~~~

Sensō-ji Temple
Japan has two stereotypes: it is the land of crazy technological advance, of beeps and buzzes and bells; and it is the mystical imperial superpower of the samurai. If Akibahara takes care of the first image, the ancient temple at Senso-ji certainly looks after the second – founded in the 7th Century in honour of the bodhisattva Kannon.

Sensō-ji is a place that can strike an almight fear into you. Although we had already been in the most crowded of city centres on more than one occasion, nowhere had people been more densely packed together than at the endless little stalls at the temple. There is the constant sound of sizzling: if you have ever been to a Catholic pilgrimage site like Fatima, and seen the endless grills with gallons of melted candlewax sizzling over charred metals, you’ll have a reasonable idea of what it was like. Throw in the smell of smoked meats burnt to the bone (some sort of sacrifice) and imagine the smell more pungent and concentrated and that’s how the temple smells.

There’s also something mightily scary of the aura of the place. With the constant smell of roasting and multitude of small, intense sources of heat, the shape of the temple and some of the decor around it become far more imposing places. One sees the shape and feels the heat and can’t help but wonder if this is what it would be like to be burned at the stake by Hasekura Tsunenaga and his mob.

So ancient is the temple that the hundreds of decorative engraved swastikas along each edge of the roofing inspires a far greater fear than its usual connotation: the unknown.

We also visited Disneyland Tokyo (conclusion: far better than the one in Paris – the Japanese Space Mountain is three times as long and there are, simply, more rides); the outskirts of the Imperial Palace – we meant to take a tour but arrived slightly too late; the ground were pretty impressive however, and again, very serene; and went to the top of the Tokyo Metropolitan Building. The latter was very impressive: because it was the city hall, anyone could access the top floor for free, and it was only at the top of the building that you can get a true sense of just how endless the city is. Even in other cities, like atop the Empire State Buidling, you can see where the rurality begins. In Tokyo, 89 floors up, you can only see endless skyscrapers, punctuated by the lush green of Yoyogi Park and the vague outline of Mount Fuji in the distance.

It’s certainly unusual to say that I went shopping alone in Tokyo city centre one evening at the age of 16, but I did, quietly riding the train to Shinjuku and visiting a soccer shop where I bought a national soccer shirt for myself (a habit, at the time) and a J-Pulse jersey for my litle brother.

~~~

But even though all of the excursions were great, and it was magnificent to do some of what I did, and see some of what I saw, it wasn’t the sightseeing that I got most out of: it was the freedom to do as I wanted with other people. Japan was where I first got drunk: on the first of our spare evenings, some Dutch guys were passing our window, saw me happening to play the guitar, and invited us out to sit with them. ‘Them’ soon became a motley crew of all nationalities: Irish, Kiwi, Dutch, French, German, Balkan, Israeli, Italian, Mexican and from Macao – even the Hong Kong lot came out one night, all illegally drinking out in a beer-garden common area at our lodgings.

It was the best fun ever. Every night Michael would use his fake ID to get us four cans of Asahi each, and every night I would end up singing my heart out with Willem from the Netherlands, roaring whatever songs we would remember the words to. Call it a stereotype – the Irish guy doing the singing – but it was brilliant fun, with people who were all enjoying the thrill of being so far away from home, in somewhere not quite exotic, but rare, with only each other for company and the strangest of all international attributes in common.

~~~

Somewhere in between – I’d have difficulty placing just when – the results were released.

35 IRE 5: REILLY Gavan --- 0 - 0 - 0 -- 0 - 0 - 0 -- 0

Shit.

~~~

The closing ceremony was painful. While none of the Irish had finished with medals, Diarmuid was one off a bronze, and having scored all seven points in one problem, was entitled to an ‘honourable mention’. It had to be the year, of course, that there was an unusual amount of medallists, and so their “We don’t have time today to list all of the honourable mentions. Sorry about that!” rang a little thinly.

What was so galling about the fact that I’d scored zero – which only 11 others managed to do, out of a total of 457 entrants – was that I honestly thought I’d made significant progress in two of the six problems. And because the ceremony was where everyone was given their awards, I had to sit through 90 minutes or more of everyone else going up to their podium, beaming, shaking hands with Crown Prince Naruhito, and generally being over the moon with their achievements.

Well, nearly everyone. The Chinese entrant of whom we’d heard the rumours earlier wasn’t there. Seeing his results, we realised what his teammates had been murmuring: it wasn’t the first time that he’d had a freakout and missed a question, destroying his self-esteem in the process. It was the second time… in two days. On both papers, he had scored 7-7-0, and while 35 would have been enough to secure a gold medal anyway, 28 slipped him into silver medal territory.

