At this point I am 9-3, about seventh or eighth. This morning I had a close and interesting game with Paul Allan, winning by two which survived the recount (it could have been more, but that's a story for another day); then lost to David Boys in a coinflip game that turned on what was in the bag, and then Wellington started with two bingos and a 64-point Q play that I couldn't overcome. Redeemed myself with a fortunate 200-point win over Nick Ball before lunch.

Good to be in the hunt for the moment...

I went to a course on the latest tweaks to Accounting Standards on Monday morning. I have to say my thoughts were elsewhere, as I was heading for the airport afterwards. Several hours later after an acceptable flight, one of Michael's orange-clad drivers met me at Changi with a tiny handwritten sign, and proceeded to take me through to JB. He looked about thirteen, but was a pretty aggressive driver not averse to flashing those ahead of him in the fast lane to make way, and when two lanes went down to one he stuck like glue to the car in front, giving the other lane not a ghost of a chance of cutting ahead of him. Meanwhile the radio entertained us with tunefully bland Sinopop, and I admired the tigerskin-effect interior of the taxi.

On arrival at the Zon, I bumped into David Boys lurking in the lobby entrance smoking a cheroot as coolly as Clint Eastwood. I chatted with him and Mark Nyman for a while, Mark having gained a few pounds since I last saw him but raring to go. Then a brief kibitz of a lobby game (Paul Allan & Adrian Tamas vs Lewis Mackay and Martin Harrison) before turning in.

After a long hot spell, the refreshing rain was bucketing down in Torquay most of Saturday, and all through the night and Sunday morning. Apparently Melbourne has had a month’s rainfall in the last 24 hours. I drove back for the Gloriana gig, fitting in some low-prob sevens before changing into all-black concert attire and heading to St Marks. The first half went very well, belying the dodgy final rehearsal, and the Mundy opener flowed unusually tunefully – then that fantastic Tomkins piece that I also sang at Philip’s ordination (O Sing unto the Lord a New Song) before moving on to the 20th century stuff. The second half was OK, with a good Britten but then the Vaughan Williams mass was marred by some bizarre solos (the tenor shipped in to do the solo parts has a lovely voice, but he totally stuffed up one section, ending a tone higher than intended which was a tad confusing).

I’ve been fighting with moths at home for a while. A couple of months ago, I kept on finding occasional maggots slowly perambulating round the ceiling, but destroyed any that I saw. Then they seemed to disappear, but two or three weeks ago I would find a few centimetre-long brown moths every day, quickly and easily crushed (as they do not bother to move when approached with my lethal sponge or other handy killing equipment), and they kept on coming despite my efforts to find where they were living. I’ve even caught courting moths in flagrante delicto a couple of times, their shameless coitus naturally interrupted by a burst of flyspray or the business end of a slipper. I’ve pulled the fridge out, emptied and cleaned the cupboards, but still they keep on turning up every day – I’m thoroughly sick of them, actually. Perhaps I will come back to a plague of them.

I’m feeling well prepared for the WSC and fly off tomorrow – should be at the Zon by bedtime on Monday. Looks as though several of the contenders are already in situ, but there is only a three-hour difference so I should acclimatise quickly. Very exciting and I can’t wait for battle to commence. Meanwhile I have been watching the Australian Idol final, which featured a new duet between Guy Sebastian and Jordin Sparks that was virtually identical to ‘No Air’ (perhaps Chris Brown is a less desirable singing partner these days).

I went to St Peter's Eastern Hill at 7.00 last night to carry out their audit - it's one of my freebies. As I examined the records upstairs in the parish office, there was somebody in the next room bashing away on the piano (with a rather improvised, jazzy feel), while downstairs the choir rehearsed one of Darke's masses for Sunday and then Britten's Hymn to St Cecilia. It's a very musical parish, but Fr Matthew popped in and opined that the Darke sounded dreary. Then occasionally there would be a tram trundling past, dinging its bell at errant pedestrians with a doppler shift. The musical clashes were quite toothsome, and I felt like turning on my MP3 player to generate a bit more delicious disharmony. A lovely, spacious room overlooking St Patrick's Cathedral and a row of venerable trees on a beauteous evening...it was all very uplifting for some reason.

Also had an audit team lunch. I was amused by the locution of my Sri Lankan colleague Suresh, who advised the waitress that he would "grab" the soup and then "grab" the scallop risotto. He is always grabbing paperwork, or grabbing files from the internet. A very versatile verb.

