Names and faces

The UK Championships are up and running - if you're not following Florian Dellé's live blogging, then you jolly well should be.

There are 18 competitors, I think, from all around the world, and the number of competitors was enough to force a relocation of the championship from the basement room of Simpsons-in-the-Strand to a conference room in the Strand Palace Hotel across the road. I can't imagine how small the original venue must have been, because the new, bigger alternative has no room to swing a cat. Luckily, the UK Cat-Swinging championships aren't until next week, and memorising numbers doesn't take up quite so much space, but even so, we're quite closely packed together in a little room in the basement.

The Japanese TV crew and a couple of very enthusiastic photographers (who for some reason wanted all the lights turned out except a big spotlight at the back of the room in order to take pictures of all the competitors at their desks - possibly they saw what we all look like and decided that a shadowed effect would be the way to go) added to the crowded feel of the room, but despite the delays all the photography caused, we finished more or less on schedule. Not that it was necessary to do so, because we're not sharing our digs with chess players any more, and can spend the whole day tomorrow memorising at our leisure, without having to hurry.

A lot of the competitors are people I've met once or twice before, and knowing how good I am with putting faces to names and vice versa I was quite happy with myself when I walked into the venue and thought "There's Rick de Jong... no, it's not, it's the one who looks a bit like Rick but isn't... Dave Billington!" and was able to say "Hi Dave" with confidence as if there had never been any doubt. And I was particularly gratified when the first thing he said to me was that at least I knew his name, because Gaby Kappus had greeted him with "Hi, Rick, it's good to see you!"

They don't look all that similar, but there is a definite resemblance. However, my confidence in my name-remembering ability was a little dented when, in front of the Japanese cameras, I introduced Ameel Hoque to them only for him to say "No, I'm not Ameel, I'm Toby Caldwell. I'm new." Kanako from Japan said "But you called him Ameel!", just in case any NHK viewers had missed it and we all had a good laugh at how stupid I am.

Then a bit later, when we went into the competition room, Toby came up to me and said hi, and I laughed "Hi, Toby - see, I remember your name now!" To which he replied "What? I'm Ameel, don't you remember me? Who's Toby?" In my defence, they've both got beards. And hair. And faces. And I think they were both wearing clothes. How do you expect me to know who's who?

Anyway, I might not remember what my friends look like, but I can still remember how to memorise things. This is a competition I should be pretty confident of winning - the world's best aren't here and the next-best memoriser here is Ameel, the world number 44 (well, Dominic O'Brien and Gaby Kappus are here too, but they're arbiting and not competing). And I won the two disciplines we've had results for, words and binaries, and got a passable score in 15-minute numbers, I think. A bad score in names and faces, naturally, but I've given up all hope of doing well at that. Anyway, I'm safely in the lead after two disciplines, with Ameel in second and Florian third.

Also in attendance is Eva Ball, the UK Schools Championship winner and possibly the first British junior ever to compete at a memory competition (unless I've forgotten someone). She protests that she's no good and hasn't done any preparation, but she got the second-best score in words and an entirely acceptable result in binary to lie somewhere comfortably in the top ten overall. We have regular internationals like Rick, Florian, Pierre Berbinau, Tomasz Krasinski, Idriz Zogaj, Dagfinn Hammar and Kranthi Raj, comparatively new internationals like Mattias Ribbing, Marco Lombardo and Håkon By, and a British contingent made up of me, Eva, Ameel, Dave, Toby, Richard Bowdler (who competed for the first and only time in Cambridge 2006, so it's good to see him back - I can now add him to the list of people I've enticed into becoming regular memory competitors by virtue of organising that competition!), Bilal Arshad (new from Cambridge this year) and newcomer Antonio Campo who despite the name is from Wales. A good turnout!

I saw him one day as he stood on the Strand, stopped all of the traffic with a wave of his hand

Here I am in London, all set for a weekend of memorising. Had a fun interview with the Japanese film crew this afternoon, although the Irish radio cancelled on me (possibly something more important than a little national memory competition in another country occurred to them). And tomorrow there's a very brief chat with Radio Shropshire (two to three minutes, in an interview shared with Phil) and possibly also talking to the Sun, but there'll be a minimum of being followed around by cameras this weekend, which will make a pleasant change.

I've even gone to the trouble of finding out which disciplines we're doing on which days - on Sunday morning we seem to have a very unrealistically rushed schedule, so expect stirring tales of memorisers barricading themselves in the competition room to keep out the chess players who want to play there in the afternoon. Anyway, wish me luck, everyone. And then also wish all the other competitors luck, because it wouldn't be fair just to wish good luck for me. I'd be happier if it was one of those competitions where nobody keeps score and everyone is declared the winner, really...

A new approach to preparation

I think it sums up my attitude to the UK Championship this weekend to say that I just realised tonight that I hadn't booked a hotel yet. And also that I felt a bit annoyed today when I remembered that I'm going to this competition and so I won't have a free weekend to practice for the World Championship in November.

I think it's just that it's only two weeks since Hamburg - I'm not used to having competitions so close together. I've done no training at all, except for an Online Memory Challenge on Sunday (in which I got perfectly respectable scores in everything, so possibly I'm worrying about nothing).

I also feel guilty about not having done even the most basic preparation (like, finding out what order the disciplines are in and deciding how many cards/digits/whatevers I'm going to attempt) because it's rather rude to the people who've spent a lot of time and at least a certain amount of money organising the thing if I don't take it seriously. They've also been very enthusiastically sending out press releases, judging by the number of people who've got in touch with me this week asking for interviews. Perhaps there's still time for me to get into match fitness. The competition doesn't start until Saturday morning, after all.

