getting for this beyond doing a favour for the old acquaintance who's organising the whole event, it makes me wonder why I agreed to it in the first place...) so I don't have to spend Saturday morning making travel plans...

Bristol. Why did I think it started with T? And Bristol is bleeding miles away! Okay, that settles it, I'll do an hour numbers practice in the morning and spend the long train journey preparing my speech/slideshow. Pictures drawn by hand, with the mouse-pad on my laptop.

Starting to believe my own hype

I have planned out the general kind of thing that I'm going to do at this stupid Mensa presentation, but I haven't written it down. It occurred to me that speaking with notes at a presentation about memory is probably a bad thing, but really, that's exactly the kind of misconception I'm intending to try to debunk - do people assume Usain Bolt never needs to catch a bus, because he can just run everywhere? There's a better analogy out there somewhere, but I haven't worked out what it is yet. Anyway, I need to go on some kind of campaign to stop people asking me how to remember where they put their car keys. It really annoys me.

I've still got a cold

And I've also got the slight annoyance of having promised to do an hour-long talk/presentation on the subject of memory for Mensa members on Sunday, and haven't prepared anything for it. When asked if I'd like accessories like a laptop and projector to aid my presentation I said yes, sure, why not, so now I've got to create something on Powerpoint too if I want them to think I know what I'm doing. It's a hard life, being a celebrity.

Reading and sneezing

I've got a cold and would appreciate sympathy. I've also got a new old book, as part of my continuing quest to actually read some books that edumacated people have read - "The Woman In White", cost 50p from a charity book stall. I have a vague idea that they did a BBC adaptation quite recently, so I might be jumping on the bandwagon like some kind of dreadful wannabe-intellectual, but I'm hoping that I'm thinking of someone else, and the book is still known and cared about only by stuffy old people with too much time on their hands. It's quite good, actually.

I'm rubbish at memory

Sorry for not blogging yesterday, but I was hanging out with my imminently China-bound brother. If it's any comfort, we did spend the time productively, including thinking up an advertising campaign for a beer targeted at sissies.

However, I'd set aside today for some more long-distance memorising training, but I just haven't been in the mood to do anything. I've had a sore throat for the last three days, and I feel fed up. And also, I think some books I ordered from Amazon have got lost in the post. It never rains but it pours. But never mind, I'll spend some evenings this week doing nothing but memorising stuff, just to get me more in the mood...

How to contact me

People often seem to have trouble working this one out. Just find my email address, it's dotted around the internet in various places if you look it up. It's zoom_zoom_ben and it's a UK Yahoo account, you can work it out from that unless you're an evil blog-scanning, email-address-harvesting computer.

I tend to ignore people who add me as a friend on Facebook if I don't know who they are and they don't leave any kind of message (actually, I sometimes ignore people I do know, who do leave a message - I quite rarely get round to visiting Facebook and updating my friends list). Also, please don't send a message to the other Ben Pridmore on Facebook and tell him you're a big fan of his memory skills, because he doesn't like it. And you definitely shouldn't add me as a contact on LinkedIn - I joined the site because someone told me to, years ago, never did anything with it and now I've finally deleted my account. Nor should you really contact the World Memory Sports Council, or the Alzheimer's Society, or anyone else I've been vaguely associated with in the past and ask them to pass a message on. It's much easier to just find my address and drop me a line directly.

Oh, and it's a really, really bad idea to find my phone number in the phone book and phone me. I'm never in, and I never listen to my messages. Also, I hate phones.

Mister can you tell me where my love has gone?

Those super-cool Japanese TV people are inviting me to Tokyo for a whole week! Flying out on October 22nd or 23rd and back home again on the 29th! This is very cool, because I was planning to take some time off work for a bit of memory training, and it'd be cool to do that in a hotel in Tokyo, with occasional breaks to see the big city. Now I just need to learn Japanese, and possibly buy some souvenirs to give to the Japanese people, seeing as whenever Japanese TV crews film me they always give me a goodie bag of really nice little gifts...

Indescribable!

Nestlé are relaunching Cinnamon Grahams cereal as if it's a new product, calling it Curiously Cinnamon, descending on office buildings and giving out free samples to the workers and holding a competition in which you can win £250 of Tesco vouchers (possibly the least exciting prize ever offered by a breakfast cereal) by describing the 'indescribable taste' of Curiously Cinnamon. The tagline for the "new" cereal is apparently "the indescribable taste of toasted cinnamon squares".

Now, it may just be me, but when I hear the phrase "indescribable taste", I automatically assume that we're talking about something that tastes awful. Since when is "indescribable" a flattering way to describe food? To me, the only thing "indescribable" describes is these guys:

Come to think of it, it probably is just me.