Many's the time I've seen the "FORM ONE LANE" roadsign amended to "FORM ONE PLANET" by touchy-feely graffiti-loving globalists, but here's another I enjoyed in Lorne recently:

I had an email exchange with Anand's dad the other day, who was asking what he ought to study before playing in the World Youth in December. Apparently Anand is already comfortable with the top 700 7's and the top 200 8's (hope I am not breaking any confidences here). What amazed me, in retrospect, was the realisation that a nine-year old with a relatively small scrabble vocabulary can earn a 1342 rating, which is good enough to be ranked 158th in Australia. I suspect he has a strong natural vocabulary, and is sufficiently alert and competitive to win a lot of his games - once he starts chewing up the rest of Collins, he will be a force. The parallels with Allan Saldanha are quite striking - a boy with huge natural talent and supportive parents, who shot up the UK ratings at a young age and ultimately became the country's top-ranked player (before jacking it all in to become a futures trader or something). When the nine-year-old Allan lost a game, he was often seen in tears being comforted by mum, but Anand seems to be more sanguine about it all.

There are three or four weeks to go, and I recommended that he should try and master the top 1000 of both 7's and 8's, and be secure on all the threes, with hooks if possible.

On Tuesday, I was comparing study techniques with Trevor and Naween. Naween is taking a week off work prior to departing for Malaysia, and will spend the time simply reading through CSW making notes (he is going backwards, and has reached S so far). It's not a bad method and should throw up many interesting words, but doesn't strike me as very systematic. Trevor has multiple sheets of "Trevor's interesting words", annotated with hooks, anagrams and so forth, and he is going through all those. Meanwhile I have been hitting Zyzzyva very hard all year, having now captured 7's up to 25,000 and 8's up to 30,000 (about 75%); I have also looked through the 4's, dwelling on them individually, and am working on the 5's on a similar basis. Within the next couple of weeks I will scroll through and read the remaining bingos, without necessarily attempting to retain them all, check out the JQXZ words, and revise a few sheets of 6's that I have picked out. Certainly my Jumbletime results are pretty good at the moment, but of course that doesn't mean it will translate to the WSC.

After mentioning my acquisition (inter alia) of a cheap CD of Tavener's Song for Athene in early June, it turns out we will be performing it on 22 November, just before I fly off. The blurb reads: Gloriana presents a program of magnificent and much-loved works by English composers. We commemorate St Cecilia's Day with a performance of Britten's dazzling Hymn to St Cecilia. Although written at the same time, Vaughan Williams's Mass in G looks back to the music of the sixteenth century. Scored for double-choir with a quartet of soloists, this work has long been noted for its noble simplicity and timeless beauty. Composed during the reign of Queen Mary, Mundy's Vox patris caelestis is one of the most imposing works of the period. The program also includes John Tavener's spellbinding Song for Athene and music by Tomkins, Holst and Rutter. (End of blurb)

Apparently we will rehearse the Tavener no more than twice, and we haven't even seen the music yet. Hope it's easy. The Mundy is mainly in a rather high register, which was no good for me this week as I am still shaking off a long-standing bug. And there is also a Harvey piece we are going to throw in, which demands a ridiculous top B of the tenors.

Funky flyer here: http://www.gloriana.com.au/BestOfBritish.pdf

As Victoria has a public holiday today, I profited from the free time by dealing with a couple of errands in the morning, then getting together with a couple of teammates for a WSC warmup session. Trevor seemed more content to kibitz and review the games using Quackle, only playing Naween and me once each; otherwise Naween and I faced one another four times. Our first encounter was a nip-and-tuck affair, and while I had the two blanks which helped with DEXTRO 66 and DECEIVED, his late REBILLS took the lead; I hit back with NEURONS, but drew the worst possible five tiles from the bag (BGTTW) while his were a tad friendlier (EEHIORZ), enabling a 17-point win for Naween. I then succumbed to Trevor’s SHILPIT despite SEDGIER and OBEAHISM (and a six-tile play TERTIUM which drew a challenge) before temporarily bowing out. Their game was notable for a couple of misses towards the endgame; Naween overlooked SHEQEL for 62, then Trevor (down to mere seconds) missed RENY/TOILE which would have won by a wafer.

