Makes it all worthwhile

After an extremely stressful and irritating day at work, I must admit it's nice to go into a final meeting and having the conversation go:

"Hi, Ben. Have we worked together before? Your face is familiar."
"Maybe you've seen me on the telly. I'm the World Memory Champion in my spare time."
"Oh, yes! You did that thing with the barcodes, and the cards! That's amazing!"

Almost encourages me to try to remain the world champion forever.

The Wright brothers are turning in their graves

I don't comment on the news in my blog, as a general rule (a general rule that I break frequently, but a rule nonetheless), but sometimes I read a quote that makes me think "Gah!" One such quote comes from 'aviation expert' David Learmount today:

Technologically there's nothing we can do about this. We cannot build engines and aircraft which can fly safely through volcanic ash, it's just out of the question.

I ask you. What kind of person gets involved in the aviation industry with that kind of attitude? The whole concept of aeroplanes is fundamentally out of the question - you can't make a gigantic metal vehicle that somehow flies through the air! The very idea is completely ridiculous! But someone made one regardless, and I expect them to keep on making them, volcanic ash or no volcanic ash. So stop whining, David Learmount, and go and invent an ash-proof engine. How hard can it be? I'll expect to see one by the end of the week.

Aunt Kitsie

In a really awesome development all round, I found Bobby Bear's Annual 1933 in the Oxfam shop in town today, for only £3! More than a hundred pages of comics, stories, puzzles and instructions for making a book-table with two leaves from a wooden packing case! Two of the filler stories are even early works by Norman Hunter that I've never read before! This completely surpasses even the 1950 Toby Twirl book that I found in another Beeston junk shop last year, and proves that I'm living in the land of antiquarian anthropomorphic animal annuals!

Now, please go out and buy some Kiwi boot polish.

On an unrelated note, if you eat a lot of cherries, do they each count as one of your five a day?

Dumplings

Here's what I'm going to do. I did like the idea of going on X-Factor as a singer in Brazilian Mystery Cloak, but I don't think it's quite the career move for me - I disapprove of X-Factor (the TV show, I approve of the superhero comic, although the original incarnation was a lot better than the current one), but I did always enjoy Stars In Their Eyes, so I'm going to wait for that to come back. I could never decide whether to be Paul Simon or Meat Loaf (I don't think the world is quite ready for my Cher, which is the voice I do best).

No, what I'm going to do is learn to cook. I think I'm actually not a bad cook, for a bachelor - many of the meals I cook involve mixing two or even three packets of foodstuffs together - but I think I could be better. I haven't had proper suet dumplings since my dad died, and I'm sure it can't be difficult. I'm going to have proper ingredients in my kitchen cupboards, like flour and eggs and sugar and things. Maybe even spices! I've got a spice rack, after all, it'd be nice to put something on it. And I'm going to make stew. And casserole. That kind of thing. It'll be great!

I think my head's screwed on backwards

I'm having disturbing feelings of optimism about the new government of this country (I'm sure I'll get over it, don't you worry), and equally disturbing feelings of pessimism about memory competitions, mental calculation competitions and so on. I need to either find something else I can strive to be world champion at (because let's face it, life is meaningless unless you're at least trying to be some kind of world champion) or really make more of an effort to hold on to the memory title. But I'm still not really feeling like it. Consequently, tonight I'm watching the football and quietly enthusing about several very nice bits of the coalition agreement. Possibly I'm sickening for something.

I don't like being surveilled

There's a van that's always parked around here, with "Survey Solutions" written on the side. While it might be perfectly innocent, I prefer to believe that it's actually some shady government agency surveying my every movement and using an elaborate double bluff to try to cover its shady activities. I need to invest in some kind of lead-lined windows. Which will also help with insulation, it's cold around here at the moment.

Wails

It seems to be becoming an annual tradition that the Welsh Championship is where I realise how very badly out of practice I am. Only last year, the Welsh Championship was in March or something (I don't remember exactly, my memory is bad) and the World Championship was in November. Now if I want to do any good in China, I've got three months to improve from 'rubbish' to 'good' (to use my own scientific terminology for how well I can memorise things).

It's a stamina thing, pure and simple. I hadn't spent a full day memorising competitively for six months, and by lunchtime I was done for. I got entirely acceptable scores in the first four disciplines, then it went 10-min-cards: 4 packs. 5-min numbers: 203 (only attempting 243 because I was very, very slow and I knew I couldn't do more than that without making a mess of it). Abstract images: 150 (again, that was all I attempted). Historic dates: 60-something. All a long way below what I can do if I can just stay more awake in the afternoon.