And on an unrelated note, aargh! I've just seen a trailer for a film called "The Invention of Lying" that uses the same basic idea as the first chapter of my unpublished masterpiece "The Adventures of Jayce and Alex"! Ricky Gervais stole my idea! And now I'll never be able to offer the story for publication until everyone's forgotten this latest movie!

Not enough hours in the day

Not if I want to fit in a great deal of lying around watching telly in the evenings, anyway. So I haven't typed up my transcripts from the othello yet, and nor am I going to write a big long blog tonight either. But on the other hand, I am enjoying watching How I Met Your Mother on E4 every night.

Still, I should probably be spending more time memorising things in the evenings, what with the world championship being so soon. I'll do that tomorrow.

Hello To Othello

The good thing about the Nationals is that although they take place over two days, they don't start until the Saturday afternoon, so even if they're in Frimley Green it's possible to travel down on the Saturday morning without getting up early. So I did, and what's more the weather was really nice, so even the walk from Farnborough Main station to the venue was entirely pleasant. And I didn't get lost in the slightest! I can follow Google Maps "walking" directions with no difficulty at all, it seems, even when I'm walking and not cycling! And what's more, walking between the two Farnborough stations takes no more than fifteen minutes, not the 22 that thetrainline.com tells us.

Since there hadn't been any delays in the trains on the way there, I even had time to drop into a nice-looking pub for lunch, and bumped into Adelaide, Geoff and Imre, who'd had the same idea. The highlight of lunch was concluding that it would be really brilliant if being brain-scanned in Japan (which is definitely happening, by the way) accidentally stripped me of my memorising ability. There would be no end of documentaries about that! And I'd never get tired of it, because I wouldn't remember having made any before!

Anyway, the competition took place at Frimley Green Football Club, which has got a whole lot of football pitches either in it or next to it, I wasn't quite sure. The main pitch is right outside the room where we were playing othello, and FGFC were at home on Saturday afternoon (they lost), so it wasn't a perfectly quiet place. But it did mean I could just step outside the door between rounds and watch the game, which was great. On Sunday I had to walk down the path to the big park with four more football pitches on it to see the action. And then I always seemed to get there just as they were stopping for half-time, or at the moment when one of the teams in a women's game decided the referee was being unfair to them and all walked off the pitch en masse.

I don't whine about this very much, preferring to just project an air of noble suffering, but if I didn't have bad knees, I would be out every Saturday or Sunday afternoon, playing football (badly) for a small local team. Being World Memory Champion is only something I do because I can't play football. If someone came up with a miracle cure, I would ditch the whole memory thing straight away and devote myself to a career as an unsuccessful amateur footballer.

Anyway, the usual prelude to the Nationals is the AGM of the BOF, at which the real excitement came from a text from France (who were also having their nationals on the same day), informing us all that Bintsa had been apparently caught cheating with a PDA, and had been doing this for the last year or so. Now, I'm not a technical person - to me, "PDA" means Pocket Dragon Adventures, my favourite cartoon, but I think in this context it means some kind of little computer or mobile phone, presumably with an othello program on it. Opinion was divided on whether this whole thing was a joke of some kind or not, and on exactly how it would be possible to cheat at othello with a PDA in your lap without anyone noticing. Still, it gave everyone something to talk about, and made our AGM's resolution to buy four new clocks seem quite tame and unexciting.

We also played some othello, but I don't remember much about that. The interesting thing about my games was that they were either extremely close or completely one-sided thrashings - no scores in the 20s for either player in any of my nine games, and only one in the 40s (I was desperately trying to maximise my disc count in the last game, against Roy, so that I could say 'no 20s and no 40s' to my uninterested blog-audience, but only managed to win 49-15 in the end). I did also have two draws, which is pretty unusual in othello - and what's more, the second draw was against Julian, who had himself also had another draw in a previous game. How many times has that happened in the British Othello Championship? Probably no more than two or three at most.

I ended up on five points - four wins, two draws, three losses - which isn't too bad, although I was never really in the top part of the leaderboard. I did get slaughtered 63-1 by Imre in my first game on Saturday, and then annoyingly beaten 33-31 by Michael in my first game on Sunday - annoying because I counted the ending with about ten moves to go (it was one of those cases where there's only one vaguely plausible ending) and worked out that I ended up with 33 discs, then a couple of moves later re-counted and realised I'd made a mistake and I actually only got 32, then another couple of moves later noticed that I'd missed another disc and I only got 31. I doubt that I had a win anywhere, but it's still annoying.

Anyway, those two ended up in the final and Michael won, so yay for him because he's never won it before. And I was eighth once you work out the tie-break, so I'll qualify for the world championship if five of the people above me find some good reason not to go to the worlds (and if Geoff, who finished 9th but is entitled to play for Britain in the WOC by virtue of winning the BGP earlier this year - we really love those three-letter abbreviations in the othello world, don't we? - ends up playing for Australia). I'm not holding my breath.

