My life is an action movie

As I was walking to the MSO the night before last, in the still-pouring rain, a lightbulb fell from a theatre poster and missed me by a fraction of an inch before shattering on the ground. In fact, either on the way down or as the bits bounced back up, it burnt my arm just below the elbow! I have a feeling that this is the kind of thing I could sue someone for, but luckily my life isn't a courtroom drama, so I won't. And then as I was heading back to the hotel, I was halfway down to the platform at the Tottenham Court Road tube station when the fire alarms went off and the whole station was evacuated. Fire engines and everything, and I had to get the bus back. It was all terribly exciting, and also wet.

Anyway, I did end up winning the UK Championship after all, although I was quite some way off my best in everything except random words (don't ask me why, but I got a personal-best 200 in that). All the other disciplines, though, I was somewhere around 80-90% of the kind of scores I expect from a safe, unexceptional result. Boris took issue with that, saying that I could have come really quite close to my best-ever score if I hadn't messed up the speed cards, but I know how good I can be, and how good I wasn't all through this competition, and I need a big improvement if I'm going to do any good at the WMC. Still, it could have been a lot worse.

And the speed cards wasn't because I couldn't memorise them, it was just either tiredness or general stupidity - the first trial I came close but got mixed up with the images somewhere in the middle of the pack, but the second trial I remembered perfectly with almost no trouble at all. But then when I was re-ordering the recall pack I somehow put the first two cards down in the wrong order. Sigh. I still don't know how I did that, I've never done it before.

So, with a bit of training and some more 'practice competitions' in Sweden and Germany, I might be able to get back to my best results. I hope so, anyway, because even though I didn't lose this one, I'm feeling more in a memory-training kind of mood now.

There might be an article about the competition in the Washington Post, if you're a reader, because I did a big long interview with an enthusiastic journalist after the championship. Then we had a big international meal at an Italian restaurant, with at least ten or eleven nationalities represented among the nine people who were there - I had thought that Enrico would be chatting with the staff there, but our waitress turned out to be Lithuanian, so Robertas did the talking instead. All in all, it was a fantastic competition, and I'm looking forward to more!

Now, should I play Texas Hold'em tonight, or go and see Avenue Q?

The best way to prepare for a memory competition

Blogging from London! I love this internet cafe next to Charing Cross. Anyway, I got the train down here yesterday afternoon in the pouring rain, found my hall-of-residence-cum-hotel with a minimum of getting lost, then set out on a reconnaisance mission to find the venue of the UK Memory Championship and the MSO.

If you're ever trying to find MWB Business Exchange's Paddington offices (and you should, it's awesome, I can't recommend them highly enough), you really should follow the map on their website. It's a bit tricky to navigate, but don't give up on it and use Google Maps instead, because the address is "1 Kingdom Street", which Google Maps thinks is about a mile away from where it really is, and the London A-Z thinks doesn't exist at all. Luckily, London has internet cafes for weary and wet travellers (did I mention that it was pouring with rain all day?) to turn to after an hour or so of fruitless searching.

Having established where the memory championship was going to be, I made my way to the easily-found Soho Theatre for a bit of poker before getting an early night. The nightly poker tournaments at the MSO run from 6:30 to 10:30 every evening, but I'm a terrible player, so I figured I could count on being knocked out within an hour or two at most. But I'd forgotten I'm also a naturally lucky player, and by a combination of dreadful play and ridiculous luck I ended up coming second and being there until eleven o'clock at night.

Also luckily, it had stopped raining by that point, which was particularly lucky since I got lost on the way back to the hotel and ended up going to bed at a bit after midnight.

But after a couple of hours' sleep, I was all ready and raring to go for the fourth UK Memory Championship (and the first to be an 'international standard' event instead of a shorter and easier 'national standard'). I managed to find "Kingdom Street" without any real difficulty this time (although it's not really a street as such, just two enormous office blocks on a business park) and got to the completely wonderful venue of the championship bang on time.

