Hi everyone! It’s nice to be home.
I’m fresh back from Sweden, where I was representing England and Mr B’s at the IAM World Memory Championship. So, what on Earth is a memory championship? And how did I do?
The International Association of Memory organises memory competitions all over the world, with many countries having national competitions each year, in addition to the annual World Championship. Memory Sports disciplines include memorising shuffled decks of cards, pages of binary digits, and lists of words, and then recalling them in the right order. It’s a test not only of memory, but of concentration and creativity. Memory athletes create and adapt techniques that anybody can learn, and practice their craft until they’re able to memorise dumbfounding amounts of information quickly and accurately.
This was my first competition, up against elite memory athletes from all over Europe and as far afield as India and Japan. Many of them have been competing for a decade or more. As such, my goal was simply to have fun and try not to come last! After three days of intense competition I placed 34th, climbing up the rankings over athletes from India, France and Sweden. There were some highs and lows: I performed well in the binary digits and hour-long card events on the Friday and Saturday, only to lose a ranking in the final event of the competition when nerves got the better of me in the ‘speed cards’ event.
It was a wonderful experience and I got to meet some people I’ve admired for years, including two-time World Memory Champion Jonas von Essen, Guinness World Record holder Christian Schäfer, and legendary multiple-world-record holder Andrea Muzii, now coach of the Italian team who took first and third place this year.
Here’s a photograph of me mid-recall in the binary numbers event, sporting one of the brand-new Mr B’s t-shirts.