Which reminds me of another thing - Geoff's moving to Denmark, so now the chairman of the British Othello Federation will be an Austrian who lives in Denmark, an extremely groovy and eccentric state of affairs that is very much what the BOF is all about.

Home from the green green grass

What a fun weekend, I'm glad I decided to go after all. And the five-and-a-bit-hour journey home wasn't too unpleasant either. But I'm still too tired to write about the competition, so I'll wait till tomorrow to talk about it, except to say that I was generally mediocre and Michael Handel won the British Championship for the first time, in considerable style.

Frimley Green

They play darts there, as I understand. But tomorrow and Sunday, they're playing othello there instead. And by 'they', I mean me and the rest of the British othello posse. I actually decided yesterday that I wasn't going to bother with the nationals this year, because getting a train back on Sunday night is a long, tedious process that is almost certain to result in me being marooned at midnight somewhere en route, probably Penicuik, when the various trains are delayed, diverted and cancelled.

And have you ever tried getting a train ticket to Farnborough North on thetrainline.com? It sends you to Farnborough Main, and then the last leg of the journey is walking, 22 minutes (exactly) from the one station to the other. I haven't checked the prices, but I expect it costs more, too.

Anyway, after telling everybody I wasn't coming, I thought that maybe I could cope with a five-and-a-half hour train/tube/walking journey if I leave fairly promptly at four o'clockish (I'm expecting the tournament to run ahead of schedule as usual and me not to get to the final as usual - although I did end up in the 3rd/4th play-off in 2004, I remind you), as that'll get me to London before the last train of the night that stops at Beeston leaves (all the later trains force me to get off at Long Eaton or even, heavens forbid, East Midlands Parkway, and get a bus).

But I still wasn't entirely sure about whether to go or not, so I decided to go to playok.com and play (ok) a few games of othello, to see if I was in good form. If I ended up winning, I reasoned, I'd go to Frimley Green and long journeys be darned. Having then lost five games in a row against mediocre opposition, I decided to go to Frimley Green anyway, because I wanted to. Never put your fate in the hands of your othello-playing ability, people.

Now all I need to decide is whether to stay up and watch the first of the new series of Peep Show, or go to bed early in order to be good and refreshed for the competition tomorrow. Choosing the first option forces me to find something to do for an hour to avoid Derren Brown on telly, but I'm sure I can manage that if I really try. Anyway, wish me luck, and I'll resume bloggery on Sunday. If I get home early enough.

There's just one thing I don't understand

Why is there a Sea Life Centre in Birmingham? Who goes to Birmingham wanting to see sharks and giant sea turtles? And isn't it really inconvenient to ship all that sea life overland to the middle of a big city? And what do they do if the big tank springs a leak and they need to fill it with more sea water?

It's a working man I am

Sorry I didn't blog anything yesterday, but I was tired after a day of stacking shelves, and I didn't realise I hadn't blogged until after I'd turned my computer off for the night. My memory is bad, you know. However, after another day of hauling a wide range of desirable products around a store that strangely keeps its stock three storeys above the salesfloor, I'm feeling quite invigorated. I think everyone who knows me knows that I'm not really what you'd call a manual worker - I've never had a job that involved anything other than sitting at a computer, and I'm really quite feeble as a result - but it's good fun to do something different. I could quite happily change careers and haul haircare products from one place to another all day long, provided they still paid me what I get now for being an analyst, of course.

Also, on an unrelated note, I've noticed lately that the best way to get a reply from me is to send me an email and not a Facebook message. I think it's because I'm terribly lazy, but since I don't use Facebook very often, I only see the notification-email and replying to it involves at least another two or three clicks of the mouse, so I tend to put it off until I can be bothered. Whereas if I've got an email, I go through my inbox at least once a fortnight or so and make a point of replying to everyone who's expecting me to...

Brum

I'm going to Birmingham for the next couple of days, working in the big High Street store. Just for a change of scene, you know. I can't remember the last time I went to Birmingham, actually - I used to go there fairly often, but it's about twenty minutes longer on the train from Beeston than it is from Derby and somehow that tips it over the edge of 'too far away to be worth the trip'. So I'm hoping to find the city so enthralling that I want to visit more often in future. Hopefully there will be fireworks and escaped zoo animals of the non-violent kinds, and balloons.

I'm memorable!

Also memorable are 2808 decimal digits or 36 packs of cards in an hour, I'm sure of it. Didn't have much luck memorising them today, but the important thing is that I attempted to, and every time I do that it gets my brain more accustomed to the hour of solid concentration and the extensive mental imagery involved. If I can find another weekend or two to practice before the WMC, I'm hopeful that I can do something world-record-breaking there.