I've got the afternoon off work tomorrow - I was hoping to avoid using up holidays for this one, since I've already taken quite a big chunk of the 25 days that have to last me till the end of March (down to London on Friday night, memorise for two mornings, back up again on Sunday evening, £10 each way because I bought advance tickets, bish bash bosh), but then the Japanese TV people wanted to film me, and Irish radio wanted to talk to me (listen to Today FM from 4:30 tomorrow if you're in range. And if you want to listen to my annoying voice.) so I had to take a half-day. Still, that's pretty efficient for a memory competition. I might even have a few holidays left for just sitting at home doing nothing on a work day! I haven't done that for ages!

Weather report

Flying walruses dominate the skies nowadays. Ever since they started growing wings, it's become increasingly difficult to find a good place to sunbathe without the sun being obscured by great flocks of ugly, blubbery creatures performing loop-the-loops and airborne-scissors-box manoeuvres. Anybody wishing to develop a suntan should therefore head as far away from the coast as possible - walruses like to return to the water occasionally in order to check their email, and so don't normally venture more than a hundred miles from the sea.

Alternatively, for those who have difficulty finding a spot in Britain more than a hundred miles from any coast, holidaymakers could also visit Skegness, where the denizens of Natureland Seal Sanctuary have developed a kind of seaweed-based cannon to shoot down passing wing-ruses. The seals and a few of the sealions have developed a competition among themselves as to who can bring down the most flying creatures, and so there are quite often gaps to be seen in the vast, grey, tusked carpet that normally renders the brightest day as dark as a really dark night. Sunbathers who position themselves carefully and manage not to be hit by a falling seaweed-coated walrus can sometimes get as much as fifty minutes of sun exposure on a good day.

Rather a gloomy prospect, if you'll excuse the pun, but to look on the bright side, if you'll excuse the pun, at least it doesn't rain any more since the earwigs found a way to stop it.

One down, one to go

Well, that's Canada sorted for footage of me. All I really have to say about it is that Josh the director looks spookily like my dad. Or like my dad would have looked if he'd been made of something stretchy and someone had grabbed his head and pulled upwards about six inches. Josh is taller and thinner, is the point I'm trying to make here. But he's got the exact same hair (curly and originally black but unevenly fading to grey and white, bald on top and unkempt back and sides), same moustache and nearly the same sideburns (he says he just had them trimmed yesterday, so possibly they used to be the same ridiculous style as my dad's were). It was quite eerie talking to him.

Here come the Canadians

They're coming to film me tomorrow, at the inconvenient time of 4pm, meaning I have to be in work early if I'm going to get everything done. And then they'll probably be here all night recording a tedious interview that will eventually be cut out of the finished program, if the whole project doesn't get abandoned half-way through. I'm in a grumpy mood, but it's probably too late to tell them to get stuffed now. The Japanese are coming on Friday, but I'm less grumpy with them because they've sent me far fewer emails asking for more information.

Still, in more important news, it's just occurred to me that it's roughly ten years since that fateful day when I saw a big black hat in a shop in Sheffield and thought to myself "I might look good in a big black hat, and it will certainly stop people noticing that I'm starting to go bald. What the heck, I think I'll buy it." If not for that moment, I would be known today as 'the one without the hat'.

Never be without a Beano

I'm feeling extremely accomplished, because I've spent the evening cleaning my living room. Some people, I realise, do this every day, or every week at least, and it takes them about five minutes, but I prefer to leave it at least a year between cleans. But we'd got to the point where I literally couldn't see the floor under all the rubbish, and the giant clumps of dust were starting to develop sentience, so I decided it was about time. And, two full bin bags of rubbish and five or six giant piles of stuff I want to keep having been moved to other rooms, I'm pleased to say I'm now sitting in a nice, clean, tidy room! I feel like I deserve a reward of some kind.

Also today, I came across someone selling old books and comics in Beeston town centre, so I picked up a few old Beanos and other bits and pieces. "And the Viz is for you, right?" the man who sold me them laughed, and I agreed that it was, not feeling like getting into the whole discussion that they were all for me - I don't care what the intended age group of my comics is.

There are some good ones in there, too - the one from January 1986 with a competition to win a Raleigh Vektar bike, the coolest bike ever made. I entered that competition, but I didn't win. John Gray had a Vektar, which was typical of him - he was rich beyond the dreams of the average nine-year-old Clinton Park School pupil and his mum bought him anything he wanted - but I never did get one. Life is unfair.

Funnily enough, I also picked up the Beano from exactly 25 years ago, August 11th 1984, which seems like a good opportunity to compare it with this week's issue and see if it really isn't as good as it used to be. I'll do a full review of both, when I get a chance! There's something for you all to look forward to.

Sporting traditions

Live league football on the BBC (admittedly not the games involving the good teams, but it's a start) and England failing dismally in the cricket - I like it when things go back to the way they're supposed to be. Also, if only the selectors had listened to me and not kept on recalling Ian Bell, we probably wouldn't be in this mess, so they've only got themselves to blame.

Other mind sports

While I was in Hamburg, people kept emailing me with news about other mental competition fun. For example, the schedule for the 13th Mind Sports Olympiad has rather belatedly been published. It's happening in the same place as last year, the Royal Horticultural Halls, from August 21st - 31st. I won't be going this year, but if you happen to be in the area, do go along and let me know what it's like.

I also probably won't be going to the World Othello Championship in Gent, Belgium, from November 4th - 7th, but only because you have to qualify for it, and the chances of me managing that are very slim. Indeed, it would require me to remember when and where the Nationals are this year (it's some time in September, I think, somewhere down south), as well as remember how to play the game. I haven't played at all for months...