I really can't enthuse enough about the venue - it might just be the best place we've ever had, and it's all thanks to the generous sponsorship of MWB Business Exchange. If you ever need an office or a meeting room, check them out, you won't regret it. Now, memory competitors don't ask for much from a venue. A quiet room, basically, but there are certain optional extras that are nice too, like an extra room for arbiters, a place for competitors to go and chat out of earshot of the competition room while others are still recalling, plentiful drinks, and so on. This venue has all of those, it's a huge spacious competition room, and it's completely and totally silent. Even though Paddington Station is right next door, you genuinely can't hear a thing.

It's a gorgeous modern building, made almost entirely of glass, with super-fast zippy lifts without buttons on the inside (you press a control panel outside and it sends a lift to take you where you want to go - only ever seen these once before, and that was at the South German championship. They're very groovy.)

We had 14 competitors turn up - less than was on the list of registered competitors, as usual (I didn't really expect to see "David Duchovny, USA", but it's a real shame that Simon Reinhard wasn't able to come along after all) but with a huge wide range of countries represented. Off the top of my head, it's England, Wales, Germany, Austria, Holland, Slovenia, Italy, wherever Robert comes from (somewhere Baltic, I think) and the Phillipines. The latter team consists of two players and a coach who have travelled about 7000 miles just for this championship, so yay for them. They also called me "Sir Ben" until I told them to stop it.

I did surprisingly well, considering my lack of training and sleep. In abstract images I got a passable 158, then an entirely acceptable 3650 or so in binary. We haven't had the scores for the other disciplines yet, but I think I got about 90 in names and faces, which is as good as I ever get. Then in speed numbers (tiredness and lack of training catching up with me by this point) I was thrown into extreme confusion by Warren saying "Neurons on the ready... get set... go!" instead of the standard formula without the "get set" in the middle and spent about two minutes thinking of nothing but the "get set" and not memorising any numbers. I eventually pulled myself together and got 216, by guessing and luck, and then in the second trial attempted 360 and probably made enough mistakes that I won't improve on my score.

Finally it was 30-minute cards, and I laid out my 18 packs on the table, but as soon as I'd started to memorise I could tell it was going to be an unmitigated disaster if I attempted to look at them all. I decided to play it ultra-safe and just do 12, and I think I got them all right. With 25 minutes of recall time to spare, so obviously I was playing it a lot safer than I needed to, but never mind.

So I'm in actually okay shape to maybe win the thing after all, touch wood. My main rival is Boris, and I will need to do something fairly good tomorrow to beat him, but we'll see. Anyway, time for more poker. It's London Lowball tonight, and I'll try my best to lose more quickly.

No more pencils, no more books

Hooray, no more work until next Tuesday! Down to London tomorrow for some good old-fashioned MSOing and memorising and not watching telly (that always used to be an important part of a week at the MSO, although of course it was more of a big thing in the olden days before BBCi and things like that). I won't be blogging, either, so you'll all just have to do without my daily updates yet again. But when I come back, well, I'll start blogging again. Hooray.

Decamentanniversary

I didn't bother to check the exact dates until tonight, thinking it was later in the week, but in fact the Saturday and Sunday just gone were the 10th anniversary of the first memory competition I ever took part in. It was the World Memory Championship 2000, and the scores are still hanging around on the internet here!

I think 16th out of 21 competitors was pretty good, all in all, considering that I had never used a memory technique before the evening of the first day. Let's be nostalgic and look back a decade to see what things were like back then...

The first thing of interest is that the WMC was just a two-day event back then. Starting at 10am and carrying on until 7:30 in the evening each day. The hour-long marathon disciplines had shorter recall times - I think it was 75 minutes, but I'm not 100% certain - which cut the overall championship length down a bit, and of course there were fewer competitors, so less organisational hassle for everyone. It expanded to a three-day event with longer recall times in 2002.

Dominic O'Brien won quite easily, as he always did back then, with Andi Bell coming second, getting great scores in some disciplines but bad ones in others, which was also quite traditional by that time. And Gunther won the binary and spoken numbers on his way to third place, which he also always did in those days. The World Memory Championship was a little bit stuck in a rut in 2000. It shook itself out of it in 2002 and 2003 with some status-quo-smashing performances.