I set myself a modest target of at least beating Christian's score from Cambridge last week, and a 96 in the spoken numbers just put me over that level with one discipline to go, so I could safely attempt two fast packs of cards, safe in the knowledge that I had no chance at all of getting them right, but not really minding. And yes, I did make mistakes - just a couple in the first pack, and then found I couldn't even remember the first pair of cards in the second attempt. So I ended up with a final score in the low 6000s, which I suppose could be worse. But that's not the performance of someone who wants to win the world championship.

I don't think I do, to be honest. I'm seriously asking myself which is less offensive to my fellow competitors - not competing at all, or competing and doing badly. If I was one of my rivals, I wouldn't want to beat an obviously out-of-shape Ben, but I wouldn't want him to drop out and not give me the opportunity to beat him, either. I could get back up to world-number-one standard with three months of solid work, but... I can't see it happening.

Anyway, enough about me. We had seven competitors in Newport - John Burrows and Antonio Campo forming the Welsh contingent (yes, he's Welsh, despite the name. They have burrows in Wales too and there are at least as many Welsh people called John as people who call themselves Ieuan), me by myself as Team England, Idriz and Mattias from Sweden, Conor from Ireland and Roy from Hong Kong. Mattias continues to get great scores, improving on his Cambridge performance with 3000-points-plus to take second place - John was third and the new Welsh Champion. Arbiting was professional and excellent as usual, courtesy of Dai, Phil and Warren. Congratulations to everyone, and long may the Welsh Open continue!

Getting to Bahrain was easier than this

Original plan - leave work early, get train all the way to Ebbw Vale, stay with Dai overnight, go to Newport tomorrow for memory competition.

I just about managed to get away from work early enough (leaving myself ten minutes to pack a bag before having to leave for the station), only to find that the first train on my journey had been cancelled, for no reason that anyone at the station saw fit to share with the travellers. Since Ebbw Vale is an almost impossible train station to get to, and now I wouldn't be able to get there till about half past ten, I re-evaluated my plans and decided to just get a hotel in Newport and turn down Dai's kind offer of hospitality. So all went well until we were in Gloucester at half past eight, and the tannoy announced "I'm sorry for the delay and any inconvenience it may cause. We're now moving to the end of the platform to wait at the signal, and we'll be there for some time. It seems a cow was struck by a train, and a vet's on the way to see what can be done about it."

Half an hour later, the conductor came down and told us that the situation with the cow hadn't improved, and our best bet might be to hop on the 9:15 to Bristol, then get another train back down to Newport and Cardiff. It'd take about two and a half hours, but it was probably better than just waiting here in Gloucester. I was inclined to agree with that, since the woman in a nearby seat had spent the whole thirty minutes talking to someone on the phone about the situation (spending ten minutes of this time telling her friend how to spell Gloucester - I think the idea was that the friend would look up on the internet how long it took to get to Cardiff, but the conversation didn't go beyond repeating "G-L-O-U-C-S-T-E-R" over and over again). But then the conductor returned to his little compartment and thirty seconds later announced that we were moving again. There was no further update about what the vet had been able to do about the cow.

So then I just had to (shudder) take a taxi to the Holiday Inn on a road inexplicably called "The Coldra" - do a search on this blog for "The Wardwick" to see my feelings about roads like this - and hope that I was pronouncing it right and the driver wouldn't realise I'm a foreigner and take me the long way round. I thought I was safe when the driver turned out to be Asian, but then he turned round and said "You did say the Coldra, right, guv'nor?" in the broad Welsh accent you can only get by living in Newport your entire life, and pronounced it differently to the way I'd said it, so then I had double feelings of guilt for a) secretly harbouring racist views, and b) offending a Welshman by not pronouncing place-names right.

Still, I eventually made it to the hotel, and now I suppose I should get some sleep in preparation for the competition tomorrow. Because, after all, I've done no other kind of preparation, and at least a period of unconsciousness might help a bit...

Election fever

Hooray, it's election night. I can't stay up to watch it, since I've got to start work early tomorrow so that I can leave early and then trek down to the distant wilderness that is Ebbw Vale tomorrow evening, but I'm still very enthusiastic about the fact that it's election night.

