Dalai Lama Skating on a Bowl of Noodles

So I'm back from the Welsh Memory championship. Leading up to it back in October November, I was really excited about competing, still am, but then I changed my system and tried to consistently get my personal bests. Then in December it tailed off and only got practising a week before the competition. I had a month of deadlines and coursewerk leading up to the championship, and the last one had to be in the Friday before so i was a bit rushed.

When we got to the Welsh thing, I had a bit of trouble sleeping that night, I was so excited, there's nothing better than hearing your scores even if there not that great, cos they kind of mean nothing, it's just exciting. So we got to the venue, we shared a taxi with Katie Kermode, and let on to the arbiters n competitors and set up shop.

Random words are of course better with practice but it's about the luck of the draw most times. It's suppose to be 85% nouns and image based words and 15% abstract. They were quite easy to be honest, bring, ugly, chair, flower, tree etc but I wanted to be 100% they were correct during recall, I got 49 words. All went good, new world record for Katie with 109 in 5 mins.

Then binary reared it's ugly head, Ben did 840, quite impressive, I did 351 after I asked for mine to be remarked, I had pefect recall of what I remembered but I didn't observe it all that great a lot of switched 0 and 1's

Historical dates I always wing it last minute. "Someone gets married in Charlotte Church" was a memorable one. oh and Policeman arrests himself". 15 minute numbers failed a bit, I missed loci during recall then rewrote the same digits about 4 -5 times before running out of time. Damn.

10 minute cards went well...ish. I got 3 decks in 10 minutes, but the 4th deck I did I got up to 31 cards into, but messed up on the recall.

Then lunch came thank God. Went to a qaint little pub looking place for a Welsh feast. The meat was rationed but the vegetables were help yourself. We spent over an hour in there, I thought we were gonna be late for the start back.

Erm...in the afternoon, images were not great, 5 minute numbers were not great, spoken numbers were not great, speed cards were not great. I'm being a bit too harsh on myself, but I could have done better in all the events. I put it down to not being used to the competion and being a bit too frowny and tense. I had a face like an orphan most of the time.

It all rounded off nicely, Ben, Katie then Me and James in fourth.

Then we all went round to Dai's for liquid refreshment, James was giving us a lift behind Phil, but We were supposed to be behind Warren and Dai but they went through a light and left us. So we finally met up that night, had a drink, had a musical undertone, bit of curry, and headed off back to Travelodge, shared a taxi with Connor.

All in all, it was great, enjoed it. I am gonna make no hesitation in starting my 3 digit system for the UK open championships. Also, stuff which I never practice, dates, images, names, words, I'm gonna make an effort to be at least half decent.

I could make the whole Welsh memory championships sound a bit more interesting but I need to do my stand up comedy routine for next Monday, so take care of your shelves.