The Top Ten Club

You know, it just occurred to me at lunchtime TODAY that Hamburg is where the Beatles played in their younger days. That thought never crossed my mind before, during or after my own trip to Hamburg last week. I could have gone on a tour. Not to mention all the Beatles-themed blog titles I could have used! Ah, wasted opportunities, and all because of my bad memory. Still, at least I get to use a very appropriate title for a blog about the world rankings...

The movers and shakers in the top ten of international memory after Hamburg are Simon, who moves up to third place, and Boris, who's now number eight. The world's coolest people are now as follows:

1 Me
2 Gunther
3 Simon
4 Clemens
5 Hannes
6 Astrid
7 Cornelia
8 Boris
9 Joachim
10 Andi

Check out that enormous gang of Germans (plus a couple of hopefully-temporarily retired Austrians) chasing me! Poor Andi's nearly followed Dominic out of the top ten - maybe that will motivate him to really try to win the world championship again this year, but we really do need more British people to help me out here.

But still, I can't believe I didn't think about the Beatles connection. I had the whole day to myself in Hamburg on Sunday, in order to get the cheapest flights, and since all the shops in Germany are closed on Sundays (what is this, the time of Charlemagne?) I had to spend it hanging around the Hauptbahnhof shopping centre, touring the various ancient and beautiful buildings (I'll admit that the Rathaus is absolutely awesome), listening to a lot of really good street musicians (especially one particularly talented xylophonist) and watching the ladybirds. Hamburg is absolutely full of ladybirds. In my quest to improve my German, one word at a time, I just looked up 'ladybird' and found that it's 'Marienkäfer'. Which I did actually know at one point. Also, the word is neuter and not feminine like I would have expected.

As well as having shops that were open on Sunday, the train station also had handy left-luggage lockers, which was a good thing because I didn't fancy carrying my bag around with me all day. As I always do at these things, I'd crammed my little rucksack to its maximum capacity with clothes, books, cards, timers and so on on the way out, not considering that I might come home with a big trophy, a Nintendo DS and other goodies. I had to fit everything I could into the bag and force everything left over (about a dozen packs of cards, the DS (removed from its box), instructions and games) into the pockets of my jacket in order to get onto the plane without paying for an extra bag.

I haven't mentioned my jacket yet, have I? I was wearing a rather groovy black and white jacket that I bought in a charity shop about ten years ago, never wore and recently rediscovered among my old clothes. So I've been wearing it for the last couple of weeks to see if it looks cool, before deciding whether or not to give it to another charity shop and let someone else leave it in their wardrobe for ten years. But actually, I think it does look cool, and Tony Buzan agreed. And Tony does have quite genuinely the greatest taste in clothes of anybody I know, so I think I'm going to keep wearing the jacket. Even though it's a little bit too small for me and it's too hot when the weather's nice.

Speaking of Tony, and speaking of speaking, his speech at the closing ceremony was shorter and used less needlessly complicated words and ideas than at the opening. I'm sure the members of the audience who don't speak perfect English were grateful. Regular memory-competition attendees will be interested to know that he informed us all that in 1994, scientists said that nobody would ever be able to remember a 30-digit spoken number. He also mentioned a few things of interest to memorisers (actually, he told me these things the day before and asked me not to tell anyone or blog about it, but since he then repeated everything so publicly, I assume I'm not under any obligation to keep it secret any more...)

Firstly, he said that the world championship moving from Bahrain was because the sponsor had had financial difficulties - and then added as an afterthought that there had been riots in Bahrain too, which came a bit closer to the official explanation published on the world championship website.

Secondly, he said at great length that the Chinese are very keen to become the top memory-country in the world, and also very keen to host the world championship in 2010. Indeed, they're shortly flying Tony and Ray Keene out to China for a week to "inspect the site". It's sounding like we might really be having a WMC in China somewhere in the near future (although we've been hearing that for five years at least, without it actually happening yet). I think it might be fun, it's only fair to circulate the competition around the world now that it's such an international thing. And provided it's organised by individuals who happen to be Chinese, and that Tony's suggestion that the Chinese government is eager to be heavily involved is just the usual exaggerations, I won't have to boycott the championship for political reasons. That would really be annoying.

Okay, I'm fairly sure that's everything I've got to say about the German Memory Championship 2009. More interesting subjects (or at any rate slightly different subjects, like the World Othello Championship and the Mind Sports Olympiad) will resume tomorrow.

I actually didn't eat a single hamburger while I was there

Well, people have suggested things I could mention about my trip to Hamburg, and my brain has thrown out a few more bits and pieces I'd forgotten about, so here goes with the further German Memory Championship adventures of Zoomy!

I mentioned the scores being read out yesterday, but what I didn't mention is that all the score announcements came with a really groovy and hi-tech animated powerpoint display! It was extremely cool, and a real step up from anything we've seen before at a memory championship. I'd congratulate the person who created and ran it, if only I knew who it was. There was a young man who worked the computer who I never got a chance to say hello to, and I assume he was responsible. I'll make sure to thank him at the next competition, before I get caught up in all the memorising...

Also super-hi-tech and more so than any competition we've had before was Florian Dellé's live blogging of the competition (while he was taking part in it! He got some great scores considering he finished his recall quickly enough to run around with a camera filming the people who were still busy remembering), assisted by Dai Griffiths. You can read all about it here, as well as his review complete with scores of all the disciplines. You can even click on the scores to sort them by overall ranking, individual discipline scores, names, anything you want! What an age we live in.

Dai mentioned that I was doing my weird rolling-pupils-into-head-leaving-scary-white-eyeballs thing again. I don't know if Dai had some kind of video link or if he was just guessing, back in Wales, but I really have no idea I'm doing that. As far as I'm aware, I've got my eyes closed while I'm recalling...