When his name was called for him to come and receive his silver medal, nobody got up. His medal was to forever remain unclaimed.

Outside, we all milled about, swapping souvenirs with each other as it would likely be the last time that a lot of us would see each other. Some were flying home that evening, while we were off first thing in the morning, and were planning to stay up all night singing/drinking/whatever so that we’d sleep through the flying. We met all of our drinking buddies, now mostly furnished with medals of various value draped around their necks. Some of them I was thrilled for, but for the most part I just sulked, and wept silently.

Sent to Japan by my country, to represent it. and I got drunk, learned nothing and scored zero.

I wasn’t going to let it happen again.

~~~

Note the last sentence: I was going back, and I wanted represent my country properly this time. And, in fairness, it’d be nice to say that I made the 2004 Athens Olympics, even if it wasn’t in the 100m sprint.

~~~

I spent most of September having pictures passed to me in the back of English class. Most of them depicted what my classmates envisaged to happen at the Maths Olympics: usually weak, limp-wristed pale teenagers scoring new world records of 1.4 metres in the calculator toss.

~~~

The letter came in November again: you are invited to return to training for the International Mathematical Olympiad, yadda yadda yadda, come back to Maynooth, kthxbai.

When I did, it was the first time that I’d seen Seamus and Paraic – the two guys I’d befriended at the previous year’s classes – since Japan. They were just as incredulous as I was: that waster made Japan?! Fair fucks to him! Seamus had done well the previous year at IrMO and had been invited to Limerick: there was a good chance he’d be joining me at IMO 2004.

Around the same time as I sat my Leaving Cert Mocks, in March 2004, we were offered a mock IMO paper, the first time that Maynooth had done so. Seamus, as he deserved to, topped the class with a stunning 67 – having missed the week where the papers were returned, I was shocked to hear I’d scored 64. Things were going well. Athens loomed large. I’d even taken to studying extra material during the week instead of keeping up-to-speed on my intra-curricular Leaving Cert material.

~~~

Lunchtime on Saturday 8th May 2004, and the sun shone brilliantly as Seamus and I strolled into Maynooth to get some chips. The first paper, we both thought, was fairly manageable. Neither of us really expected to match our mock results but we both felt that a 40 was on the cards. As we went back in for the second paper, it was just a matter of steady-as-she-goes.

At 4.55pm I was scribbling furiously. FIve minutes to go. I was nearly finished a problem asking to identify all the primes that satisfied a certain condition that currently escapeds my mind. I just about got all of my solutions listed before the paper needed to be clutched from my hands.

As absurd as it sounds, it was just as the first drops of light summer rain began to patter when the switch flicked in my brain. As strange as it will sound, I had managed to construct a rather elegant proof for the final question – the one with the primes – all based on the premise that certain numbers were prime to begin with.

37 x 3 = 111. NOT 101. 101 is prime. 111 is not.

Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit. That was the mistake I’d made.

If I cocked up a basic computation like that, I might not make it. I mightn’t deserve to either.

~~~

Dear Gavan ,

Congratulations on your recent performance in the Irish Mathematical Olympiad. As you will see from the attached list overleaf, you finished in 12th  place, and all of the IMO volunteers and staff of the Mathematical Faculty of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, offer their sincere congratulations.

You will also be happy to hear that Seamus O’Boyle, who attended the sessions in Maynooth, finished the Irish Mathematical Olympiad in third place and has qualified for the 44th International Mathematical Olympiad. (Someone else) also finished in eighth place, and it is wonderful for NUI Maynooth to have produced two high finishers as Seamus and (whoever).

Thank you very much for your participation this year and if you are still a pre-University student next year we will be delighted to see you returning to our classes next year.

Again, Gavan , thank you for your participation.

Yours sincerely,

Prof A. O’Farrell

~~~

With that muted letter ends my Olympic story. While it’s not the traditional Olympic story, it’s the one I managed to conjure for myself, and the only one I have.

That is my story: one of triumph and despair, of victory and defeat, but – most importantly – of the experience had, the road travelled, the world no longer unknown.

What else would you expect of an Olympic story?

~~~

Due to unforseen circumstances I’ve been offline and away from the world for a few days. I reposted this epic – originally from Every Day is Electoin Day – to keep up the pretence of a blog a day.

Normal service will resume very soon – thanks for reading.

