Must be some sort of distorting lens

There are pictures of the world championships up on the official website now, but I'm not going to link to them because they make me look horrifically fat. Seriously, it shocked me a little, and I think I'm going to have to face up to the fact that I am currently fatter than I have been for many years. I need to do something about it, as a matter of urgency. I'm too young for middle-aged spread. Okay, diet starts tomorrow!

Well, maybe not exactly tomorrow, since I've just been to the supermarket and bought my usual unhealthy foodstuffs for the next couple of weeks. Maybe I could just eat smaller portions...

Watching Junior Masterchef on Children In Need

Any ten-year-old who knows what dauphinoise potatoes are, let alone how to cook them, is too posh for her own good. Breaded sole indeed. If I was the grand supreme dictator of the universe (and I'm sure it will happen some day), such children will be forced to eat nothing but pizza and chips like normal people.

Anyway, got to go and answer phones. Remember to donate money!

This is why I don't like phones

I nobly and selflessly volunteered to phone a guy called Alex at a radio station, and not even to talk about how great I am either, only to find that he's actually a woman called Alex. See, if we'd done this over email, I would have remained blissfully unaware, and the ensuing awkwardness would probably never have happened.

Anyway, I was going to write an essay on 'the future of memory sports' tonight, but a) I've written rather a lot about memory just lately, so I thought maybe I should give it a rest, and b) I can't really be bothered. Still, I should write something reasonably lengthy, seeing as I'll probably only have time for a quick scribble tomorrow night - I'm hanging out with Pudsey Bear all night, manning a phone line for Children In Need.

This is another cool thing about working for Boots - there's ample opportunity and encouragement to do good things for charity. And every year they turn their call centre into a Children In Need call centre and ask for volunteers to answer the phones and take credit card details while wearing Pudsey T-shirts. I'm all in favour of this kind of thing. So give us a call tomorrow night, if you're in this general geographical area, some time after nine o'clock, and see if you get through to me! Also, give money. And don't give me a fake credit card number, I've secretly memorised the numbers of everybody I know, so I'll be on to you.

The Cambridge Memory Championship!

My passing mention of the Cambridge Memory Championship last night provoked a surprising flurry of emails and comments from people wanting to know more about it. I suppose it is a while since I've mentioned it, and I have picked up a few more readers since all those TV shows I've been on, so I should probably go into a bit more detail...

The Cambridge Memory Championship (which has got a website, albeit one that only talks about last year's competition) is an annual event that happens somewhere in Cambridge, at some time in May, usually on a Sunday. I organise the competition, but I don't pick the date or the location - it happens as part of the Cambridge Mind Sports Olympiad (which has also got a website, which also just talks about last year's) and we just get a room wherever this wider event takes place.

I'll let you all know as soon as I know when and where it's happening. In the meantime, you can let me know if you're interested in coming, or ask any questions you may have, by using the 'contact' link on the Cambridge Memory Championship site (it just goes to my email).

Or you can post any questions as comments here, and I'll try to answer them. Anticipating some of them, I'd just like to stress that it is a friendly, relaxed introduction to the world of memory sports for beginners and a friendly, relaxed get-together for experienced memorisers. No previous memory experience is required - having seen me on telly is an advantage only in that it'll boost my ego. I will be organising and not competing, although I often end up persuaded to have a go at memorising a pack of cards really, really quickly at the end.

For real beginners, a quick guide: The competition is all about memorising as much information as possible in a set time. There are ten 'disciplines', which you can read about in detail on the website - for example, memorising as long a number as possible in fifteen minutes, or as many random words as possible in five minutes. The rules on the website are more in-depth and complicated than you need to know, but pay attention to the scoring.

And please do come along! If nothing else, it's a chance to meet some fun and weird people, and we always go to the pub afterwards to hang out and chat. Everyone's welcome!

More memories

Well, now that I'm officially free to write about something other than memory, let's talk about memory. Am I going to win next year? I'm on a bit of a roll at the moment, I won everything I entered last year (which would have been more impressive if I hadn't skipped the German championship) and although I haven't done any training bar an online memory challenge since the WMC ended, I'm still feeling motivated. I think I'll do some serious practice this coming weekend.

Also, I was in too much of a hurry yesterday to mention that at the prizegiving ceremony, while trying to escape the hordes of people who wanted their picture taken with me for a minute or two so the cheesy grin wouldn't get permanently stuck on my face, I bumped into a guy called Phillip Holt (or something like that - I'm still rubbish with names), who was one of the people giving lectures at the Festival of the Mind, but more interestingly once worked for Peter Pan Playthings while they were the distributors of othello. And it turns out he designed their database for keeping track of othello competitions, back in the days when more than six people turned up for the average regional. I love these little small-world moments.

What else could I mention? How about a little advance advertising for next year's Cambridge Championship? I want to make it a big and special thing in 2009, so clear a space in your calendars for next May! Come on, let's have a lot of great memorisers and a lot of enthusiastic beginners!

Let's get this thing written!

Let me finish my account of the world championship now, before the next one comes around. As you may recall, I had a very comfortable lead going into the final discipline, but decided to play it super-safe, just in case. In Speed Cards, as I'm sure you know, the aim is to memorise a single, shuffled pack of cards as quickly as possible. You get two attempts, and the best time counts. If you can't recall the whole pack in order, it doesn't matter how fast you were, you only score a handful of points.

I knew that if I set a safe time of around a minute in the first trial, my rivals Gunther and Hannes would have to do something like fifteen seconds, which is (to the best of our current knowledge, anyway) utterly impossible. One minute is a piece of cake, normally, and so it proved here. The only problem was with the timing device - we use clever timers that start counting when you take your hands off them, and stop again when you put your hands down again after memorising the cards. They also turn themselves off if they've been left alone for five minutes, and I think this is what must have happened with mine, without my noticing. Unless there was a fault with it - I was about 90% sure at the time that I'd seen the lights come on when I put my hands on it, but I couldn't absolutely swear to it. Sadly, no TV cameras were watching the timer this time round. Luckily, the ever-alert Phil Chambers was watching, and quickly checked with his watch when he saw what had happened. If it had been vital for the championship, there might have been a problem, but as it was, an estimated 59 seconds (it was two or three seconds faster than that, really) was acceptable to everyone.

That settled the championship beyond any doubt whatsoever, although I still insisted that nobody say so to me on pain of being glared at - I hate to jinx things. What was still interesting was the fight for second place, and the fight for tenth, to see who would get the prize moneys. In the end, Hannes had mistakes on both attempted packs, and Gunther's 49.3 seconds was comfortably enough to secure his silver medal. Liu Ping, having last year become one of the five people to do a time under 40 seconds (without allegedly cheating), now became one of the five people to do a time under 40 seconds more than once, winning the final discipline with 39.09 and bumping himself up to 7th place in the championship. Lukas Amsüss, who's another of those Famous Five, came third with 50.84, although it wasn't enough to break into the top ten in the overall championship.

Speed Cards at the World Championship tends to be a little disappointing - it's not often we see world records in that one, because everyone tends to be tired out after three days of hard-working memorisation. Still, I was annoyed with myself when my attempted 25.61 was a complete disaster. I got the first card wrong - somehow I was convinced that there had been another image on my journey before the one that turned out to be the first. Ah well.

I was also annoyed with myself for not getting a single new world record at the world championships! Yes, I'd won the championship, got personal best scores in four of the ten disciplines, had extremely good scores in all ten of them (possibly the first time I've ever done that at the worlds), set the highest ever championship points score and blown everybody away, but the no-world-records thing still bugged me. It's the first time since 2002 that I haven't set a new record at the worlds, I think.