Let's talk about the competition room some more, too - it was spacious and pleasant, there was ample supply of water (albeit the fizzy kind that you always get in Germany - ask for still water and they'll look at you like you're some kind of lunatic) and the only real drawback was that it started to smell a bit funky by the end of the championship. Memorising things is sweaty work, and we had to keep the windows closed a lot of the time because of the noise of trains outside. Still, you got used to it quickly enough.

Boris raised an interesting point in an email today - is the room in Simpson's-on-the-Strand big enough for the world championships? At least twenty Germans have said they'd come, I would hope there'll be up to a dozen British competitors, hopefully a whole load of Chinese and other assorted foreigners. Last time the world championship was held there, back in 2002, there were only 24 competitors, and as I recall there wasn't all that much empty space. Last year at the UK championship, there were 22 and we were fairly close together. I'm not sure if we really could fit twice as many people into that room. We'll just have to see, I suppose. Maybe we can spread out into the hallway.

But back to Germany, the first event of the second day was Historic Dates, and for the first time in German Championship history they provided English translations! It's official, memory championships are now an international sport! What's more, Gaby was kind enough to give all her announcements in German and English, for the benefit of me and the one other non-German competitor Rick de Jong. I very much appreciated it, because I'll admit I had a lot of difficulty following the discussion about the 30-minute cards.

Because some packs weren't shuffled, some people got worse scores than they otherwise might have, whereas other people (like me and Simon) were unaffected. It was suggested that for the purposes of the German Championship, the 30-minute cards shouldn't be counted. It eventually was decided that it would count after all, because otherwise the scores would have changed. I might have missed something in Klaus's logic there, though. Anyway, I wasn't all that interested - I tend to ignore the inevitable quibbles about the rules and scoring when I get involved in a competition and just agree with whoever asks me to agree with them if they try to drag me into an argument.

Where was I? Historic dates! It didn't go quite as swimmingly for me as it usually does, I only got through about 100 of the 120 dates-and-event-descriptions by the end of the five minutes, when I normally get up to about 110 or even more. Hannes, apparently, got right to the end with a minute or so to spare - I don't know how he does it, I thought I was the quickest memoriser in town. But, for the first time in quite a long while, I ended up with a higher score than him - 81 compared to 78!

That left me nearly 900 points in the lead after four disciplines, ahead of Hannes and Simon neck-and-neck in second, with Cornelia just behind them. Cornelia actually had a bit of a quiet competition by her standards, coming up with lots of good results, but nothing absolutely spectacular. I'm sure she'll be back for more next time - with the WMC being in London rather than Bahrain, she'll probably be there this year, too.

But back to the scores, by lunchtime, when we'd heard the results from the first four disciplines, people were starting to talk as if I'd already won, much to my annoyance. I knew that I hadn't got very good scores in the disciplines that followed, you see.

Spoken numbers (in German, but that's not too big a problem for me), was frustrating. You only score up to your first mistake in this one (with the best score from three attempts counting) and I kept making little mistakes. I ended up with a score of 50, while Simon ended up with a very cool 135 and Boris started out a succession of great results in his best disciplines with a 100.

Abstract images, meanwhile, I was expecting something good. After years of moaning that it's a stupid discipline that should be got rid of, and hoping somebody will listen to me and scrap it, I've recently started seriously training for it. My argument that the only way to do well in it is by coding the background patterns, which turns it into another numbers-style discipline, took a bit of a blow when Boris mentioned that he doesn't do that, and he won the event comfortably (as he always does in the absence of Gunther). But my system and training paid off, and I ended up with a perfect 225. By the world championship, I'm aiming to get 300. And then I'll insist even more strongly that they scrap the stupid event once and for all!

Names and faces, on the other hand, I'm still resigned to never being any good at. Especially when the names are all German, although that's not much of an excuse. Suffice to say that I got a pretty bad score, while Boris broke the world record (held for many years by Clemens Mayer), while Simon and Hannes continued to gain ground steadily on me.

The real disaster for me, though, was speed numbers. Two trials to memorise as much as possible in five minutes, with the best score counting, and I started as always by attempting a 'safe' 360, only to have little gaps in my recall here and there and end up with a score of 234. There was a time when that would be one of the top scores, and anything over 300 was practically unhead-of, but those days are long-gone. I knew I'd have to do better in the second attempt, and tried for 400, only to end up with a miserable 240 (and I was lucky to get that - my recall was very patchy and I had a lot of gaps to fill in with best-guesses that I wasn't entirely certain about). It was tiredness, I think - I'm still not in top competition fitness, and two solid days of memorising drains my brain power. Hannes won comfortably with 362, and I was just glad he didn't get more than that. But Simon's 296 was enough to push him fractionally into the overall lead ahead of me, and this is the point where I really started to feel that everything was slipping away from me.

And it certainly didn't get any better with the penultimate discipline, random words. I was trying for a safe-ish score of 180 or so, but my memorising just wasn't quite clear enough, and this is a discipline that can really punish a few little gaps in the memory. I don't practice words enough, and I'm going to have to knuckle down on that in future. Long story short, I ended up with a miserable score of 100, Boris broke another world record with 280, Simon had 229 and Johannes 222.