~~~

While there are only so many distractions to occupy you while flying – again, there was more spontaneous study to break the in-flight movies, walking out of Narita International Airport was the single most memorable thing of the trip. The planes and airport were air-conditioned, but while we were conscious of the impending monsoon season and the promise of humidity, we had no warning of just how sudden it would attack. We were warned that we’d feel a blast of humidity upon stepping outside, but were lulled into false security as the canopy over the entrance extended out for a few metres. As we finally let sunlight fall on us, we felt the sheer blast of heat.

There is no way of preparing people in advance of feeling the true blast of Japanese humidity. I had a suitcase on wheels and not much in it, and I didn’t have much weight to carry. What’s more, Michael – a teammate who had had his bag left behind at our changeover in Amsterdam and hence was travelling empty-handed – was carrying my guitar for me; yet, extraordinarily, I was covered in a film of sweat within ten seconds (literally) of leaving the terminal. It’s like an instant sauna. If you’re ever walking out of Narita in a t-shirt in early July, be warned.

Out we hopped, though, and into our bus – thankfully air-conditioned – expecting to catch a short sleep before arriving at our accommodation. No chance. Despite having gotten up at 7am to get to Dublin (Diarmuid, Michael and Hugh had flown from Shannon too, so they’d been up since 5am), spending 90 minutes on the plane to Amsterdam, 90 minutes in Schiphol airport, and 12 hours in air going to Tokyo, and arriving in Japan at the same time as we’d departed Dublin – but a day later – we were fit to collapse. The adrenaline of the city took over though: as our bus slowly made its way through the city, around the cusp of Tokyo Bay, we were just captivated.

The Japanese school of urban planning, it seemed, had one philosophy: up. Up, up, up. Quite simply, there were skyscrapers everywhere. They stretched as far as the eye could see; even as we navigated over bridges around the coastline, buildings rose majestically from the sea and far over any height we could see from the bus. Between trying to take in the scale of the epic urbanisation, and the novelty of seeing advertisements we all knew to see in the Latin alphabet, but not in any other script, kept our hearts pulsing as we mazed through the metropolis.

~~~

The inside of the National Olympic Memorial Youth Center belied its age. Built to serve as a contributory facility of the Olympic Village for the 1964 Summer Olympics, the marbled lobby of the accommodation seemed almost newly built. Perhaps after seventeen hours’ transit and ten hours in time difference, anything other than the inside of an aluminium carriage seemed slightly more lustrous.

We were assigned our rooms and given our accreditation, and went to wander the corridors meeting some of our fellow contestants. Rooms were assigned along the corridor on an alphabetical basis, and the six Irish were split across two four-bed rooms, nestled between the Iranians and Israelis. Irish neutrality had never seemed less jovial.

Further down the corridor were the Indians, Hungarians, Cantonese, Indonesians and Hungarians. The pillars outside their quarters were covered in Microsoft Publisher flyers advertising their own local websites: 數獨開 being the most prominent message on most of them, being only identifiable to us through the .hk ending on the website, and the encouraging inclusion of the rather more identifiable phrase ‘Math Game’ advertising the Fun Math Super-Cool Website that the six from Hong Kong had put together as part of their own training.

~~~

The opening ceremony almost seems like a parody in hindsight. We had a parade of athletes, where the six of us walked across the stage – myself with a tricolour draped over my shoulders, waving to people we couldn’t see through the haze of halogen lights pointing to the stage – as part of some sort of Parade of Athletes. The six Mexicans, of course, wore sombreros. Sandwiching this bizarre bazaar of mathletes (it was sometime around June when a schoolmate first saw Mean Girls and introduced me to the word) was a procession of traditional Japanese musicians and the Japanese Minister for Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (or at least that’s what we figured out afterwards, having merely had him introduced as ‘文部科学省’).