Whatever happened to... Well, Dominic is still hanging around, albeit as an organiser rather than a competitor (although he still hasn't "officially" retired, you know), Andi pops up from time to time (he won't be in London this week, but apparently he's still planning to be in China), Gunther is still ever-present and still at the very top of the memory world, but what about the rest of those 21 participants ten years ago? Daniel Corney now calls himself Daniel Tammett and writes books about how great he is. Rob Carder last competed in 2002, but kept in touch with things on internet message boards until a few years ago. You never know, he might pop up again some time. Dr Yip is still teaching small Malaysians about memory skills and is sure to turn up at a competition again one of these days. Tom Groves I saw in New York a couple of years ago, and Graham Old has a blog on the internet somewhere that I should go and check out while I'm thinking about it. It'd be good to see them both at another championship. Michaela Buchvaldova is now Mrs Dr Gunther Karsten, and so still involved with championships interspersed with motherhood. I haven't actually heard anything from Christiane Stenger for quite a while, but I think she's still technically a memory celebrity in Germany. Then we have four Malaysians - Dr Yip's class of 2000. I know nothing about them and none of them ever came back to a memory competition. The next year, though, there were some really really talented youngsters who came along with him! I'll write about that next year, maybe. Tatiana Cooley was the American champion - we haven't heard from her for a while, and I have no idea what she's doing now. That great berk Ben Pridmore is still turning up to competitions, but nobody likes him, so that's enough about that. Hew Kian How got the booby prize from Dr Yip that year, then we have Harald Lammermeyer who I think I know, but I can't remember what he looks like or what kind of person he is. I've got a bad memory. Edison Hong won a trip to London by coming third in the US Championship, he was a friendly and fun young high school student, but he didn't carry on with the memory sports thing after this. And the last two are more Germans, I think, but I don't remember them.

And look at how rubbish those top scores and world records were! Except the poem one, that was really really cool, until the likes of Astrid came along a few years later and blew it away.

I'm still meaning to write a book called "Noughty Memories" about all the memory competitions of the 2000s, you know. I'll get round to it one day, possibly after I retire.

Get your kicks on Cycle Route 6

I'd assumed it was going to be rainy and miserable again today, but in fact it was sunny and hot and just plain gorgeous all day long. It's real MSO-week weather - when I used to go to the MSO regularly, it was always baking hot for the whole week. I don't think the MSO saw a drop of rain until it had been running for five or six years.

So after a really quite fun photo session and interview this afternoon, I went out for a bike ride and followed the cycle route all the way from Beeston to Derby without getting lost this time. It's really great, it takes you on a long, winding scenic route through all the nice parts in between the two cities and almost none of the nasty parts. I'd recommend it to visitors who want to see the beauty of England at its finest but can't afford the DVD.

And then I got the train back home, because there is such a thing as too much exercise.

Pearly, where's your milk-white skin?

I think I'm getting wrinkles around my eyes. What with that and the white hair that pretty much dominates my beard nowadays, it's increasingly hard to convince myself I'm still youthful and devastatingly handsome.

This is the kind of thing that concerns me mostly when there's someone coming to take photos of me tomorrow. I'm not sure what for, some kind of news article most probably. But I'm going to look fat and bald and old and hideous, you can rest assured.

And now the news

I'm back, or at least I'm back in a non-cohabiting kind of situation where I don't need to worry about being a bad host by sitting here writing my blog while my house-guest is hanging around. And I felt that several of the news headlines you get shown when you log into Yahoo mail were interesting enough to blog about. Mainly because the only people who've been commenting here lately are the type who just read my blog for memory tips, and I wanted to annoy them.