As I've mentioned before, this is the first general election where I've been in a constituency where my vote could plausibly make any difference, so I've been quite gripped by all the twists and turns of this campaign. I'll be sorry when it's over with. In 1997, I was living in East Lindsey, under the dominion of Sir Peter Tapsell, who'd been Conservative MP for the rural wilds of Lincolnshire since long before I was born, and who is still MP there now (although boundary changes mean he's now MP for "Louth and Horncastle" instead). He'll be Father of the House when Parliament reconvenes, now that the even more ancient Alan Williams has retired. At eighty years old, he knows he can say and do whatever he likes, and still be guaranteed well over fifty percent of the votes in his constituency, so expect to see him continue to vote with his excessively right-wing conscience against any modern Conservative policies that come his way.

In 2001, I was in Boston (with Skegness), where it was thought for a while that Labour might take the seat from the traditional Conservative majority (Sir Richard Body, who everyone either voted for or would-have-voted-for-if-only-he-wasn't-a-Tory was retiring, and the new candidate was very young). But then their campaigning, which consisted of driving a loudspeaker van around the towns and villages constantly blaring "Vote Labour! Vote Labour!" made everyone hate them, and the yuppie-ish new Conservative Mark Simmonds won it easily enough.

By 2005, I'd moved to a safe Labour seat for a change - in Derby South, nobody really liked Margaret Beckett, but it was understood that everyone would be voting for her anyway. And indeed they did. Politics can be strange.

This one, though, I still don't know who'll win. Probably the Conservatives. But we'll see tomorrow morning.

Eeg.

That's the sound you make when a small lobster jumps down your throat unexpectedly. But that didn't happen to me today, so don't worry. What did happen is that I got up early and went down to London on the train packed with commuters who presumably do that every day, the poor things. Then it was into the Japanese crew's minibus like some sort of Cliff Richard and out to Greenwich, where Dominic monitored my brainwaves by means of sticking electrodes to my head.

The scanning apparently showed something interesting, but I don't really get the whole idea behind it. Still, it proves I've got a brain, if I was still doubting it after the MRI in Tokyo. And that's that for this latest bout of TV fame and glory. I can go back to normality now - or at least as close to normality as you can get at a memory competition in south Wales.

Brain drain

London tomorrow on the early-morning train, where brainwave-scanning things will happen for the entertainment of Fuji TV's viewers. I need to go to bed, I haven't had nearly enough sleep lately, with one thing and another. I didn't mention that on Sunday night/Monday morning in the hotel the fire alarm went off at four o'clock. Everybody was just coming sleepily out of their rooms when it stopped, and we all just shrugged and went back to bed.

I'm Martin Sheen, I'm Steve McQueen, I'm Jimmy Dean

Before I talk about the Cambridge Memory Championship, let me just say that I've found a website that's supposed to use super-technology to identify celebrities who look like you:



I have to say that none of those people look terribly like me, or indeed like each other, but I take this as evidence that the person I'm most likely to be mistake for on the street is Jackie Chan, which is extremely groovy.

Anyway, Cambridge! I couldn't go to the othello on Saturday because I hadn't finished all the preparations for Sunday (in my defence, it's a lot of work, and I'm extremely lazy), which is a shame because a lot of other players couldn't go either - the Cambridge Regional clashed with the Copenhagen International, and there were only four players who chose Cambridge. Apparently Iain won again, which pretty much confirms him as BGP champion this year.

So it was on Saturday afternoon that I hauled my big rucksack full of memorisation and recall papers, packs of cards, speed cards timers and my laptop down to Cambridge on the train. I stayed in Cityroomz, having been sensible enough to book the room in advance for the first time in my life, and found it as delightful as always.

I got up super-early on Sunday morning, allowing the maximum possible time to walk (or stagger) all the way to Trinity College from the hotel next to the train station, since the buses don't run so early on a Sunday morning and I'm not going to compromise my principles and take a taxi just because I've got a rucksack that's too heavy for anyone other than Geoff Capes to lift. I got there a bit before 8:30 (start time was nine o'clock, but there are always people who get there early, even if I tell everyone they'll have to wait outside in the rain because the man with the key won't have got there yet) and bumped into Dai and John on the way there. Dave and Nelson were already hanging around, too, and we got suspicious questions from a porter who thought we might be up to no good.