The competition was running behind schedule (as memory competitions always, without exception, do) and Klaus suggested that we start the speed cards before the scores of the random words were announced. Everybody insisted that we stick with tradition and know exactly what the scores were before we got started - it really is important, because there are complicated calculations to be made about exactly what times to attempt in everybody's favourite final discipline. So there was a lot of time for me to pace around like a caged tiger, fretting that I was going to lose the competition that I'd been winning so comfortably half-way through. When we finally got the confirmed scores, they looked like this:

Simon 7128.3
Hannes 6635.8
Me 6608.6
Boris 6218.3
Cornelia 5987.2

With the rest of the chasing pack, headed by Dennis, too far behind to catch up. But with a lead of 520 points, Simon was going to be next to impossible for me to catch. I was racked with indecision - Florian asked me if I was going to go for a fast time or a safe slow one, so he'd know whether to set up a camera to film me or not, and I replied (about a minute before we had to start memorising) "I don't know!"

I had three choices - a safe 1-minute pack in the first trial to at least guarantee 3rd place, probably, followed by an attempt at a fast one; a sort of semi-fast one of 30 seconds or so, which is something I've experimented with but I'm still not confident that it's more reliable than just going as fast as I can; or just going as fast as I can and really throwing down the gauntlet to Simon and the others.

Actually, as we started to memorise, I was still planning on option 2, and I didn't make an effort to go particularly fast. But the images slotted into place very quickly and easily, I sped up, and I stopped the clock at 24.97 seconds in the end.

I think I might have stopped the clock a bit noisily, so I do apologise for that - Jürgen had asked that people not do that, just before the memorising started, but it's hard to remember etiquette when the adrenaline starts flowing.

Thinking through the journey while waiting for the five minutes' memorisation time to be over, I was extremely surprised to realise that I had remembered it all very well. I only had a few gaps to fill in, and when I came to put together the unshuffled pack in the recall time, I was able to fill in all the gaps with minimal difficulty. The only thing I was a little worried about was the exact order of a couple of sequences of images - I was about 90% confident that they were right, but I much prefer to be 100%. It's better for my blood pressure.

I insisted on someone checking my results straight away, despite people flapping around with cameras and saying wait, wait, just a moment. And I got extremely excited when it was eventually confirmed that I really had broken the world record, and bellowed "YES!" at top volume, scaring everybody else in the room (again, apologies. It's exciting.)

After a certain amount of skipping around the room, high-fiving everybody and bowing to the applause, I went to see what everybody else had done. Simon had done a super-extra-safe 1 minute 43 seconds or thereabouts, Hannes had had mistakes in his recall. You get 1200 championship points for a 25-second pack (not something that had ever happened before, of course), but that still didn't leave me in a safe position. Simon needed a time of what I estimated at 50 seconds or so in the second trial to win the championship (although now that I sit down and think about it more clearly, it was actually more like 44 seconds). And Simon is of course the other person who's done a pack in under 30 seconds in competition before now. My only consolation is that he's only done it once, and he just barely got the recall done in time, and we were now at the end of a much longer and more exciting competition with infinitely more pressure on him. But since it's terrible sportsmanship to wish failure on someone else, I put all thoughts of that out of my mind and tried to do an even faster time in trial 2.

That was a complete and total disaster - my mind was still buzzing too much and I didn't come anywhere near remembering it properly. I even had some trouble passing the cards between my fingers, and even though I was trying to go as fast as possible, I only stopped the clock at 23.33. But never mind, one world record is enough for me, especially if it's a speed cards one.

Simon, in the end, just did a time of 65 seconds, making sure of winning the German championship and coming second in the German Memo Open, while Hannes tried for a fast time but didn't get it right. Boris's 74.78 seconds rounded off a really good championship for him, but was just barely not quite enough to catch Hannes in the final rankings. Cornelia was fifth, then there was a big gap down to Dennis and Jürgen, then an excellent eighth place for another newcomer Fabian Saal, then Simone Nicklas and Florian rounding out the top ten (he's also got my speed cards performance on film - look out for it on the memory-sports.com website!)

So then we all scurried over to the main building lecture room for the prizegiving ceremony and memory-show (there's always a big show at the German championship in the evening - it starred Ramon Campayo breaking a speed-memory record, and the really absolutely awesome Jens der Denker, who I've seen before but is still quite sensational). Every competitor in the adult, junior and kids competitions (actually, we don't seem to be saying 'kids' any more, it's Junior Group II) came up on stage one at a time to get a certificate, round of applause, and photo. For the record, Dorothea and Konstantin won the Junior I and Junior II competitions, as expected, but they were up against some tough opposition. If only we could get young people in Britain to take some kind of interest in memory sports too.

There were, as is also always the case at the German championships, lots of trophies too. Trophies for first, second and third in each championship (Junior I, Junior II, German Adults and German Memo Open) AND big trophies for the winner of each one (except the Memo Open, which I don't have a problem with at all, really). So Simon ended up with three trophies to take home - 2nd place in the GMO, 1st place in the DGM, and the gigantic German Championship trophy. I think they gave the kids' trophies to the adults and vice versa, but I'm sure it got sorted out in the end.

Fabian, who's about nine feet tall, caused some amusement trying to pose for his photo without obscuring the prizegivers (Klaus, Tony and Silja Nintendo), and there were plenty of laughs as usual when the winners of each championship were handed, one by one, far more prizes than they could possibly carry. Nintendo were very generous - I've got a DS! I'll have to buy an adaptor so I can plug the German plug into my English sockets, but still, a DS! Groovy! And two brain-training games, in German! I might have to buy some more games instead. And I pocketed €700, which equates to £557.97, thanks to the weak pound and strong euro. I like the point-nine-seven theme I've got going here too.

So that's the German Championship, and woohoo, I won! But I was lucky to win. I'm really not going to win the world championship unless I improve on that performance - the days are gone when I could accept bad scores in a few disciplines and rely on good results in the others to carry me through. I need to improve my all-round performance, or the likes of Simon, Hannes, Gunther, Cornelia, Boris, Dennis and even a few non-Germans will eat me alive in London in November.