Examining all the other entrants as only a frustrated 16-year-old can, it seemed that many of the other entrants – mostly clad in uniform suits, and the rest in matching t-shirts – seemed more stereotypically geeky, but almost to the point of ineptitude. Perhaps there was a chance that, with a sense of creativity, I might have a chance here. Not a chance of success, but maybe the chance to avoid a distinct fear of failure.

~~~

Sunday July 13th, 2008. Day 1, Paper 1.

Each paper in the International Mathematical Olympiad is four-and-a-half hours in length. Each paper has three problems. Those finishing in the upper half of the IMO are given medals: the top twelfth of entrants win gold medals, the next sixth below that a silver, and the quarter below that take bronze. Ireland’s history in IMO’s up to that point had been somewhat mediocre; despite being well known for a high standard being set for its youth, its participants had only ever scored four bronze medals (two of these going to the same person, an Indian immigrant).

The IMO is split into two papers, each held on seperate days. Each paper is four-and-a-half hours in length and contains three – three – problems, for which a maximum of seven marks can be awarded. Being from a country like Ireland, where a bronze medal is seen as a glorious pinnacle that we’d be thrilled to get, if you think you can make good progress on any one of the three problems, and get some points on the board, you pretty much spend your entire time on that problem.

Day 1′s paper offered me a little of this hope. In the second question, involving pairs of integers, I had whittled out the answer that either of a pair could be twice the other. Maybe there were marks to be made after all.

~~~

Though we had struggled immensely with jet lag and sleeplessness on the previous night, Day 2 again offered similar hope. I spent three-and-a-half hours on the final problem, proving that manipulations of indices of prime numbers left remainders of one (happening to be based on something that Eoghan has recently blogged about). Again, I thought there was hope – a couple of marks here and there, and I would at least have avoided the ignominy of a zero-point finish.

Afterwards, while speaking to our new friends from New Zealand – a few of whom were returning contestants from 2002 and who had befriended Diarmuid and Michael that time round – we realised just how seriously some people took the competition. One of the New Zealanders was an expatriated Chinese guy, and he had overheard some of the Chinese participants huddling in a corner shortly after the paper.

It seemed that one of the Chinese had had a mental block, and having answered two of the questions perfectly, could not begin to make an attempt on the final question of the paper. Distraught, he had ran out of the room, gone straight back into his living quarters and would not, simply could not, unlock the door behind him. The Chinese, it seemed, were one of the nations we had heard about – the ones that identified the potential participants years in advance, sent them to special boarding schools from the age of 13, and trained batches of students each year who would all easily make any other country’s team. The Chinese organisers would then have about 40 potential gold medallists from which to choose their six participants. Those who made the cut, therefore, not only had to satisfy themselves with their performance, but also prove their worth to those who were left behind in their gruesome selection process, and to those who had faith to pick them themselves.

While the Kiwi couldn’t make out which day’s paper they were referring to, he could succintly make out two feelings from the other Chinese: distress of the shame that been brought upon their team and country, and for the wellbeing of their teammate (apparently it didn’t seem like the first time such a thing had happened); and annoyance that their teammate had fucked up the competition for the rest of them.

Later in the afternoon, having no official engagements for another couple of days, we started our wanderings around the local area. Again, somewhat shallowly, we were captivated by seeing familiar sights, distorted by foreign lettering.

This, however, was breakout time. Because two of the three adults who had accompanied us on the trip were sequestered marking papers, and the third – Gordon – simply had different ideas of what he wanted to see and do in the city, the six of us were pretty much left doing our own thing.

There is no more exhilarating feeling in the world than being 16 years old, being on the other side of the world to your parents, wearing your Meath jersey, and taking a subway train to a station whose name you can barely pronounce, with two other young lads from your country, who are equally giddy at the sheer abandon and recklessness of not being sure if you can find your own way home again.

~~~

We had three days off before there would be a banquet and closing ceremony for us, which were free for us to roam the city, with our assigned tour guide: a 20-year-old from Rathfarnham who was finishing a year on foreign exchange in the city.

While I won’t pretend to remember the exact itineraries of the few days, noted highlights were:

Yoyogi Park and the Meiji Shrine
By far and away, the most serene place I’ve ever been. Built in 1920 to honour Emperor Meiji and his wife, Empress Shōken, the Meiji Shrine, amid the unimaginable urbanisation of Shinjuku and Harajuku around it, and even with the bustle of the NHK telly studios nearby – is so still and peaceful that it really must be seen to be believed. Even breathing felt sacrelege.

Slow flowing waters in the park, the hush of reverence… quite simply undescribable. I bought a small Shinto Scholarship Charm (it being a maths competition, after all) which I would keep in the corner of my desk in the Study Hall back in St Finian’s for the following Leaving Cert year.

Akihabara – ‘Electric Town’
Imagine walking through a town that is the manifestation of not just your childhood dreams, but of your childhood itself. That’s a little of what Akihabara was like for me: you walk around and see giant logos of video game companies everywhere, hanging ominously over open-faced shops selling spare PC parts with just a clear plastic anti-static wrapper. People haggled with each other over the price of RAM while more Harajuku girls (they’re everywhere, usually sat on subways wearing very little, and openly reading school uniformed pornography) hand out fans emblasoned with advertising messages for hyperstores that would make the new Ikea look like a dead pixel on a Bravia.

With this constant buzz – of people, electrics, traffic – comes an awful lot of noise. Akihabara is probably the noisiest place I’ve ever been. People are shouting to hear each other over competing music blaring from each shopfront, each of which is beyond synthesis and degenerates into an apocolyptic din. Yet, strangely, you feed off the noise: walking past shopfronts roaring with sound produces an energy you’re not used to feeling. You are, literally, electrified. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but merely transferred from one form to another: the sound becomes a carb and you buzz.

The video game arcades are the loudest. They are cramped, but multistorey: there’s barely room to manouevre between different games. You walk into a room the size of a kids’ bedroom and see twenty gamers or more, all hunched around futuristic fruit machines, each simultaneously squealing with slogans roared by anime characters. “君の勝ちだ!”, they all shout over each other, each demanding superior attention over their needy identical septuplet neighbours. And these things are multistorey: there are twenty rooms like this on each floor as high as you can conceive.

On the fourteenth floor of some crazy electro-skyscraper – about a year before iPods became it – I bought a personal CD player that played mp3s and CD-RWs, for the equivalent of about €35. I don’t want to think how little it would be worth today, but the same one in the Argos catalogue was marked at €89 when I got home.