Everyone told me not to be silly and start celebrating, so I did, keeping the disappointed mumblings to a minimum. Final scores:

1 Ben Pridmore 7908
2 Dr. Gunther Karsten 6859
3 Johannes Mallow 6145
4 Guo Chuanwei 5779
5 Andi Bell 5382
6 Boris Konrad 5213
7 Liu Ping 5145
8 Su Ruiqiao 4871
9 Dr. Yip Swe Chooi 4707
10 Edward Cooke 4610
11 Yuan Wenkui 4520
12 James Ponder 4423
13 Jürgen Petersen 4043
14 Corinna Draschl 3926
15 Dorothea Seitz 3868
16 Lukas Amsüss 3862
17 Zheng Caiqian 3440
18 Stephanie Bünter 3434
19 Zhu Shao Min 3405
20 Mia Körkemeyer 3200

That just left us to pass the time until the evening's prizegiving ceremony. The dress code for this was 'smart', which brings out an interesting range of clothing from the competitors. Dominic O'Brien always wears his dinner jacket on the final day of competition - if it was me, I'd spill something down the shirt at lunch and not have a spare one for the evening, but he never seems to have that problem. Tony Buzan dresses in one of his sensationally cool self-designed suits, as he always does. The rest of the arbiting team wear suits and ties. As for the competitors, the ones who could fit jackets into their bags wear them, the rest wear their smartest T-shirts and jeans. Just for a change, I had also brought my work clothes - I knew Andi would be there dressed as scruffily as possible, as a matter of principle, so me dressing untidily wouldn't be unique or cool. I wore my big red tie, and of course my hat, so I wouldn't look exactly like I do at work.

Actually, nobody at the championship believed that I wear a suit and tie for work. They can't picture me dressed like that. Conversely, the people at work can't picture me dressed in hat and T-shirt-with-funny-picture-on-it. Anyway, on this occasion, my attempt to look smart and yet unique was undermined by the way that the entire Team China were dressed in identical black suits and red ties. Still, never mind. Conformity is cool too.

As for the prizegiving, that was fun, as these things always are. The boss of those wonderful sponsors, Intelnacom, came along despite the fact that rescheduling the prizegiving had made it clash with his sixtieth birthday party. This, and the fact that they gave us $30,000 and I ended up pocketing $11,300 of that, prevents me from poking fun at his speech like I normally would.

There were other prizes too - a titchy little glass trophy (I normally complain that the trophies are too big, but this year I felt it was too small. I really am a terribly ungrateful person, and clearly impossible to please. I suggest that the organisers of all future championships refuse to give me any prizes, just to teach me a lesson), lots of medals (gold, silver and bronze for each discipline, and for the championship, and for the junior and kids divisions - Konstantin won the kids, I forget who won the juniors, but it was probably Dorothea. The medals were also smaller than last year's, by the way) and for the winner (me) a super-enormous giant print of a painting by Tony's friend Lorraine Gill.

This picture isn't my kind of thing at all, but several other competitors said they wanted it, so I decided to get rid of it in the least ungrateful way I could think of, and auction it off, giving the money to charity. I'll let you all know when that happens - I need to get a camera and take a picture of it, because it's ten times too big for my scanner. It'll go to the Alzheimer's Society, assuming my contact there is still there and is happy to accept the money.

I won't bore you with the details of the following day, which I spent very enjoyably lounging around doing nothing or exploring Manama, or the journey home, enlivened by discovering a really great Canadian comedy called Corner Gas - check it out some time, it's very funny. Oh, and I got another pair of plane socks and once again accidentally left my original holey socks on the plane. And it was extremely cold when I got back home. I want another trip to Bahrain! Now!

Looks like I'll have to wait till next November, though - or at least that's the current plans. Meanwhile, all that remains is for me to thank everybody who helped run the competition, everyone who took part, and everyone who's said congratulations to me! Let's hope next year is just as much fun!

I'm no good with deadlines

It's terrible, knowing that I still need to get round to finishing my account of the world memory championships. Because I just can't find the time in my busy schedule of sitting around watching telly right now, and because I haven't got the time to do that, I feel guilty about writing more than a couple of lines in my blog on any other subject. And then when I don't write more than a couple of lines, I feel guilty about disappointing my eager blog readers, if any. There's an expression for this kind of situation, along the lines of 'pyrrhic victory', but I can't quite put my finger on what it is. And I also feel guilty about that, because people read my blog (if anybody does still read it) in the expectation of hearing exactly that kind of uncommon expression casually tossed out.

Tomorrow I'll write about the speed cards, the prizegiving, the journey home, and anything else that happened last month in Bahrain, and then resume my guilt-free daily drivellings.

Busy busy

Sorry, can't really write anything in depth tonight, either - my brother's coming round for the weekend, so I set aside this evening to clean up the place and put some of those boxes of junk in corners rather than the middle of the floor. Of course, what I've done in reality all evening is sit around watching telly. But in my defence, it's quite a while since I've watched the first few episodes of Friends. Normally when E4 gets to the end of the series in its never-ending loop, I decide to stop watching it every evening and save myself an hour every day, only to succumb to temptation a couple of weeks later (I think I've got to the point now where I can't cook and eat my tea without Friends being on in the background). So it's relatively fresh and new to me now! Anyway, must go and move the more lethal piles of paper from the middle of the slippery living room floor...

It's a matter of time

I will finish my account of the WMC, it's just not going to be until I find the time to sit down in an evening and type. Sorry to leave you all in suspense like this. In the meantime, can I just observe that the state of Maine voted overwhelmingly for Obama and the state of Alabama voted overwhelmingly for McCain? Do Americans have no idea about rhyme?

Look, you know perfectly well that this blog is different from other blogs. Don't complain.

It's footy on the telly tonight, and I haven't got the time or the inclination to continue my thrilling account of the world memory championships. Honestly, if I'd realised it was going to take so long to write about, I would never have started.

Besides, I need to record some things that have happened to me lately - I'm back at work, and those cool people I work with bought me a congratulatory bottle of champagne! Come to think of it, I never got so much as a card from my colleagues last time I won the world championship. Clearly I've got a great job now!

Also, I must confess something - on Saturday I left my hat on a train. As regular readers will know, this isn't exactly the first time this has happened, and it's getting a bit embarrassing now. I'll see if it's ended up in the lost property at Nottingham when I get a chance, but I might have to spend some of my WMC winnings on yet another replacement...

I don't remember

How can my rear bike light not be in the same box as the front one? I need it to get to and from work tomorrow without being killed! Maybe I'll just call in sick. They've probably forgotten I work there, anyway, after all this time.

Still, we've got an account of the world memory championships to finish writing, haven't we? Day three dawned hot and sweaty as usual, I put on my Zoom-Zoom T-shirt and headed down to the Gulf again. It's probably worth mentioning here what a long day it is at a world championship - the first two days we started at eight in the morning and finished at six in the evening, and it's even longer for the arbiters, who have to stay up all night marking the hour-long disciplines' recall papers. Day three was scheduled to be just a half day, with only the spoken numbers and speed cards to go, but those are the ones with the highest likelihood of delays, so you never know just how long it's going to take.

I came in to hear that the results of the random words had been posted on the website, although we hadn't officially been told them yet - a new world record for Boris, and Hannes as predicted making up some more ground on me. He reassured me that he'd done badly on the hour cards, only getting ten packs or so, so if I'd done twenty-something, I was safe, but I was sceptical about that. Those headlines mocking my ability to ever win the world championship again were still playing in my head until we had the official announcement of the scores so far.

Boris had indeed made a whopping 255 in words, Hannes was second with 191 and Dorothea picked up another bronze medal with 189. I got 170, and I'm looking at the website, and it says that was the 4th-best score, but I'm quite certain that I remember it being fifth. Has someone been amending the scores since they were announced?