Aubrey turned up promptly, with the key, and let us into the room. I'd asked for the room at the back, rather than the Big Glass Cube, since it's slightly farther away from the loud beeping lift, but it didn't make very much difference - it still could be clearly heard going BING-BONG! at unexpected moments. There were also other games tournaments taking place in the BGC - draughts in the morning and backgammon in the afternoon, which provided a bit of background noise too (especially the latter, with the rattling dice), but I'd say there was an adequate level of silence roughly 75% of the time, which I suppose is acceptable for a cheap little memory competition. The room was also rather too small for the eleven competitors, four arbiters and enormous film crew, but we managed well enough.

Yes, there was the enormous Japanese film crew, which led to another person hanging around too - Trinity College rules apparently require a Fellow or a Porter to be present during any filming. Imre, who arranged the rooms for the Cambridge MSO, is a Fellow (I wish I was a Fellow, it's a really great-sounding thing to call yourself) but was one of those othello players who prefers Copenagen, so Fuji TV had to pay for a porter to stand guard. Trinity College Porters wear bowler hats, which makes it probably the awesomest job in the world. I'm going to change careers.

Eleven competitors, from six different countries. Seven if you count Wales as being foreign! Two of these competitors, the Danish ones, weren't taking part in all the disciplines, which is probably a good thing because I hadn't been able to get a Danish translation for the dates.

Team Sweden - Idriz, Mattias and Oliver - put in a strong performance, especially Mattias, who narrowly won the Words and Names & Faces disciplines. The Swedish championship in September (they're promising 100,000 spectators, which seems a little optimistic) should be interesting. The speed cards was won by all-American hero Nelson Dellis, with a time of just over a minute - he's got to be favourite for the US Championship next year. Runner-up in all three of those, and winner of all the others, often by a vast margin, was the new German superstar Christian Schäfer. His scores included 693 in 5-minute binary, 653 in 15-minute numbers, 260 in abstract images and 81 in dates - world-class results all four. He's now moved up to number 14 in the world rankings and is one to watch out for at the World Championship in August.

Nelson's speed cards was just enough to knock old campaigner and best-of-Team-Britain James Ponder down to third place overall, while Christian's win ensured that the German domination of the Cambridge Championship continues - four of the five winners now have been Germans (nobody's ever won it twice).

Incidentally, Sir John Houblon has been haunting me lately. The Japanese TV crew have been paying for all their incidental expenses with a huge wad of £50 notes (that kind of thing is perfectly normal in Japan, but perhaps I shouldn't be mentioning it here where the chances of being mugged are somewhat higher), and then Oliver paid his entry fee with another fifty. I can't remember the last time I saw a £50 note, and now they're everywhere.

We finished not on time, but not too late, and went to a Chinese restaurant in the evening. I had plenty of time to stand around chatting to people, not too much time spent talking to the cameras (they continue to be a lot of fun), and everything went more or less smoothly all the way through!

Back to work tomorrow, on Wednesday it's down to London where Dominic will do something with my brainwaves, another couple of days of trying to get my real job done, then Wales on Saturday for my first competition (as a competitor) of the season. I haven't done enough training, as per usual.

He's a Japanese boy

That was a fun afternoon's filming! My flat hasn't had so many visitors in all the time I've been living here - most TV documentaries in my extensive experience send a crew consisting of director, cameraman and sound man (either or both of these 'men' can be female, obviously, but 'cameraperson' just sounds silly), but Fuji TV had a team of eight charged with capturing evidence of my amazingness (it's a hard thing to track down and capture, I'll admit, so clearly we need as many people as possible working on it). There was the presenter of the show, the completely awesome Ken Mogi; a director, cameraman, sound man and producer; another (female) cameraman with a smaller camera; the British-based Japanese woman who's been making all the arrangements for schedules and things; and a driver who stayed in the van all afternoon. They all hung around the flat performing their various roles and giggling in Japanese about my untidiness (I happen to know that the Japanese word for 'pants' is 'pants', and since I had several pairs strewn about the floor of my bedroom that I somehow forgot about while tidying up yesterday, I could catch the gist of what they were giggling about).

But the filming was really awesome. The crew all already knew everything about memory techniques, competitions and all about me, so I didn't have to answer any of the usual boring questions, and I think I came across as quirky, eccentric and likeable as well as an amazing person who can remember cards. Mind you, I normally think I come across as a complete berk, only to be told that I wasn't that bad, so possibly I'm going to horrify and disgust the Japanese audience.