Not that I'm going to have many free weekends over the next couple of months, what with the British Othello Championship, the Mensa Annual Gathering (remember that I promised to do some kind of presentation there? I seem to have forgotten to weasel my way out of it...), that potential trip to Tokyo, an important bon-voyage kind of get-together with my brother, a birthday party (York, weekend after October 14th, anyone?) and probably other stuff too. Maybe I should quit my job again.

It's officially Christmas

The shops are filling their shelves with seasonal merchandise, the 2010 comic annuals are out, it won't be long before everywhere is full of decorations and the merry sound of carols! Which makes it all the more inappropriate that it was hot and sunny and lovely today. I feel like I'm living in the southern hemisphere, although that might also be something to do with the fact that I'm standing on my head as I write this.

Mysteries of the Orient

Japanese TV want to fly me out to Tokyo to have my brain scanned! A free trip in return for some tedious documentary filming sounds like a good deal to me. It'll be some time in October, assuming they don't change their minds or find a cheaper way to do it without buying plane tickets for me. Maybe I can go and visit Ayumu the chimp while I'm there!

It's good that I'm going to Japan, because my brother's threatening to outdo me in the globetrotter stakes - having never in his life so far been farther away from home than Wiltshire, he's now got a job in Harbin, China for the next year at least. And I don't know if you've ever checked on a map, but that's a heck of a long way away. Still, hopefully next year's world memory championship will be in that neck of the woods (I forget whether anyone's told me yet exactly where in China they want it to be) so I can visit.

Anyway, it's the weekend and if I don't do lots and lots of marathon memory practice over the next two days I'm going to lose the world championship this year and be banned from competing ever again due to general rubbishness, so I'd better get on with shuffling cards. Also, I need to learn Japanese...

V.F.D.

I've signed up to become a 'volunteer reading partner' - spending an hour a week helping primary school children with reading. It's one of those 'corporate social responsibility' things that Boots is keen on, and the idea behind me volunteering is that, much as I like my job, I do sometimes feel like I'm not exactly helping people or making the world a better place on a regular basis. I mean, at best I'm tangentially contributing in a minor way to enabling Boots customers to enjoy reasonably-priced cosmetics, but somehow that just isn't as fulfilling as it could be. And improving small children's reading skills might turn out to be fun as well as beneficial to the world in general. It's also a scary kind of prospect that I might well back out of at the last minute, but we'll see...

Forget that Northern Ireland thing

I've decided that it makes more sense for me to support Bahrain. They're playing Saudi Arabia tonight, with the winner going on to play New Zealand for a place in the world cup finals. And the second of their two games against New Zealand is on the last day of the World Memory Championship in November - it would have been a great double sporting event if only they hadn't changed the venue. Just picture it, we could have had all the excitement of the speed cards, then sat around watching the footy and impressing the press people with memorisation of international football trivia. It would have been in all the papers.

Except I would doubtless have gone to bed early, because I'm always dead on my feet after the final day of the world championships, and missed everything.



Postscript: Bahrain scored an equaliser in the last minute of injury time to win on the away goals rule! Yay! Go... whatever the national football team of Bahrain are popularly known as!

Red card

I need to get some new cards. I've had my current load for a good few years now, and they're getting to the point where they're too old for proper memorising - they might well start to stick together when I'm trying to nimbly flick them between my fingers in the space of twenty seconds or so, and that would be really annoying. Of course, it's too late now to get new cards for the world championship, because brand new packs are too slippery and I'd be liable to drop them. I'll just have to reward/condole myself after the competition with a big pile of brand new playing cards, and break them in over the course of the winter break.

Hey, maybe I could ask the organisers to just give me lots of cards instead of a trophy or whatever the prize is?

Because you demanded it

A regular reader (and I didn't even know I had any) has pointed out that I haven't mentioned my sainted grandmother on this blog for a long time. This is quite remiss of me, since I only saw Grandma last Saturday, and she's still alive and well and as brilliant as ever. Considering that, as she often likes to point out, she's eighty-nine years old, she's actually in great shape and likely to carry on having my visits to and conversations with her go unreported in my blog for years to come. I'll make more of an effort to give her a passing mention at least, seeing as I know she's got a lot of fans out there.

Apparently people do see her on the street, recognise her from the telly and stop to chat about whatever I've been up to recently. It's the price of fame, you know.

International affairs

Does anyone know anything about the upcoming Slovenian Memory Championship? There's a website, but it's all in some foreign language (I don't actually know what language they speak in Slovenia nowadays) so I don't know any details about it. It clashes with the British Othello Championship, in the even more exotic and mysterious locale of Frimley Green, so I can't go along and see what it's like, but I hope some information about the event will somehow leak into my consciousness. I've never heard of anyone Slovenian even taking an interest in memory competitions...