Anyway, it turned out that I had indeed got 25 packs right in the hour cards - top score again by a long way (second was Chuanwei with 15), but yet again short of the world record. And Hannes had only got nine, which eased off the pressure on me quite a bit. After random words the gap had narrowed to a mere 129 championship points, which is nothing, but now with just two disciplines to go, the standings looked like this:

1 Ben Pridmore 6534
2 Johannes Mallow 5805
3 Dr Gunther Karsten 5256
4 Chuanwei Guo 4744
5 Boris Konrad 4634
6 Andi Bell 4413
7 Su Ruiqiao 4346
8 Liu Ping 4027
9 Yip Swe Chooi 3919
10 Yuan Wenkui 3713

Of course, it wasn't all over just yet, despite what everyone kept saying to me. "Stop saying I've won! Don't congratulate me until it's finished!" I kept having to yell at people. The two final disciplines are by far the easiest ones to end up with a tiny score in. Spoken numbers came first - we hear numbers read out at a rate of one digit per second, and have to remember as many as possible. Three trials (with 100, 200 and 300 digits respectively) and the best score counts. But the scoring for this one is brutal - it only counts up to your first mistake. So if you remember a perfect 300 digits apart from writing down the second digit wrong, you score 1. Still, the system for converting raw score into championship points isn't a linear progression like the other disciplines, it's (for some reason) 70 times the square root of the number of digits recalled; so I figured that if I got 100, it would be a decent 700 championship points and I wasn't going to lose any serious ground even if Hannes or Gunther got more.

Gunther is always good at spoken numbers, and Boris (probably in some kind of evil German mind-games) told me before the start that Hannes had been seriously training for this one more than anything else. In more evil German mind-games, Hannes offered me a hundred dollars to eat a hot pepper just before the spoken numbers started - I declined, fearing it might affect my performance, but apparently Lukas (or possibly Ed, I forget), took him up on it.

Anyway, we got down to memorising (the sound system was perfect this year, I didn't hear a single complaint), and to my own surprise as much as anyone's I got a perfect 100 in the first trial. Nobody else had managed that; James Ponder, going into the event about 20 championship points ahead of Ed in their continuing struggle, had got an impressive 89, Gunther had 84. Hannes congratulated me on winning the championship at this point, and I told him not to be silly, there was ample opportunity for me to screw things up yet.

In that kind of positive frame of mind, I did indeed screw things up in the second trial - after only 18 digits I thought "Hey, wait a second, I've added an extra location to my journey here..." and by the time you've waited a second, another digit has been read out while you weren't listening, and you're done for. So no improved score for me there. Andi had taken the lead with 108, it turned out, and Ed had made 94, with James fractionally improving with a 91 and giving Team Britain the top four places. Woo!

This seems like a good point to mention languages - the spoken numbers are spoken in English, we don't have the multilingual options of all the other disciplines. They did experiment with headsets and simultaneous multiple-language transmissions back in 2005, but it was a horrible disaster and they haven't dared to try it again ever since. It IS an advantage to English-speaking people, if only a slight one - you only really need to learn ten words, and I can confirm having done spoken numbers in German a few times that it doesn't make all that much difference, but I still feel a bit guilty about it when I see the Brits topping the table like that. Luckily, Gunther put us all in our place in the final trial.

In the third trial I'd got as far as 150 digits when I thought to myself "Hey, wait a minute, that was 807, why did I think of the image for 871?" and lost track of the numbers. Still, I ended up with a score of 153, which is another personal best for me, if still short of the world record 188. James Ponder, with staggering consistency, had improved his score again, to 92. 89-91-92, that takes some doing. And Jürgen Petersen celebrated his personal best 58 so loudly that he got an extra round of applause. Gunther, however, had blown everyone away with 202. Fifth world record of the championship, and not a single one of them set by me! I haven't failed to break a record at a world championship since 2002, when I was still rubbish at remembering things.

Still, with Johannes only having got a disappointing 21, and Gunther too far behind before that huge world record to do anything but sneak into second place, I had to admit the scores looked good going into the speed cards:

1 Ben Pridmore 7400
2 Dr Gunther Karsten 6251
3 Johannes Mallow 6126
4 Chuanwei Guo 5239
5 Boris Konrad 5153
6 Andi Bell 5141
7 Su Ruiqiao 4805
8 Yip Swe Chooi 4394
9 Liu Ping 4377
10 James Ponder 4138

1149 points ahead. It's 1000 championship points for a thirty-second pack of cards, and I'm still the only person who's ever beaten thirty seconds without allegedly cheating. I still told people to shut up when they tried to congratulate me, though. Who knows what Gunther or Hannes might pull out of the bag? I decided, just as a matter of principle, to do a 'safe' one-minute-ish time on the first trial, get 500 or so championship points in the bag and make it impossible to beat me. I'm impressed with my maturity (or possibly stupidity, depending how you want to look at it) here, since this was my last chance for a world record.

We were split into two groups, to make sure there were enough arbiters to watch over everyone (and enough timers for everyone to use), with the lower half of the leaderboard going in first. I didn't get to hang around outside with the rest of the top 20, though, because the BBC had joined us for the day, and Michael Mosley, who I'd taught to memorise cards a week or so beforehand, was giving it a go, and I had to come and watch. He did a pretty good job, all in all - he can't do a pack in under five minutes (the maximum time allowance) yet, but he had a go at a half pack and nearly got it, managing 14 cards before a mistake, I think. I'm hoping he sticks with it after they've finished filming, because he's clearly enjoyed himself and might just end up being quite good at the whole memory thing.

Hmm, actually, I'm going to have to put a 'to be continued' sign up here, because I've got to get my stuff ready for work tomorrow, and this is taking longer to write than I thought it would. Sorry to leave you in suspense!

To the memory of the memory of Bahrain

I had a dream last night that I was competing in a muffin-making competition. Not baking the muffin itself, you understand, taking it out of the packet, toasting it in the grill and then spreading butter and jam on it. I was quite confident of success, but I woke up before it finished, so we'll never know.

Perhaps slightly less exciting, but still worth talking about anyway, let's see what I can remember at this late stage of the rest of the World Memory Championship. The start of day two was delayed somewhat, waiting for Tony Buzan to arrive and announce the scores so far. I don't know why it's essential for Tony to perform this task - he does have by far the best speaking voice, but it's just a case of reading from a piece of paper, and I'm sure there are other people among the WMSC who are capable of doing that. Phil did his best to hide his irritation with the Chinese translator, who kept pointing out that the schedule said to start at eight, it was now after eight, and we should have started by now.

When Tony did turn up (perhaps distracted by his sleeping arrangements - I had by now been moved from my suite into a normal room, but apparently Tony, who was staying in the posher and more expensive Gulf Hotel, had had to put up with a double room instead of the suite he'd booked for the first night), I was pleased to see that he'd corrected his description of Andi - he'd referred to him all through the previous day as 'two times world champion Andi Bell' instead of three times champion, but it seems that was a genuine mistake rather than any kind of political title-stripping, and he described him correctly from this point onwards. I always had my name read out as 'reigning world number one Ben Pridmore', and Gunther as 'reigning world champion Dr Gunther Karsten', by the way.

Anyway, having confirmed that, as I said at the end of my last-but-one blog entry, I was 200 points up on Gunther, 500 on Hannes and 550 on Chuanwei, I was feeling confident. Hannes sounded pessimistic when he told me he couldn't see any way he could make up that difference, but I reassured him that there's always the possibility of me messing things up. Secretly, I didn't believe he could make up that gap either, but my opinion was soon to change.

The first event of the day was Speed Numbers. Which, for the sake of consistency with other disciplines, we really ought to rename Five Minute Numbers, but that's just me being pedantic. Anyway, it's exactly like Hour Numbers except (as you might have guessed by now), there's just five minutes of memorisation time. Since, once again, the numbers are in rows of 40 and you drop 20 points for a single digit wrong in a row, and score nothing for a row with two or more errors, this means that an error strips you of a bigger proportion of your points than in hour numbers, and there's a bigger chance of a disaster. Still, with a smaller quantity of digits to memorise, there's also a big chance of getting much more than a twelfth of the score you can achieve in the 60-minute discipline.