It's a complicated business

There comes a time in everyone's life when you think to yourself "Right, that's got my flat clean enough that I won't be hideously embarrassed when the Japanese TV crew come round tomorrow, as long as they don't look in the spare bedroom or the bathroom... now I'd better get on with stapling all those memorising and recall papers together and putting them in big brown envelopes ready for Sunday." And then you generally think "You know, I haven't seen my stapler for a very long time. Not since this time last year, probably. I don't have much call for stapling in my general everyday life. Never mind, I'm sure I put it back in the top drawer of the desk in the spare room, with all my stationery."

Obviously, I didn't. And obviously, that means I dumped it on the floor of the spare room the last time I cleaned up my flat (about nine months ago, I think it was). And after that point, my brother left all his worldly posessions in my spare room when he went to live in China. And after that, I'd just dumped all the rubbish from the rest of my flat on top of the general pile in there. I clearly wasn't going to find the stapler without mounting the kind of expedition that would lose me for weeks and involve discovering whole new tribes and sharp pieces of glass. It's a shame, because it's a very groovy stapler, made of see-through plastic (I also own a very groovy phone, made of see-through plastic - got to be good looking 'cause they're so hard to see), but I'm sure I'll see it again some day. When I clean the spare room.

So, since I needed to go out and buy big brown envelopes, I bought a new stapler as well. You might say that this anecdote doesn't really merit a three-paragraph blog entry, especially one which only mentions in passing the clearly more interesting fact that Japanese TV are filming me tomorrow and doing no end of doubtless exciting things that I'm not telling my readers about, but hey, that's the way I do things. And I do love transparent plastic office supplies. If I get my own business some day, everything will be transparent!

Greatest advertising slogan I've ever heard

"We use real ingredients" - advert for Hellman's mayonnaise. That even beats that advert for some yoghurt or something that boasted that it only contained two ingredients.

An Unforgettable Winner

There's a transcript of a radio interview with me available on the internet, apparently recorded immediately after the world championship last year, in which I answer the usual range of questions for the benefit of Americans. The particularly interesting thing about it is that I have absolutely no memory whatsoever of doing this interview. I obviously did do it, because it's all exactly the kind of thing that I would say, and anyway who would want to make up an interview with me, but this is a fine example of how mentally drained I always am after a world memory championship. I'm fairly certain that these things aren't good for your memory.

Cambridge draws nigh

I realise that I haven't blogged so much as a tweet (as the cool kids are saying nowadays) for the last couple of days, but I've been busy getting everything ready for the Cambridge championship... well, technically I've spent most of the weekend not getting ready for the Cambridge championship and feeling guilty about it, but that also takes up a lot of time. Procrastination is really hard work, I'm quite exhausted.

But I'll have it all done before Friday, when I have Japanese TV descending on me again to film me at work and at play. Then it's othello on the Saturday, and a day of exciting memory on the Sunday, all in the beautiful surroundings of Cambridge. I must admit that the interesting politics around here has been a big part of what's been distracting me this weekend - I've just been to the hustings down the road, which was really quite fun, with lots of interesting and occasionally childish bickering from all the candidates. They're all splendid people really, obviously. But Cambridge has already got a Lib Dem MP, so presumably it's now a super-safe seat, so there won't be any local fuss to distract me from running the competition. Or does it work the other way around, and all those students will be determined to vote against the established power and will be campaigning wildly for someone else outside the window? I don't really understand the whole concept of politics, so I wouldn't know. Anyway, I'm not blogging about it.

You know what I miss? The Bridge!

It's years and years since my favourite-ever website disappeared into the limbo of lost internet chat rooms (which is a scary kind of place, possibly haunted by the ghost of Chiquittita), and I still, on going into a lesser forum tonight, almost introduced myself with "Zoom Zoom skips onto the Bridge..."

So I thought I'd post a blog that leaves all the non-Bridge people out there scratching their heads and wondering what I'm talking about. Let's hear from those surviving VPSers out there! Throw your stick into my comments section and let's stand in a state of catlike readiness, waiting to see what happens!

Sporting triumphs

I'd forgotten about this, but I was reminded of it recently somehow - I once represented my primary school in the annual inter-school sports in the egg and spoon race. I came last, but I had properly qualified for it by beating all the other third-year-junior boys in the school (there were about six of us, it was a smallish school). That's a really quite impressive achievement and I ought to make myself some kind of medal or trophy.

The backlog is building up

Sorry, everyone who's waiting for an email or just a hello from me, I've been a bit rushed just lately and I'm getting behind with everything. I'll catch up with you all tomorrow, and that's an Official Zoomy Promise.