Times Crossword Championship Day

After all that practice last weekend (and during the week), it was the day for the Championship. I was up early and left Bury St. Edmunds before dawn...

...to drive to Royston and get a train - my first journey using my Senior railcard! There was no fog or traffic difficulties so I got the earliest of trains I was targetting and arrived in Kngs Cross about 8:30. Having so much time to spare I decided to walk to the venue via St. Paul's Cathedral and the Millenium Bridge, which I hadn't used before. Here is the view from it.

Passing the Globe theatre I ended up a Borough Market where I got myself a salt-beef bagel for breakfast.

The competition is held on the 17th floor of The Times headquarters, right next to the Shard. There are excellent views from there.

Then it was into the room for the first preliminary final.

With all the tables arranged in lines it was just like sitting a school exam. After only about 24 minutes I was startled to see the competitor in front of my lift up his number to say he was finished. I had sat behind David Howell! At the end we all waited to hear who had qualified for the Grand Final.

The news was good... 3 of our bloggers, Verlaine, Mohn2 and Keriothe were in the 12 who made it - Keriothe for the first time! Well done them. As for me - well my form deserted me and I struggled to get on the wavelength for any of the 3 puzzles and finished well down the pack of also-rans and no better than last year. Here are the full results of my prelim.

We headed to The George, the traditional meeting place and watering hole on finals day. Whilst the finalists stuck to soft drinks I enjoyed a beer or 2 with others from the blog community, including boltonwanderer, astonvilla1 and davidavid1 and a few other cruciverbalists I had met last weekend in York.

Astonvilla1and I decided to go and sit at the back of the Grand Final. Wow those puzzled were hard and only 7 of the 24 finalists finished them in the hour! Well, as you will have seen in the results and news story, we had a new champion in Roger Crabtree and our bloggers Matthew and John were 2nd and 3rd!

Here are Astonvilla1 and I posing with Roger and Matthew (with John in the background)...

Then it was back to The George for the celebrations.

Eventually it was getting dark and the Shard was shining brightly...

...and I had to make my way home. With an extra 55 minutes on the train, I very nearly finished the 3 grand final puzzles, leaving just a handful of clues unsolved, so I decided my crossword-solving skills hadn't deserted me entirely. I think I'll be back next year to see if I can do better!

P.S. You might like also to check out the legendary solver Tony Sever's blog entry, which gives more details of the results.