This was another discipline where I thought I had a chance of beating the world record. Andi's 396, set in Germany last year, was huge, but with him not on top form and me knowing I could consistently get 360 (better than anyone else had managed) and 400 at a stretch, I was quite hopeful. You get two trials at Speed Numbers, with the best score of the two counting, so normal procedure is to do a 'safe' attempt first time, then if that goes well, try for something huge and run the risk of messing it up. My 'safe' score is 360, and I attempted that, but, annoyingly, I blanked out completely on one of the images. Luckily, it was in the last row, and you're allowed to partially complete the last row you attempt, so I just scribbled out everything after that point, and ended up with a score of 336. Pretty decent, all in all.

We get the results of the first trial before we start the second (lots of frantic marking by those wonderful arbiters!), and that confirmed that my 336 was the best score. But only by three digits - Hannes had 333. Andi had got 278, followed by ever-consistent Guo Chuanwei with 240 and Liu Ping with 224. Gunther had only got 97. Still, all that counts for nothing if anyone gets a better score in the second trial, so I went for something big. Something big for me is 468 digits (I put 234 on each journey - a strange number, I admit, but that's just how it works out for me; 26 locations on each journey, three images in each location, three digits to an image), but it went wrong in a new and unexpected way.

As I said above, I memorise the digits in groups of nine, and when I got to the end of the ninth row, I somehow moved back to the start of row nine, instead of row ten, and memorised all that row of digits again (different images, naturally, since I do them in threes, which means they overlap the ends of the row, so while the first time it was split --1/234/567/890, second time it was 123/456/789 etc.) I've never done that before, and I didn't notice it until I got to the end of what should have been row 11, and noticed it was labelled 'row 10'. The resulting mental confusion put paid to any chance I had of beating 336.

I don't actually remember whether we got the results of trial two before we moved on to the next discipline. I'm going to assume we didn't, because we don't usually, but I can't be certain. It wouldn't have made much difference to my state of mind, because next up was Historic Dates, and I knew in advance what was going to happen there. In this discipline, you get a list of years (between 1000 and 2099 - the full title is Historic And Future Dates, but not many people use that) and a description of something fictional that happened in that year. You get five minutes to memorise them, then you get the list of happenings back in a different order and have to fill in the years beside them. The number of dates provided has just been increased this year from 110 to 120, so there was another good chance of a world record here.

I always used to be the best in the world at dates. And the best by miles and miles, so much so that it was embarrassing. However, over the last couple of years, Hannes has become just a little bit better at it, and always narrowly beats me. It's really annoying - now there are two of us who are light-years ahead of the rest, but I'm always in second place. Nonetheless, I gave it my best shot. I used to always just about get to the end of the 110 with ten seconds to spare in five minutes, so I was a little surprised to find that I got all through the 120 this time, and still had about ten seconds to spare. I remembered most of them, too, and estimated that I'd got a score of about 100 (one point for a correct date, minus half a point for an incorrect one, no score for a year left blank). The world record was 99 (set by Hannes last year - my best was 96).

It would have been around this point, probably, that we got the results of the Speed Numbers. Much to my surprise, Hannes had set a new world record of 405! I had no idea he was capable of that, and it caused me to reconsider my chances of winning the championship. My 336 was still the second-best score, but Ping had moved into third place with a 300, and Gunther had done 280. This made the top ten at the half-way point in the championship look like this:

1 Ben Pridmore 3749
2 Johannes Mallow 3425
3 Dr Gunther Karsten 3390
4 Chuanwei Guo 2942
5 Andi Bell 2783
6 Boris Konrad 2689
7 Su Ruiqiao 2678
8 Yip Swe Chooi 2476
9 Liu Ping 2408
10 Yuan Wenkui 2387

A healthy lead, it might look, but I was getting worried. Johannes, as I mentioned, always makes up a bit of ground on me at historic dates, and he's also always better than me at the next discipline, Random Words, even when I'm at my best. And words is a discipline where there's always a good chance of me making a mess of things and losing a LOT of championship points. It was going to be closer than I was comfortable with.

Still, I was in reflective mood - stepping out of the building for a blast of the oven-like atmosphere of Manama (it was a little cloudy, but still unbearably hot), my thoughts were mainly running along the lines of "awww, we're six-tenths of the way through the competition, and then it's a whole year till the next. It goes by so fast!"

Still, it was already time to go back inside to the air-conditioned hall for the next discipline. The temperature, incidentally, was as never-quite-right as in every building with air conditioning - the first morning, it was decidedly chilly in there and I was regretting not bringing a jumper. For the rest of the event the temperature was about right, but there's always that problem of how, as soon as you turn the aircon off for a minute, the temperature goes up a little, but it immediately feels stuffy, humid and uncomfortable as the outside air gets in. All in all, though, there weren't any serious temperature problems - unless you're Ytep Ho Yin, who spent the whole competition dressed in heavy coat and scarf.

Random Words essentially does what it says on the tin - you get a list of random words and fifteen minutes to memorise them. They're arranged in columns of twenty, with the usual scoring - 20 points for a complete column, 10 points for a column with one mistake, zero for two or more mistakes. I have a habit of having blanks in lots of columns and getting a very mediocre score. I felt a bit under pressure this time, which is usually a good thing, because I always perform best when I absolutely have to. I went for a big 200 words, and felt sort-of more-or-less confident of getting most of them right. My problem is often that I remember a different word that means the same as the one written down - especially if the synonym is one that appears on my list of mental images for cards and numbers. I did feel proud of myself for remembering that one of the words was 'vulture' when my brain was telling me 'eagle', though. 200 would be a great score, maybe better than Hannes and anyone else (with the obvious exception of Boris, who always gets a huge score at words).

Then it was lunchtime, nearly. Sandwiches and things were laid out on the tables, wrapped in cling film, but the catering staff wouldn't let us touch them until the scheduled time of one o'clock, so we had to wait around for fifteen minutes.

After lunch, it was the results of the dates - as per usual, flipping Johannes Mallow had beaten me into second place. My world-record-beating 100.5 looked meagre in comparison to his 110.5; the third-best score was Boris's 69.5. So now we were looking at a championship position like this:

1 Ben Pridmore 4854
2 Johannes Mallow 4641
3 Dr Gunther Karsten 4072
4 Chuanwei Guo 3476
5 Boris Konrad 3454
6 Su Ruiqiao 3398
7 Andi Bell 3217
8 Liu Ping 3029
9 Yip Swe Chooi 2911
10 Yuan Wenkui 2750

Yikes, that lead's coming down. I could really see myself losing at this point - if I'd got 50 fewer words than Hannes (by no means impossible), it was dead level. The final three disciplines are ones in which I was fairly sure I still had the edge over him, but look at what happened last year in hour cards AND speed cards. That had lost me the 2007 championship, so who's to say it couldn't happen again.

Just outside the top ten, incidentally, my compatriots Ed Cooke and James Ponder were fighting a thrilling battle - they'd only been separated by a few points all the way through the championship. Ed at this point was 11th with 2603, with James on 2514. With $1000 on offer for tenth place and nothing for eleventh, it was an important struggle, too.

So we settled down for an afternoon of Hour Cards - sixty minutes to remember as many packs of cards as possible. By this point it was really starting to bother me that I hadn't broken any world records yet. I ALWAYS set at least one new world record at the world championships! I'd got personal bests in three of the first six disciplines, but not in any of the ones where I hold the record. What should I do in the cards? Last year I attempted 36 packs and had a horrible, televised disaster (they'd shown The Mentalists on the big screen during lunch on the first day, just in case anyone didn't know what had happened, so everyone was talking about it). I knew I was on better form this year, but decided to play it comparatively safe and go for 33. My world record was 27, and that gave me a good chance of beating it.