But "Brigade in industrial action ballot" is a weird one. I mean, can't we specify which brigade we're talking about? I'm sure they've got number-of-characters limits, but they could have substituted 'strike' for 'industrial action'. Because if it's the fire brigade then yes, I can see how that might be a bad thing. If it's the Boys' Brigade, then they can feel free to go on strike as far as I'm concerned. If it's the Teen Brigade, the fictional group of teenage American radio hams who appeared in Marvel comics in the early sixties, then quite frankly the world would probably be better off if they went on strike.

And "May authorises marches ban in city" is really quite groovy, because it has two different months in it, and because however many times I read it I find myself automatically thinking it's the verb 'may' instead of Theresa, and getting confused trying to make sense of the rest of it.

And as for "Cenotaph outrage woman flees court", I just find myself wondering what that story was and why I didn't hear about the cenotaph outrage when it first happened. And thinking that "Cenotaph Outrage Woman" would make a great name for a supervillainess. Much better than "Bigot Woman".

"Students scramble for university places" is a rubbish headline though. For one thing they use exactly the same headline, and story, every year, and for another thing only idiots go to university. Posh, wealthy idiots for the most part. There should be a law against it. So if you've found this blog because you googled 'memory tips for university' or something like that, then go on, bog off and get a real job, you'll get no advice from me.

The secret to harmonious co-habitation

My brother was away in Leamington Spa last night, and he's away in Bingham or somewhere tonight, and just paid a flying visit here on his way between the two while I was out today. I came home to find the only change was a pair of cowboy boots had replaced the flip-flops in the hall (he has unusual tastes in footwear), and a pack of newly-developed photos had appeared on the kitchen table, containing lots of drunken pictures from his first Saturday night back in the country.

These photos were taken (a little unprofessionally - this is about the only one without a thumb over the lens) just before the immortal phrase "Hey, there's a webcam on my laptop that I never use..." sprang to my lips. Next time, hopefully, the phrase "And there are people I work with who follow me on the internet, so we'd better not post anything embarrassing" will spring up too, but that's another matter.

Still, this picture of a bad day for He-Man is quite artistic. The blurry book in the foreground is "The Remains Of The Day", which sort of sounds appropriate for the scene depicted. And it has the advantage of showing my bare foot. I often mention to people that I've got freakishly long toes, and offer to show them, but most people object to me taking my shoes and socks off and sticking my feet in their face, on grounds of hygiene and general good taste. But now I can just show them this photo, and have them react with disgust and horror!

Anyway, the brother's going back into Chinese exile in a couple of days, so I can miss him again, but until then, I'm just lying back, enjoying the peace and quiet and the return of football highlights on a Saturday evening. Ahh, bliss.

On me!

The only thing I genuinely wanted to be when I was young was The Milkybar Kid. So this latest campaign of encouraging adults to audition for the part is quite disturbing to me in many ways. Perhaps it's still not too late for a change of career...

Who's cooler? Me or Daley Thompson?

It's a dead heat, according to the press release sent out today about the UK championship. I beg to differ, unless they're comparing me with Daley as he is nowadays, and if he's really let himself go since he retired from professional athletics. If I was him, I'd sue for libel.

Obscurity

Radio Nottingham are quite persistently asking me to talk to them, but apart from that, there hasn't been much media interest in me for quite a while now. Possibly my fifteen minutes have nearly run out, along with my run as World Memory Champion (because I'm most definitely not going to win in December, so my only hope for keeping the title is if the championship is postponed indefinitely).

I would really like to find something else to be famous for. Being a star of low-budget documentaries about one subject is easy, but being documentarized for two completely different and unrelated reasons takes a special kind of talent. I just need to stumble across something else that I turn out to be good at - it took me the first 23 years of my life to discover memory competitions, but surely there must be something else out there that I'm not completely incapable of doing. I just need to devote some time to going around and trying something new. I've never tried needlepoint tapestry. Maybe I can invent a new way of doing that and become the world champion?

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack

Rather than doing any memory training today, I decided what would be really cool would be to go for a very long bike ride, all the way to Derby and back. I'm motivated by the fact that I'm heavier than I've ever been, probably (I was really very fat back in 2002-ish, but I think I'm possibly even fatter now) and another of my friends has now lost well over ten stone after some dedicated dieting and exercising. I'm surrounded by strikingly slender ex-fatties!