Still, that makes six consecutive memory championships I've entered and won - one short of Clemens's record. It really would be nice to break that record by winning the UK and World championships (assuming I don't go to Sweden or France, if the latter is even still happening - I haven't heard anything about it for ages, and I'm still not sure whether I can manage a trip to Sweden or not). But then, Simon was the one to end Clemens's run, which might be a bad omen considering how close he came to beating me this time.

However, I promise that as and when I do end up losing a memory competition again, I won't 'do a Clemens' and disappear forever! I'm looking forward to the days when I'm not the favourite for every championship I enter - it's a lot more fun to be the underdog.

There aren't enough hamburger-puns

Plenty of hamburger-buns, but not hamburger-puns. I'll just have to use non-Hamburg-themed blog titles in future. Anyway, when I left off my last blog, we were just about to start the competition. Everybody had changed into their official competition T-shirts (really cool ones, too, with German-flag collars and sleeve-ends) and found their way to the competition room (spacious and quiet, whenever there wasn't a train coming in to the station next door) and sat down to kick off the event with 30-minute numbers.

The German championship is uniquely arduous in having the three 30-minute disciplines all in a row, from 2pm until 8pm at night. It's seriously draining. But the first one, at least, went okay. I had experimented with attempting seven journeys' worth of numbers, 1638 digits, but without much success. So I just went for six journeys, 1404 (plus an extra nine for good luck when I had a few seconds left at the end), and seemed to remember most of it okay.

Gaby Kappus, who I don't think I've mentioned yet, was sharing the master-of-ceremonies role with Klaus and also acting as 'ombudsman', checking competitors' scores if they didn't believe them. Actually, all the scoring seemed to be done extremely well, by a team of arbiters who clearly knew what they were doing. I should really have found out their names and/or thanked them, but I never remember to do that until it's too late. I get so wrapped up in memorising things, you see.

However, it takes time to mark all those papers, so we set off onto discipline two, 30-minute cards, without knowing how the first one had gone. I was attempting 18 packs here, more than anyone else, and I can normally do that many and get the recall more or less okay. But this time round, I really struggled with the recall, having to cross things out and start again on three different packs. I ran out of recall time and so I knew I'd got 15 at most, even if I hadn't made any silly mistakes along the way.

There were some problems with the cards, apparently some of them weren't shuffled properly. This kind of thing does happen occasionally, however careful the organisers are - I always bring my own pre-shuffled cards with me, ever since the same thing happened to me at the world championships in 2005. That way even if nobody remembers to shuffle the cards, I won't notice. I suppose I could also try memorising my cards in advance and just hoping someone forgets to shuffle them, but I think that sounds like more hassle than just winning fair and square.

Anyway, Tony then read out the results of the 30-minute cards (or the Zahlenmarathon, as they call it over there - all the events have cool German names) in reverse order. I'd got 1193, which would have been a new world record if not for the fact that Hannes got 1264. Drat it, he did the same thing to me in the historic dates at the world championship last year, too. Still, that was a pretty good start to the competition. One more marathon before the end of the day - binary digits, at which I'm generally better than anyone else. But what with the long day of long-distance memorising, I was never going to break any records there. Still, it all went fairly well, and I went back to the hotel pretty satisfied with the first day's competition.

As we found out the next day, I'd got 14 packs right in the cards and 3610 in the binary - not world record standard, but enough to give me about 700 points lead ahead of a closely-packed chasing group of Simon, Hannes and Cornelia.

You know, that account has practically put me to sleep, I don't know why I'm sharing it with the world as if you'd be interested. I'll continue tomorrow, if I can think of a way to make it more interesting...

A few more hamburgery morsels

I forgot to mention that after the press conference I did a quick interview with people who I think were from the local TV news, in which I think I explained the systems we used and asserted that anybody can do it. Although since the conversation was conducted in German, quite frankly I could have been talking about octopuses juggling goldfish for all I know. The interviewer was very nice, but she did cut short the list of questions she'd said she was going to ask me, and I doubt that my incoherent stumbling responses ended up making it onto the telly.

I also forgot to give credit or even a namecheck to Frank Miltner, who's another of those people who does all the work of running the German championships and doesn't ever seem to get a mention in ungrateful competitors' blogs. He compered the opening ceremony and at one point asked me a question in English that I still failed to understand. Possibly it's all languages that I have a problem with, not just German.

Hamburglar

I'm home again from Hamburg - actually, I got in at about one o'clock in the morning after a late-night flight, but I'd sensibly booked a day's holiday for today, so I get to catch up on my sleep and blogging rather than going to work. And wow, that was a fantastic German Memory Championship! I'll blog it in installments, just to keep the suspense going and also because I'm much too tired to write up the whole thing today.

I flew in around lunchtime on Thursday (with FlyBe, who I've never used before but are cheap and perfectly nice, so I'll probably use them again) and found that finding the venue and my hotel was extremely easy - 25 minutes on the S-Bahn takes you from the airport to a train station right next to the Hamburg University buildings where the competition was held, while right next to the station on the other side was the Radisson Blu hotel (formerly known as the Radisson Sas - what with SAS Furniture in Beeston closing down and now this hotel chain changing its name, it's been a bad time for SAS enthusiasts just lately) where most of the competitors were staying. It's possible that I might still have managed to get lost, but as I got off the train I ran into a whole mob of memorisers who pointed me in the right direction.

The Radisson hotel will be very nice when it's finished, probably. At the moment, it looks from the outside like they still need to finish adding walls, roofs and other such essentials, while on the inside there are some classy and shiny new bits and a lot of bare boards and unfinished sections. And also, from eight in the morning until eight at night, a lot of loud hammering and drilling noises all day long, for which half-price meals in the hotel restaurant are supposed to compensate.