I bring my own cards to competitions these days (they do get shuffled by someone else before I get to memorise them), but those who don't might have been surprised to see that they've got a new supplier this year - some American company, whose cards look decidedly cheaper and flimsier. I don't think the new ones are going to be reusable more than a couple of times. Still, that's just me nitpicking, it didn't affect me at all.

My memorisation went fairly well - I had more gaps and guesses than I was hoping for, but it wasn't a total disaster. I estimated that I'd got about 25 packs, maybe more, maybe less. That should be enough, right? Even so, it was in worried mood that I left the conference centre in the evening. I could just see the headlines - "Pridmore Beaten By Third Successive German In World Championships", "What A Big Fat Loser", and so on. When I'm worried about losing a memory championship, I generally assume the newspapers will focus on me and my weight problem rather than on the winner. I'm self-centred that way.

Tune in later to see whether I won or not! And no peeking at the results!

Intermission

Before I continue the thrilling account of the World Memory Championship, let's put in a plug for Chris Dickson's very entertaining blog, and especially the bit where he suggests we start a campaign to make me Sports Personality Of The Year. Actually, I don't think that goes far enough. What about the new year honours list? I defeated the evil Germans, after all - surely that's a sterling service to the British Empire that's worth an MBE?

Anyway, Chris is also kind enough to mention that comic I drew, and since by coincidence I've just finished another one (it's taken me about a year to draw this - I just never seem to find the time), here:

Memories give me the strength I need to proceed

When we last saw Zoomy, UK Memory Champion, he was about to face the first day of competition, last Friday morning. I was staying at the same hotel as Phil, Chris and Jennifer, the people who do all the work of running the competition, and they were already at breakfast when I came down (good breakfast, too - as close to an English breakfast as you're likely to get in Bahrain, beef bacon is pretty much indistinguishable from the pork stuff, and next time I might get past the name and see what 'foul mesdames' taste like...). "Don't walk there this morning!" Chris cautioned, in a way that suggested he knew I wouldn't be so mad as to walk really. "I was planning to..." I said. And I did, too - it was a bit less than half an hour if you don't get lost, and it's nice to get a bit of fresh air (albeit swelteringly hot fresh air) and exercise before spending the whole day indoors, sitting down.

I passed Yip Siow Hong on the way, and he was out jogging! Now that's excessive. But you won't catch me taking a taxi to a memory competition every day, I've got a reputation as a cheapskate socialist to protect. I got to say hello on the way to a ginger cat who looked like he might be friendly but then ran away at the last moment. I'm normally quite good with feline body-language, but perhaps it's different in Arabic.

So I got to the conference centre in good time and picked my seat (we get to choose them in order of world rankings, so I technically get to throw anyone out of their place if I really want to, although I've never exercised this privilege - any desk at the front is fine with me). I ended up with Andi Bell to my right and Liu Ping to the left; both of them likely to be among my rivals. Ping was the best of the Chinese competitors last year (although Guo Chuanwei did better than him at the Chinese championships and wasn't quite on his best form at the 2007 worlds) but he's not really part of Team China - he shuns the team uniform in favour of his stylish pale pink jacket and doesn't generally join in their noisy and excited motivational chants that they broke into at unexpected moments between disciplines. Of my other expected rivals, Gunther Karsten was lurking a few seats behind Andi, dressed all in black - how good was he going to be this year? Chuanwei was dead-centre in the room, looking confident in Team China jacket, and Johannes Mallow was towards the back, looking very much like someone who'd startled the memory world with some amazing scores at the German championship and could spring a surprise or two here.

The room itself was spacious - more than big enough to fit the 44 competitors who'd turned up (once again just failing to live up to the most-entrants-in-history boasts of the pre-championship press releases, but comfortably more than last year, which I wasn't really expecting) - and rather noisy (there were board games tournaments in the room next door, the arbiters next door on the other side and the lobby just outside the room was the place where competitors gathered to discuss the competition so far), but otherwise excellent. Great sound system which worked fine all weekend, ample supplies of water on the desks, replenished regularly and efficiently by someone who deserves high praise but who I never even saw. The whole championship ran wonderfully smoothly, in fact - huge kudos to the people working behind the scenes to make it look effortless!

Those board games I mentioned were part of the "Festival of the Mind" (there's a Tony Buzan title if ever I heard one) which incorporated the memory championship. It also included little tournaments in chess, scrabble, dama, sudoku and possibly something else too, lectures from Tony and friends and an exhibition in the basement of various brain-related things which absolutely nobody seemed to visit.

Anyway, we didn't have time for that kind of thing, because we were off on event one of ten - Abstract Images. This is the newest of the ten memory disciplines, introduced a few years ago to replace the poem, which had proved impossible to offer fairly to all competitors in these multi-lingual times. It was Dominic's idea, and the idea was to provide something that uses natural memory rather than techniques. You get rows of five abstract shapes, and you have fifteen minutes to remember the order they came in. Then you get the shapes back with the images in each row in a different order, and have to number them. Five points for a correct row, minus one point for an incorrect one.

I've been moaning for years that the images program is hugely not what it was supposed to be - the shapes are all well and good, but nobody looks at the shapes, because they're coloured in with one of a very limited number of textures, so you can just memorise those. While I was moaning about it, Gunther was practicing and working out the best system to do them, so he's better at it than anybody else. And he refuses to allow them to change it unless and until he no longer has a huge advantage. So lately I've been practicing too, and trying to catch up with him, but (as is always the way with these things) he keeps getting better too. He's recently lobbied to increase the number of rows provided from 50 to 60, and so a world record was expected from him here. It's 1000 championship points for 50 rows (250 images), so my aim here was to be less than 500 points adrift of Gunther (knowing I can usually make that up on things like binary and dates, where I'm the one who's much better than everyone else) and roughly on a level with everyone else.

[For the uninitiated, note that each discipline in a memory championship has two kinds of points to it - a 'raw score', for example 250 images, and a 'championship points' score, also known as a 'milennium standard' score, although I think that's a silly phrase and don't use it, which converts the raw score to a number proportionate to a 'milennium standard' that is worth 1000 points. So everyone is theoretically at least shooting for 1000 championship points in each discipline, which might be 250 images, 2500 digits, 100 dates, or whatever.]

I attempted forty rows, more than I've tried before, and it went pretty well. Gunther looked pleased with himself, Boris Konrad looked contented too - I should have mentioned him before, he's the second-best in the world at this one - and everyone else looked like they were waiting for the 'real' memory disciplines to start. The ones with numbers and cards, allowing the use of super-duper memory techniques, are the ones that most people come to these competitions for.

It takes time to get the results of each discipline, so we went into the second event of the day, binary digits, not yet knowing how the images had gone. Here we have thirty minutes to memorise as many 1s and 0s as possible. They come in rows of 30, and you get 30 points for remembering a complete row, 15 points if you recall a row with one mistake in it, zero for any row with two or more errors. I'm comfortably better than everyone else at this one - I've got a groovy and brilliant system for it that took a lot of work to prepare but gives me a huge advantage now it's ready and waiting in my head. Gunther is the second-best in the world. Almost all his best disciplines come on the first day of the world championship, so I knew if I was close to his score at the end of the first day, I'd be well placed.

I didn't do as well as I'm capable of doing here - for some reason I haven't quite been at my best all during my training this year, but I knew I'd still got a half-decent score by my standards; I was thinking in the region of 3700, which turned out to be very accurate, as did all my predictions this year. Memory people generally know what score they've got, more or less, but it's still nice not to be surprised.