I'm realistic about my prospects of losing ten stone plus, but the fact that I could do that and still be the average weight of an undersized greyhound is a bit worrying, and frankly, being two stone lighter would probably be good for me.

So off I pedalled. There is a network of cycle paths between here and Derby, but it's not very well signposted, so you really need to look at a map before you set off. I didn't, and predictably got completely lost very early on in the expedition. But by a pleasant coincidence, I found myself on Cleve Avenue, where Grandma and Granddad used to live when I was little, even though I had absolutely no idea that I was anywhere within five miles of the road! So I went up and down it a couple of times trying to work out which house they lived in (I couldn't remember the number, and although the house does feature on one of my memory journeys, none of the houses there now look even remotely like the one in my mind. They're all too small, for one thing. So that counts as memory training, albeit the completely unsuccessful kind, and I'll just phone Grandma and ask her to remind me.

Anyway, knowing where I was, I set out on my travels again, and before long ended up in a place that I at first thought was Long Eaton but turned out on closer inspection to be Stapleford. At that point I gave up on the idea of getting to Derby before midnight and decided just to try to find my way home, but luckily I immediately stumbled across those cycle paths I'd lost, and followed them through some delightfully scenic countryside back to Long Eaton (where they come to an abrupt end at the back of the big Asda, which I still call "the new Asda", although it's been there for decades and there's now a genuinely new and bigger Tesco looming over it), then went back home the normal way, along the un-scenic main roads.

So, lots of cycling, and then I had an unnecessarily huge dinner to completely counteract any weight benefits it might have had. I'll start dieting tomorrow. Actually, I feel like making this a new thing of mine - forget memory training, I'll get into competitive weight loss!

Package tour

I did promise a link to good cheap London accommodation, so here we go. I'm staying at Rosebery Hall, a very nice place I've stayed at before, although it does look like it's missing an R. Maybe it was just named after an illiterate. But anyway, £140 for five nights, including breakfast, can't be bad. That's the same as one night in the real hotel near to the UK Championship venue (and you might not be able to get that any more - I got an email this morning that made me giggle, describing this special offer and telling us that rooms will be held at this rate until July 30th).

Also, they're looking for arbiters to help out in London - please do come along if you're not doing anything on August 26th and 27th, it really is fun and we'd all be very grateful!

And also also, if you're booking your stay at an LSE hall of residence online, you get the following options from the 'Title' drop-down menu:

Mr
Mrs
Miss
Ms
Dr
Capt
Colonel
Conf
Maj
Mst
Prof
Rev
Sir

What's a Conf? And a Mst? And what, they don't cater to anyone below the rank of Captain or above the rank of Colonel? And where's 'Lord' or 'Dame' or 'His Eminence'?

And when they ask me how I got her, I'll say "I saved my money!"

In a comment to last night's blog, Boris reminded me of something I should have been telling everyone about ever since they announced the UK Memory Championship - book a room in a student hall of residence! I'm going to book mine this weekend, if I get round to it, and I'll post helpful links then if anyone's interested. Student accommodation is available to the public in the summer holidays, at much cheaper rates than real hotels, and I have many happy memories of staying in halls during the MSO. They usually offer a full English breakfast and everything, and some of them even have en-suite bathrooms nowadays (students are so pampered today, that's probably why they're all so stupid...)

Indeed, the first mental journey I ever created (and I still use it today, ten years later!) was the route from a hall of residence to Alexandra Palace, where the MSO 2000 was held. It's a pretty unprofessional kind of journey, with some locations right next to each other and some absolutely miles apart, but it's become so stylised and altered in my head over these ten years of constant use that it's now nice and evenly spaced and bears no resemblance to the actual places it's based on.