My room was very nice, with lots of pillows, international TV channels, comfortable bed and all the bits and pieces that you expect in the good hotels. It also, weirdly, has a window between the bedroom and bathroom, so if you really want to you can sit on the bed and watch someone else in the shower or on the toilet. There's a venetian blind on the bedroom side of the window, but even so, I don't know why they thought a window was necessary in the first place. Anyway, I didn't stay long in the room, both because of the deafening construction work and because I wanted to see some of the city before spending two solid days remembering stuff.

My conversation with the receptionist had made it pretty clear that my ability to understand German had deteriorated in the couple of years since I was last there, but you don't need to speak the language to use the super-user-friendly and efficient train ticket machines or the trains themselves, so I went down to the Hauptbahnhof, assuming that was the best way to find the city centre. And indeed it is, unless you leave the station by the south exit, in which case it's an experience more comparable to getting a train to King's Cross and wandering out into the streets to see the sights of London. But by a strategy of walking around and turning the other way whenever the word 'Erotik!' loomed in front of me in blue neon, I eventually found my way back to the train station, out the other side and into the proper shopping area. Which is really nice, and I'd recommend it to anyone.

A little bit of sightseeing later, it was back to the hotel for a half-price dinner with a gathering of German Gedächtnissportlers which confirmed that, yes, I definitely can't understand even the most simple conversation in German any more. Resolution for next year - go on a refresher course and improve my language skills. It's so embarrassing when I go over there and everybody effortlessly switches to talking in fluent English whenever I'm nearby. And then bedtime, in preparation for the excitement to come.


The competition didn't start until 2pm on Friday, with a press conference/opening ceremony at 11:30, but since the building works prevented me from having a lie-in, I went back into the city to get some rubber bands to hold my packs of cards together (the cardboard boxes are getting rather old and falling to pieces, and I'd hate to lose a stray card somewhere along the way as they travel around the world) before heading out to the university. Rather than having breakfast at the hotel, I decided to get the event off to a traditional start and go to McDonald's. I really am eating more healthily nowadays, but you can't beat junk food for a memory competition.

And so began the thirteenth German Memory Championship, the first one held in the north of Germany (my knowledge of German culture is sadly lacking, so I have no idea what kind of social or political significance this has, but everybody else felt that it was a point worth making) and brilliantly organised, as always, by Klaus Kolb and his team. As usual, there was a great sponsor, Nintendo, a very professional look to the whole event and lots of media people scurrying around. The press conference was held in a very stylish lecture room, watched from the walls by photos of eminent professors including Agathe Lasch (1879-1942), the first female linguistics professor in Germany, who wore a monocle and looked very cool.

The field of competitors was even stronger than is usual for the German championships - the publicity booklet handily was able to list all the favourites by their current titles: German Champion 2008 Johannes Mallow, South German Champion 2009 Simon Reinhard, North German Champion 2009 Boris Konrad, Vice-World-Champion 2008 Gunther Karsten and Women's German Champion or German Championship Runner-Up 2006-2008 Cornelia Beddies [I don't like the idea of having women's titles in a sport where men and women compete on equal terms in the same events, and I was pleased to see that there was a minimum of mentions of it this year]. Oh, and also that foreigner who won the world championship. There were also a whole lot of other competitors, old and new, most prominent among them probably Dennis Müller in his first really big competition but having claimed some very impressive results in training and probably a star of the future. Plus the usual mob of juniors as well - if only we could get the same kind of thing going in Britain, maybe we'd have somewhere close to the same number of good adult memorisers as the Germans have...

Hannes and Cornelia got to sit up on the stage and do quick memory demonstrations at the press conference, joined by Klaus, Tony Buzan and the Nintendo representative, whose name started with S and had a J in it somewhere, I think. I'm bad with names, have I ever mentioned that? Tony gave a very lengthy speech, in English, informing us that the world's greatest thinkers (Tony and his friends) had a meeting in Kuala Lumpur last month at which they proclaimed that it is no longer the age of information, but the age of intelligence (in the same way that it was once the age of agriculture, or the age of industry). This made the 2009 German Championship particularly special because it was officially the first memory championship of the age of intelligence. How this differed from the announcement a few years ago that it's now the millennium of the mind, I'm not sure, but it got a round of applause. During the course of the speech, Tony asked his young, German-speaking, audience to split into groups of three and discuss among themselves questions like "What is it more important to manage than to manage knowledge?" and asserted that "The world is in the trouble it's in because we're thinking informationally".

But I shouldn't be nasty about Tony's speech, since a) everybody else seemed to genuinely appreciate it (although the Nintendo woman looked downright baffled) so clearly I'm just being a miserable old cynic, and b) Tony later told me I'm looking really great and asked if I've been exercising. I think I really do look quite a bit less obese than I did at the world championships last year, so I was very flattered. And anyway, who am I to criticise someone who's unquestionably one of the world's great speakers - he went on for at least fifteen minutes, without pause or reference to any notes, and I'm sure he could have carried on all day without repeating himself if he'd wanted to.

The shorter speeches from Klaus and Madam Nintendo, as far as I could understand them, were more along the lines that memory and learning are not only good for you but can also be a lot of fun. There were Wiis and DSs set up in the hall outside, demonstrating all the cool brainy games now available. Gunther made a quick announcement that he wasn't going to be competing this year after all, apparently because he just wasn't prepared well enough for it, although he did say later that he'd be back for the world championship. He's growing his hair long and was unshaven - I think he's going a bit rock-n-roll in his old age.