The results of the images came in - Gunther had indeed set a new world record score, 276. Boris was second with 208, and I was very satisfied with a third place 188. That's a personal best for me, and I found out back at home that it's a higher score than anyone except Gunther and Boris has ever got, which I didn't know. But it's still cool. Boris was still disappointed, he'd been hoping for something better. That put me just 350 championship points behind Gunther. Not that the championship scores really matter at such an early stage after such an atypical discipline, but the top ten went:

Dr Gunther Karsten 1104
Boris Konrad 832
Ben Pridmore 752
Chuanwei Guo 684
Yuan Wenkui 660
Zhu Shao Min 636
Johannes Mallow 504
Su Ruiqiao 500
Dorothea Seitz 480
Mia Korkemeyer 460

The schedule had called for lunch after the binary, but it wasn't twelve yet and we had time to accommodate names and faces too. Now, as everyone knows, this is my weak spot in memory competitions. I'm rubbish at it. You get 110 photos of people's faces, each with a name underneath, and have fifteen minutes to remember them. Then you get the photos back, in a different order, and have to fill a name in underneath. One point for a correct first name, one for a correct last name. I suck at it, but my only consolation is that Gunther sucks at it even more. All I can really do with names and faces is sit back and get it out of the way, letting the likes of Andi and Boris get the good scores and just making up for it later.

After that, we went to lunch, which was again a very nice buffet, followed by an optional speech from Tony about which foods science has recently demonstrated are good for the brain. My own opinions about this being at odds with modern science, I decided to skip it.

Then we got the results of the binary digits, which is always the first indication of who's on form and who isn't. And it seemed that I more or less was - a score of 3730 - and Gunther wasn't quite. He got 2460, when he's normally above 3000. Dr Yip was on form, though, in second place with 2865, and Hannes was right behind him with 2840 - personal bests in both cases. The Chinese army, Guo Chuanwei, Su Ruiqiao, Liu Ping and Yuan Wenqui, all had scores over 2000 too, and Andi rounded out the top ten with 2013. Andi can do better than that - he genuinely had come to Bahrain believing he was in with a good chance of winning, but he's been out of serious memory competitions for quite a while and he clearly wasn't quite up to the form he had five or six years ago. Su and Yuan, on the other hand, are scarily young and clearly going to be dangerous if they improve on this year's performance.

Announcing scores is a very formal thing at memory championships, with a real ritual to it - Tony Buzan reads out the top ten in reverse order in his wonderful, sonorous, booming voice (generally mispronouncing the names of any non-English competitors) and everyone gets a round of applause (from everyone except Andi, who always sits motionless and scowling throughout), then the whole room goes out to the lobby to read the results posted on the noticeboard and see where they and their rivals are placed. The gap between me and Gunther had narrowed to a mere 34 championship points, which is better than I'd expected. I already had nearly 400 points on third-placed Chuanwei, although there was a long way to go yet.

And a major milestone on that long way was the afternoon's entertainment - Hour Numbers. This is one of the two 'marathon' disciplines; a whole hour to cram as long a number as possible into your brain. Scored like the binary, except in rows of 40, which makes it rather easier to make a mistake and lose all the points for a whole lot of numbers that you really have memorised properly. Gunther holds the record for this (1949), but I was quietly hopeful of maybe just beating it - I'd been doing very well in training.

During lunch, Andi, who has an annoying habit of offering me advice as if he's an old pro and I'm a newcomer, surpassed himself by advising me not to drink too much coke since we had an hour of memorising and two hours of recall to come. I treated this with the contempt it deserved, but in the afternoon I was rather grateful that the arbiters let competitors take a quick comfort break in between memorisation and recall, otherwise there would have been a very embarrassing situation for everyone involved, and probably a lower score in the hour numbers for me too. But, without too much bladder-related distraction, I was quite happy with my result. Gunther was reportedly rather less so, and was heard muttering that perhaps he wouldn't come back tomorrow.

We didn't get the scores until the following morning, but I'll let you in on the secret now to round off this first day report. In names and faces I'd come eleventh, with a mediocre 70. Gunther, as usual, was a little bit below me, in thirteenth with 62. The good scores had come from Boris, winning comfortably with 123.5, Corinna Draschl second with 101, then Dorothea an impressive third with 86. After them came Andi, James and Hannes, all making up a bit of ground on me, with Chuanwei just half a point ahead of me (you get half a point for a name that's phonetically correct but spelt wrong - I'm not sure how spelling works if you're getting your names in simplified Chinese characters like he does, but presumably there are arbiters who know).

In the hour numbers, I had the best score, a personal best of 1800, and I still wasn't happy. I'd thought there was an outside chance of a world record, dagnabbit. But Gunther had indeed underperformed, getting only 1352. The big threats to me were Ruiqiao with 1710 (yikes, he's going to be one to watch out for next year), Dr Yip with 1640 (he's always good with numbers, and he was clearly on form), Hannes with 1631 (in every discipline he'd elevated himself over the course of a year from the chasing pack to the top-flight competitors. I did the same, many years ago, and I'm going to need to make another quantum leap upwards soon if I want to stay ahead of these Johannes-come-latelies), Andi with 1580 (not his best, again, but you can never write him off) and Chuanwei with 1440 (a way behind me, but he's consistent at everything and I have a habit of messing one or two disciplines up every year).

The top ten championship scores after four disciplines looked like this:

Ben Pridmore 2853
Dr Gunther Karsten 2644
Johannes Mallow 2345
Chuanwei Guo 2302
Boris Konrad 2156
Su Ruiqiao 2054
Andi Bell 2041
Yip Swe Chooi 2034
Yuan Wenkui 1961
Edward Cooke 1759

Three British, three Germans, three Chinese and a Malaysian (no, Team China, you don't get to count Chinese-Malaysian Dr Yip). Boris had had a somewhat disastrous hour numbers, only getting 688, and would have to do something impressive with two of his best disciplines already gone, but was still up there. Hannes and Chuanwei were both lurking, but I was very happy with this position - being a couple of hundred points ahead of Gunther after day one and five hundred ahead of anyone else is better than I'd hoped for and started to put me into the ever-dangerous "if I don't make a mess of everything, then I might just..." kind of mindset.

Stay tuned for the Day Two Report, tomorrow, probably. Unless I don't feel like it. This one was a bit boring, to be honest...

Memories are made of this

Okay, no Memoriad for me. But my feelings of guilt about dropping out at the last minute are assuaged by the glorious prospect of four more whole days of rest and relaxation. I can't remember the last time I had that (yes, I've only been employed again for three and a half months, but my memory has trouble stretching back that far).

So let's stretch my memory back a week or so and remember the World Memory Championship, Bahrain 2008. It all started, for me at least, on the Tuesday night - having realised at the last minute that it's not actually possible to get a train from Beeston to Manchester Airport early enough in the morning to catch the flight I'd booked, I realised I was going to have to spend the night in a hotel. A little bit more internet research revealed that every hotel in Manchester and the surrounding area was fully occupied (that was the night of the Man Utd/Celtic game), and eventually the closest place I could find was an expensive suite in the Novotel in Sheffield, which was at least half way there and allowed me an early-morning train to the airport.

I've never stayed in a suite before - I don't see the point, personally. Surely the fun of a hotel room is getting to lie in bed watching the telly? Why would you want an extra little room with a settee? Inviting other people to come and hang out with you, you say? Sit on the bed, the floor, any chairs/desks etc provided! Sheesh, what kind of people book suites in hotels? Anyway, I resolutely ignored the suite part of it (and the hundred-and-something-quid cost), lay in bed watching Man U thrash Celtic, and got a good night's sleep. After a quick call to Etihad Airways, anyway, having just noticed in the small print on my e-tickets that they have a policy of cancelling bookings that aren't reconfirmed three days before departure. Still, the person on the phone put my mind at ease on that point quickly enough.