Back to me and Naween, and his NEARSIDES and AVAILED were too much for me although I developed a strong rack towards the end. If he hadn’t, in his usual canny manner, blocked as many spots as possible, I might have had a shot at finding the sole bingo from AERRTU? with floating EF and AR available (it’s a toughie but rather a delightful word, and guessable).

That was three losses in a row for me, and I was glad to get my name on the scoreboard with FROTTAGE, LONGLEAF, RETINOL and SEGOLATE (Naween could only muster the picturesque DAHABIEH through AH). I clawed back to respectability in the final rubber with a fortunate opening rack of DFIPZ??, yielding FIZ and then OEDIPEAN 86 which were ample to outmatch his later BERRETTA. So it was Naween 3-2, Trevor 1-1 and 2-3 for me. A good session.

SCREICH and SCRIECH are both good, as are SKREIGH and SKRIEGH, and SHREIK and SHRIEK. SCRAICH and SCRAIGH can be paired, as can SCREECH and SHREEK. The tough ones are SCREIGH, SHRIECH and SKRIECH which do not have interchangeable vowels, though they do fall into line with the old rule "I before E except after C".

I was sad to find out that a beloved old friend had died at the weekend. John Davis was my landlord for a year or so when I was at Oxford - an extraordinary character, lover of cats and nightly sherries, the host of dinner parties that started late into the night (soup at 11pm, anyone?), sometimes irascible, but always full of warmth and encouragement. He was dreadfully unwell with diabetes and a number of other problems, not helped by a highly indulgent diet and lack of exercise, but somehow soldiered on for many years even after a leg was amputated. The anecdotes are legend, and no doubt many of them will get an airing at his funeral at New Hinksey on Tuesday.

Random notes from the last couple of days. Angela at work, a popular and lovely girl, was sadly made redundant, so most of the office had a lunch at Thai Thai in farewell. My dish was a kind of combination crab salad which looked good on the menu, but the reality was somewhat different – in a partitioned dish, there was a dipping sauce, some minced bits of an unidentified pinkish meat mingled with raw onion, a chunk of sticky rice that had been delivered in a gladwrap envelope inside a woven box, strips of dried pork, and the star of the show, comprising small dismembered arthropodal limbs and joints among chunks of tomato and carrot. But the crab shell was PURPLE, and the meat within seemed to be translucently uncooked. On tasting, the whole section was drenched in a lingeringly acrid saline solution so that none of the components were distinguishable, except by texture – I wasn’t sure whether the shell was supposed to be edible, so crunched on one piece as my neighbour compared the dish to a plate of cockroaches. I wouldn’t dwell on it, but it was comfortably the most unpleasant meal I have had for a long time.

It turned out that Barry Harridge was resigning from WESPA’s dictionary committee, so my name was put forward as a possible replacement. Elie asked what I might propose to contribute, and I basically said that I wanted to ensure that the workings were more open to public view – there has been a perception of a secret cabal. Most of the substantive decisions have already been taken, but I would also be keen to ensure greater consistency (e.g. why don’t DREIGH and LOUCHE compare, when SKEIGH and GAUCHE do), assist with the mining of Chambers 2008, and weigh in on the phrasal words issue. As far as timing is concerned, I would argue for harmonising with NASPA’s schedule. Hence WESPA may need to issue an update shortly after the next US update, whenever that may be, but could then leave the wordlist in place for eight to ten years.

Friday night I picked up Philip’s mum Coralie from the airport, accompanied by Peter who had met her in Adelaide after training down from Darwin on the Ghan. They were the last ones to emerge by several minutes, and I was fearing they had been kidnapped. On a mild, sunny Saturday morning we all explored a meadow in Anglesea, famous for its wild orchids – identifying bearded, donkey, carnea, spider and several other varieties all captured on Peter’s camcorder. Philip had to conduct a wedding in the afternoon so I drove Peter and Coralie down to Wye River, a favourite beachside location of mine south of Lorne. Then in the evening we travelled back to Melbourne for the Elaine Paige concert (celebrating forty years on stage). We’ve seen her a few times, and she still has a belting voice although perhaps a little less melodious than in her prime.

Having guests plays havoc with one’s cardbox schedule. I was supposed to review 2,750 fives this weekend but may have to squeeze them in during the week. I don’t want to just whizz through them – I am targeting active study.