Then it was time for a free lunch in the university cafeteria down the road, and on with the real business of memory. Even without Gunther, this was going to be the strongest competition we've had for a long time; for one thing it would answer the question everyone's been wondering (or maybe it was just me) - who's the best nowadays out of Simon and Hannes? Simon had a year away from memory competitions, during which Hannes improved himself up to similar world-beating levels, and the two of them were hot favourites for the German championship. I knew that I'd need to be at my best to win the event, and I wasn't sure whether I'd been quite as assiduous with the training as I should have been.

As always, the adult competition was confusingly split into two different events - the German Memo Open, listing everybody's scores, and the Deutsche Gedächtnis Meisterschaft, for German competitors only. This makes the statistics website seem to say that Gunther's won twice as many championships as he actually has, but for the purposes of this blog, I'm just going to talk about the GMO. By contrast, the UK championship has trophies for the best three British competitors and one for the best foreigner, but only lists the results as one competition.

Tune in tomorrow to hear what actually happened at the championship!

Cheap trip

I've got rather more euros than I thought I had - about 100 of the things, if you count the 20-euro note with quite a big chunk ripped out of it that I doubt I'll have the nerve to try to spend. Incidentally, have you ever noticed that 100-fils coins from Bahrain look quite a lot like 1-euro coins? It can be confusing if you're a globetrotter like me. Perhaps I'll try to pass off those fils as euros, seeing as I don't seem likely to be going back to Bahrain now. But what can I do with those Brazilian reais I brought back with me even though you can't change them outside Brazil on the grounds that I'd probably be going back there some day?

Sorry, I'm just showing off about all the places I've been. I'll stop now.

I've also got dollars, you know.

Last day

Woo, just one more day of work before I jet off to Hamburg for a weekend of intensive memorisation! I'm feeling less and less like I'm properly prepared, which is annoying. I'm still quite hopeful of winning, but it's quite possible that the whole competition might turn out to be a horrible disaster instead. We'll just have to see what happens - the best way to guarantee success is not to think about it and just have fun, or at least that's the way it always works for me.

Hitting the heights

Well, I take it nobody wants a fun-filled family day out at the Heights of Abraham, then. (Or possibly you just need to read my blog from last Friday, but I can't believe anybody would fail to read my blog every single day). I'll just have to go along there myself and shanghai the first one adult and two children I meet along the way, because if people don't use free tickets to their maximum capacity, the capitalists will win!

Foreign films

I've got Canadian and Japanese TV filming me in August, just before (but apparently not at) the UK championship. That's two separate TV companies, not a Canadio-Japanese co-production like one of those 1980s cartoons animated in Japan and dubbed by Canadian voice-actors. Although they should totally make one of those about me. No, this is the boring kind of documentary that all of my devoted fans just can't get enough of. Especially if I change my mind and tell them I don't want to be filmed after all. I don't actually like making documentaries, after all. I should put my foot down some time and say that I think we've done enough of them and it's getting a bit old now...

At last the truth can be revealed

"Zoomy's thing" has in fact been ghost-written for the past two and a half years by a team of ghost-writers employed by the government, under the supervision of editor-in-chief Emma Bunton Out Of The Spice Girls, who's actually quite a lot cleverer than most people think. It has been important for reasons involving national security to keep up the illusion that Zoomy himself still maintains a daily blog, hence the deception. In fact, it still is vitally important to the security of the nation and the existence of Zoomy himself that this deception not be revealed, but unfortunately there was a typographical error in the latest edition of the ghost-writers' secret instructions, issued today, and now they start with "Do under any circumstances reveal in the blog that Zoomy is in outer space and not at home writing his inane nightly drivel..." so the writers have had no choice in the matter.

Zoomy's occasional appearances on television were all pre-recorded in early 2007, and the results of all memory competitions to which they refer were decided in advance by a committee of government and WMSC officials - Zoomy has been represented by actors (the identical triplets Steve, Dean and Other Steve Bradshaw) at all competitions and the results manipulated by arbiters to conceal the fact that "Zoomy" can't actually memorise anything. At othello competitions he is played by Joel Blackmur in an ingenious disguise made from coat-hangers and gravy. At parties and social occasions, a crude robot is used.

Zoomy's space mission is top-secret and highly classified, but it involves a giant magnet in Bridlington which was built by accident and can't be got rid of due to a refuse collectors' strike, which attacts alien spacecraft from the farthest reaches of the galaxy and have to be continually repelled by Britain's own space program. Since this space fleet consists of one spaceship, and since this was built in the nineteen-fifties and requires course calculations to be done with pencil, paper and a book of log tables, and since all log tables were thrown on a big fire when scientific calculators were invented in 1983, the only person who can fly the ship is someone with a really good memory for numbers.

If any aliens read this blog entry and its revelation that Zoomy is currently taking a week off on one of the least pleasant moons of Jupiter, they'll immediately send their most magnetic spacecraft out on a beeline to Bridlington, take over the country and eat all the ice cream. So now we're for it.

Heights of absurdity

Hooray! I've won a prize in a raffle! A family day out at the Heights Of Abraham!

It does look like a fun kind of place, judging by the website (although the writers of it don't know how to use apostrophes), but all in all I think I'd still prefer to stay at home and watch telly. Besides, it would be embarrassing to ask someone to lend me their wife and kids for the day, even if I promised not to damage them. So, does anybody out there want this golden ticket? Free for the first person who asks!

Also, boo to the blood donor people. You can't give blood for 28 days after you return from the USA (because they're all swimming with West Nile Virus over there, apparently), which means I'll miss the days the donor van comes to work, and have to go somewhere else and get out of sync with the donor van's visits and be dreadfully inconvenienced.