Next morning, I got the train to the airport without incident (except for a surprising announcement on the platform at Manchester Piccadilly station that the train to the airport, which I and my fellow passengers were already sitting on, had been cancelled. Someone had pressed the wrong button on the hi-tech announcements system, apparently, and the staff had to go around assuring people that yes, the train did in fact exist and was about to depart) and had time to hang around the airport and find another book to read on the journey (picked Animal Farm, seeing as I don't own a copy, to go along with the ones I'd brought along, Frankenstein and William Sleator's Singularity).

As for the flight, I think it deserves a quick glowing recommendation/advert: Fly Etihad - the airline of the United Arab Emirates! They have the best range of in-flight entertainment of any airline I've flown with! Lots of good films old and new, and a huge choice of sitcom episodes, plus a few decent cartoons. Also, they give you free socks (possibly they're special socks that prevent deep vein thrombosis, but I don't really care. I approve of people giving me free socks, and immediately swapped my holey ones for these intact (if a little small) ones) and a good meal.

Got off the plane in Abu Dhabi, which was extremely hot, and bumped into James Ponder (how typical, you go all the way to Abu Dhabi and the first person you see is someone you know) who'd just come in on a similar flight from London to catch the same plane out to Bahrain. Realised that I'd left my hole-filled original pair of socks on the plane. We flew into Bahrain, which was also baking hot, although it was after dark (the idea of holding the WMC later in the year was to make the temperature less uncomfortable for us poor Europeans, but I didn't notice any difference from last August. Still unbelievably hot and humid!) and my big rucksack was the first bit of baggage on the carousel! This is a very good sign - I'm always the last to get my bag, I think the workers in airports around the world see it coming and decide to hang onto it just for a laugh. Or maybe to ransack it for memory-champion souvenirs, I don't know.

Anyway, we split up again to get taxis to our respective hotels in different parts of Manama. James warned me in advance that there's a current scandal of taxi drivers ripping off tourists, and mine did indeed refrain from using the meter and try (and succeed) to charge me more than James said was the going rate - but since it was still less than you'd expect to pay a taxi over here for the same distance, I didn't mind too much. I was staying in the Ramada Palace Hotel, which was very nice, fancy-looking, not too expensive and air-conditioned. They didn't have a single room available for the first night, so put me in another big posh suite. I'm turning into a suite kind of person, I can tell.

So then it was Thursday morning, the day allotted in the schedule for press conferences, competitor briefing, arbiter training and a posh opening ceremony/dinner. I hadn't brought a copy of the schedule with me, so wasn't sure when exactly these things were supposed to happen, and hadn't brought a map or the address of the competition venue (the Gulf Hotel/Conference Centre) with me, so I decided that a good strategy was to just go out, walk around the city and see if I stumbled across the right hotel.

I walked out into the sweltering heat (it was just about bearable if you stayed in the shade, so I spent the morning dashing from shadow to shadow) and pointed myself in the general direction of a big pointy building that looked like it might be the Gulf Hotel. Actually, as it turns out, most of the big, glassy, expensive-looking buildings in Manama aren't hotels (I've possibly been conditioned to assume that by visiting Las Vegas), they're offices - lots of big companies have their Middle East headquarters there. I'm still not sure what the big pointy building I was aiming for is, since I got distracted on the way there, but I'm pretty sure it's an office of some kind. It certainly turned out to be in the opposite direction to the Gulf Hotel, as I found out later.

I really do love walking the back streets of an extremely foreign city, and I spent a good couple of hours seeing the sights, while still keeping an eye out for anything that might be a Gulf Hotel. Had an expensive can of coke in a rather cool and crowded market place (it's hard to pretend you're not a clueless tourist when you're the only white person to be seen and don't speak a word of Arabic) and an extremely cheap one in the cool shopping centre, then I wandered all the way down to the Diplomatic Quarter, where last year's hotel was, just to prove that I can still find my way to places and to have a drink in their nice Harvester's pub (just coke again - championship the next day, and going to an Islamic country and having a beer in a British-style pub by yourself is a bit sad) before setting out back to the city. Eventually giving up on the chance of finding the venue by random wandering (or, indeed, of finding my own hotel ever again) and went into the Sheraton, pretended I was staying there and asked for directions. It turned out that the Gulf Hotel was right out over the other side of the city, and the doorman recommended that I take a taxi, but I explained that I disapprove of taxis and would rather walk, and anyway I was already as hot, tired and sweaty as it's possible for a human being to get. So he gave me a map and I successfully followed it for what must have been about an hour's further walking to the Gulf Hotel, out near the big fancy palace.

The hotel is surrounded by a big stone wall with only one opening, and I managed to walk around three and a half sides of the complex before finding the entrance, but I eventually made my way into the conference centre. I was warmly greeted by Chris Day and the good people of MICE Management (which, incidentally, is the best-named company in the universe, especially when they're organising a memory championship and thus enable Tony to make a convoluted joke about elephants, memory and mice) who appreciated the way I'd arrived at exactly the right kind of time, about fifteen minutes before registration officially started, so as to avoid the rush. I didn't mention that it was equally possible for me to arrive six hours early or not at all, and just cheerfully took the credit.

I love the feeling of a memory championship just starting to happen - all the memory people you know and don't know gradually arriving, all the organisers running around trying to make things happen the way they should (Phil Chambers, as ever, was non-stop all weekend, much appreciated by everyone, Dominic O'Brien was always doing something and Jennifer Goddard had the job of shepherding a small army of arbiters around the place, telling them where to go and what to do). It's always fun to guess who's going to turn up and how many competitors we're going to get - reports of Astrid's return turned out to be greatly exaggerated, but Andi had definitely been seen (not at the briefing, of course, he never comes to those, but at the airport), and Ed, who wasn't on the list although he'd told me a month before that he was coming, had showed up assuming nobody was going to tell him he couldn't compete just because he hadn't filled in a registration form. The Chinese arrived in a big mass as usual, all dressed in identical Team China jackets - I can proudly report that I can now pick most or all of the top Chinese competitors out of a lineup and even have a vague idea of some of their individual personality traits; it's still a bit them-and-us, but I think we intermingled a little bit more this year. The presence of Hugh (despite the name, he's Chinese) the official Team China translator, helped with that somewhat. They want to invite me to China to give talks and things, but I don't think I can any time soon - I've only got three days of holiday left at work to last me till the end of March.

Daren and newcomer Heidi, not to be outdone, sported Team South Africa T-shirts. It's a little bit harder to be a team when there's only two of you, but they managed it. Idriz, the only Swedish competitor, was wearing his zogaj.se cap and shirt. Chester Santos, who finally won the US Championship back in March, came along to his first World Championship, we had Dagfinn from Norway, Dr Yip from Malaysia and the usual crowd of Germans were joined by junior champion Dorothea Seitz, who I decided after a moment's consideration to talk to as if we'd spoken before - I know we were in the same building at the 2007 German championship, but I couldn't be sure whether we'd actually properly met. She seemed to think we had too, so it was okay. Also there was nine-year-old Konstantin Skudler, German Kids Champion, who had written to a TV company telling them he wanted to go to Bahrain but couldn't afford it and got a free trip with accompanying camera crew following him around (as were his parents, who by all accounts he'd dragged along to the competition entirely of his own volition, rather than being pressured at all by them to compete). The Chinese team had the similarly-aged Zhang Dianshuo, who made a point of saying hi to me whenever he saw me. Since his English ran to three or four words, and my Chinese vocabulary consists of no words whatsoever, our conversations weren't very in-depth, but he still seems fun.

The introduction and briefing followed the same kind of format as usual, with a couple of additions - an extra-long speech from Tony emphasising how much work the arbiter/organiser team do for no money and out of the goodness of their hearts, and a long speech from Dominic about sportsmanship, fair play and how cheating is bad. The first of these was a deliberate attempt to forestall any protests about the last-minute schedule changes - the original schedule called for the prizegiving dinner not to take place until Monday evening, despite the event finishing at Sunday lunchtime, and despite loud protests that this meant everyone would have to spend at least one extra night in an expensive hotel, they'd insisted that it was necessary to do it that way. Then, five days before the competition, they'd been forced to reschedule the prizegiving to Sunday night when the convention centre told them they couldn't have the room on Monday after all, and had rearranged the competition timetable in an attempt to leave more time between the finish and the awards, thus proving that they could have done it that way in the first place if they'd really wanted to. Despite this, I don't think anybody was planning to complain at the briefing anyway - these things do happen, and the revised schedule was by no means unacceptable in and of itself, and anyway everybody had already complained over email in the days before the competition.