The trouble is, I can't remember which hall of residence it was. I know it was down the road and round the corner from a tube station, but I can't remember which tube station either. If I concentrate, I can picture the real building and roads (as opposed to the completely different-looking ones that appear in the mental journey) quite clearly in my head, but I can't identify where it was. I do remember, though, that there was an old Volkswagen camper van parked on the road with a sign in the window saying it was for sale for £300, and I really wanted it. I didn't know how to drive and I didn't have three hundred pounds (by 2000 I was earning just about enough money to afford a week's holiday in London, unlike previous years when I had to pay for it by not spending money on luxuries like food and rent for a couple of months, but I still didn't have much cash to spare) but I still seriously considered buying it.

Of course, now that I'm a wealthy international celebrity who actually has got £300 to spare, writing this has rekindled my desire for an old Volkswagen camper van. Next one I see, I'm having it. Even though I still don't know how to drive.

(Probably) all in the mind

The Mind Sports Olympiad still exists, and they've got a schedule up on the internet. And, once again, I'm going to be in London for a memory competition around that time. Maybe I'll drop by and play some games. Or maybe I won't, because it's expensive and the only people who still go to the MSO are the ones who really, really want to win everything and so take it very seriously, but on the other hand, it might be a good place to hide from the hordes of international press who will be pursuing me after the UK Memory Championship to ask me why I'm suddenly so rubbish.

Possibly I could go to the evening poker games after each day's memory competition has finished, just to make absolutely certain that my memory will fail me, or maybe I could just find games to play during the daytime after the memory is over - from the looks of it, I could play mastermind, abalone, azacru, creative thinking and then a full day of monopoly, plus a bit of evening poker. For only a hundred pounds or so, plus however much it costs to stay in London for a few extra days (I haven't booked a hotel yet for the memory - I'm certainly not staying in the horribly expensive official tournament hotel, I'll find somewhere cheap and nasty).

The only one of those that really appeals hugely is the creative thinking championship - I used to enjoy that, back in the olden days. In an event full of competitions with good and bad moves, or right and wrong answers, it was fantastic to have a completely subjective championship where the aim is to make Bill Hartston laugh. I even won the bronze medal one year, I can't remember which, but wait a minute, it's on the website... 2001. Wow, nine years ago. Anyway, I was extremely proud of that result, because there's a gang of people who always compete in it and who are more in tune with Bill Hartston's thought processes. So, I think I will go along to the MSO this year, I've talked myself into it. Creatively.

Besides, I'm only 31st in the all-time medals ranking, and I'd much rather be in the top twenty and appear on the first page.

Silence

Yes, sorry I haven't been blogging as assiduously as usual just lately, what with having a house-guest and all. But I'll tell you what, I'm going to do lots of memory training for the next couple of weeks, and I'll tell you all about it when I do!

The Road To Wigan Pier

I'm going to somewhere in the vicinity of Wigan tomorrow, to poke my nose into the goings-on at an actual shop, rather than just juggling numbers on spreadsheets. I don't think I've ever been anywhere vaguely near Wigan before, although with my memory being what it is, it's quite possible that I lived there for three or four years and just forgot about it. Still, they've got a football team called Athletic, which is probably the best football-suffix, implying that the team are really good at what they do. There's just something very American or Communist (or maybe both) about proclaiming that you're "United", and names like "Rovers" and "Wanderers" are just silly, because generally speaking they just stay on and around the one football pitch during the course of an average game. And the City Ground isn't even IN a forest!

It's like being married

My flat is full of unfamiliar things like deodorant and nail-clippers. I've never liked sharing my home with anyone or anything, even if it does make dinner for me when I come home from work. Still, it is extremely groovy to see my beloved brother again, it's been eight whole months, which is much longer than we've ever gone without seeing each other in the past. But I think we've got the excessive drinking and filming-selves-dressed-as-cartoon-characters that was a necessary part of the reunion out of our systems, so you needn't worry.

Of course, if only I'd remembered that a couple of people from work watch my Facebook page, I would have advised Joseph not to link that video to it, but it's too late now...

In the cold light of day

With hindsight, it might not have been such a great idea to post that film footage all over the internet last night, but it did seem like a really great idea at the time.

This is what is happening here tonight