The cheating speech was to highlight that Dominic, in his capacity of chairman of the Ethics Committee, or whatever his latest title is (great job though the WMSC do, they have an amazing talent for forming new committees and sub-committees and giving themselves official titles, considering there's only half a dozen of them) was going to come down like a ton of bricks on anybody who showed the slightest inclination to look at the memorisation papers after they'd been told to stop, kept writing after the time was up, or made any attempt to cheat in any way. They even had two CCTV cameras, which he promised could pick up any unethical activity of any kind. I don't know if they actually worked or if they were just there to scare people, but I'm all in favour of making it clear that cheating isn't acceptable, even if we haven't really had any problem with it in the past (I heard rumours, possibly made up, that someone had been caught communicating with a hidden microphone up her sleeve - it all seems a bit far-fetched and unlikely to me, but perhaps some people really do think you can gain fame, fortune and glory by cheating your way to an above-average score at the world memory championships?)

I had a splitting headache by this point, possibly from sunstroke, so decided to skip the posh dinner (I really dislike posh dinners, although as it turned out this one was a non-posh, no-waiting-around-between-courses buffet which I would have really enjoyed, but never mind) and went back to my hotel for a room service snack (I also, generally, disapprove of room service as being unnecessarily extravagant, but the Ramada Palace has a really nice choice of inexpensive meals). Or at least I eventually went back to my hotel - not remembering how to get there, I walked right past it and all the way back to the Sheraton, where I asked the same helpful doorman how to find the hotel I was actually staying at, still without giving away the fact that I wasn't staying at the Sheraton. Having eventually got to my posh suite, I had a very early night and woke up bright and refreshed at exactly the right kind of time in the morning. Interestingly, while I often feel headachey or unwell immediately before a memory competition, I'm always 100% fighting-fit on the day itself, and this year was no exception. But I'll pause this account here, and tell you about the actual competition just a little bit later. Thanks for your patience and thank you for choosing Zoomy's Thing; we know there are other blogs out there and we value our loyal customers.

Pros and Constantinople

Sorry about not doing the promised memory-writing last night. I was so tired that I went to bed at half past seven, and then woke up at half past three this morning (possibly posessed by the spirit of my late father, who always slept those kinds of hours, probably as some kind of revenge for writing yesterday about wearing my old coat instead of the leather jacket that he bought me). I got up, had a bath, had breakfast, checked my emails, went back to bed and slept again for another few hours. And I've spent most of the day lounging around doing nothing, which was great.

You've probably noticed I'm not in Istanbul. I spent quite some time weighing up the good and bad points of going or not going, and ultimately the option that involved not getting out of bed won. And so then I did get out of bed and went to Nottingham, just so that the world wouldn't think I'm lazy. But I only spent a couple of hours there, before coming home and changing into my pyjamas again - it sounds weird, I know, but I really DO need to spend a day in bed after a memory championship (which I didn't do yesterday, because I went out to do an interview with Radio Derby and spent most of the day hanging around in the city). Sitting around for three days remembering numbers physically exhausts me.

I might still find the best last-minute price and fly out there tomorrow - tomorrow is just the optional sight-seeing tour of Istanbul, the competition's on Saturday and Sunday - but I think it's more likely that I won't. Haven't completely decided yet, but here's my thinking behind it at the moment:

It occurred to me today that my number one reason for going there is because there's a pretty good chance that I would win $4,500. And if I'm doing something mainly because it would involve getting money... it just offends my sensibilities somehow. I got lots of money from the World Championship, enough to pay off those credit cards that keep sending me rude letters and have a bit to spare for future credit card splurges, so I don't need an extra two or three grand. And I'm very much not a professional memory man. Sure, there's also the hanging out with people aspect, but it's only Gunther, Andi and Boris from the memory world, and I saw them last weekend, plus the mental calculation people, who I mostly don't know all that well. And there are people right here (okay, mostly on the internet), who I haven't hung out enough with over the last couple of months. And then there's the wanting-the-Memoriad-to-be-a-big-success aspect, but I don't really think my presence or otherwise is going to make an impact. It's always going to get a lot more coverage in Germany than over here, so it'd probably be a good thing if Gunther or Boris win gold medals. Besides, I took too much of the prize fund at the WMC, it'd be greedy not to let them have a share.

And there's the rather embarrassing reason not to go - I find that I genuinely care about my job. And if I fly back from Istanbul on Monday and go into the office on Tuesday, I will be rubbish for the rest of the week. I will make a horrible mess of the monthly wastage analysis, which I care about even if nobody else does, and I'll be falling asleep at my desk and wishing I was at home. Whereas if I spend the next four days lounging around, I'll be fed up with being at home and positively delighted to be at the office!

So, it's about 75% probable that I won't go to the Memoriad after all. We'll see how I feel tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I really, really will write about the World Memory Championship! At great length! Tonight, or tomorrow, or both!

And it's cold, cold, cold, and we'll soon be old

Naturally, the British weather decides to punish me for going away to sweltering-hot Bahrain by being horrifically cold when I get back. But I found it quite a pleasant change to go out early this morning (I'm still three hours ahead of GMT) in the chill. Besides, I wore my old coat that I haven't worn for years, and was amazed by how warm, cosy and snuggly it is! Why did I stop wearing it? I've always worn my leather jacket in winter, and many years ago I realised that I just had this coat lying around but never did anything with it, and resolved to give it away to someone at work who was collecting winter clothes for the homeless. I put the coat in a safe place so I'd remember it, and like many other things I've put in a safe place over the years, never saw it again until I moved house. But now I think I'm going to start wearing it again, it's great! And it's reversible, so if I ever become a criminal and stop being a nationally-famous memory man, I'll have a perfect disguise!

Still, I imagine most of my readers didn't tune in to this blog to read about my coat (it really is a great coat), so don't worry, memory talk coming later tonight. I just wanted to record that I'm wavering about my decision to fly to Turkey tomorrow. I'm utterly exhausted, and another weekend of travelling and memorising followed by going back to the office the day after I return will literally kill me. I really do want to go along and support the Memoriad, but it's not going to do my mental and physical health any good at all. I think I'll just see whether I can get out of bed tomorrow morning, and if I can't, send my apologies.

Brief trailer

I've just got back, I've got squillions of emails and messages to read through, and it's after midnight, Bahrain time. Tomorrow, assuming I get out of bed at any point during the day, you can expect a full travelogue!

Blogging temporarily suspended

Well, I probably won't have internet access while I'm away in Bahrain, so you might have to wait until next week for an update from me. I got told off last year for not going into enough detail about the world championships, so even if I can't get online, I'll make notes and write about the whole thing at excessive length when I return. So that's something to look forward to!

Mindwipe

Woo! This has been one excellent weekend's training for the world championship! I feel fully prepared for the rigours of competition! The only thing that worries me is that I might have crammed this final practice in a little too close to the championship itself - I really needed the training, so I'm still pretty sure this was best in the long run, but there's always a problem of my journeys not being fresh enough next Friday when I need them again.

So what I need to do now is blank out my brain completely. Not memorise a single thing between now and the competition. In fact, not even THINK about remembering anything, at all! That might cause a problem or two at work and in any social situations where remembering to wear clothes is a requirement, but I think it'll be worth it in the end. Just as long as while I'm remembering not to remember anything, I do remember to go to Bahrain.