~~~

It wasn’t specifically an Electric Town-specific thing, but even in mid-2003, the Japanese were all about their 3G mobiles. As a gift for winning the trip, Dad had bought me one of the new-fangled picture phones that David Beckham was appearing everywhere to advertise for Vodafone. My brand new Sharp GX10, though, was a brick over there. The Japanese were so far advanced with their 3G networks that the standard GSM ones had all been switched off. Only the phones that showed up in Ireland at the start of 2006 would have been able to work over there: I ended up just carrying the phone with me anyway, as it was a better camera than the Kodak camera-cum-16MB-mp3-player I used to take the pictures you see in this post. You would often see three or four yuppies all sat alongside each other on train carriages, each of them looking into a phone as they shouted to their other halves to be heard amongst their companions.

One of the later evenings, as we took a quieter train back to Sangubashi, we were sat at the back of a large carriage with about ten others. We heard giggling coming from a seat in front of ours: a young woman – early twenties at the oldest – was wearing a revealing schoolgirl outfit, as many others tended to at this time of day. She was on a video call to another girl, about the same age, wearing identical clothing to her own, who was also giggling away. Slowly, though, the giggles became more muted and laboured. We had gotten on at the main station in Shinjuku and were only travelling two stops down the Odawara line, but after two stops, somehow the innocent giggly schoolgirl video call had already led to the girl at the other end of the phone giggling as she showed her hand throbbing furiously under her skirt.

God knows what would have been happening on that phone call by the time the train reached Odawara.

~~~

Due to unforseen circumstances I’m going to be offline and away from the world for a few days. I reposted this epic – originally from Every Day is Electoin Day – to keep up the pretence of a blog a day.

The final part of my Tokyo memories will appear tomorrow, and normal service will resume soon – thanks for reading.

~~~

Not so long ago, Alexia wrote a post about the places she’d most like to go to on holiday, and one of the places she listed was Electric Town in Japan. It didn’t take long to get me thinking that the fact I’ve been to Japan – and indeed to Electric Town – must be something worth blogging about. It being the Olympic time of year, too, it seems appropriate that I share some memories of a different type of Olympics.

Now, I’m not a physically big guy. I don’t have a huge amount of strength, or physical stamina, and aside from once having spun a yo-yo 5,500 times in succession on a bored Sunday, I do not have much physical skill to speak of.

But, believe it or not, I’ve been an Olympian in my time; not trading on the strength of my body or the agility of my muscles, but of calculating radians and solving for x.

I am an Olympian of a different kind, and this is my story.

~~~

My Olympic story, unorthadox as it is, begins in an even stranger place: my 5th Year English Class. It was a rainy November morning in 2002, and 31 young men were stooped in intense concentration, in a classroom to the rear of St Finian’s College in Mullingar, trying to figure out just how Macbeth was to be defeated should he be fallible only to ‘none of woman born’.

Our readings were interrupted by the familiar sound of heavy breathing over the intercom: it was the school principal, with the morning announcements, which were their usual nondescript selves. Under-17′s soccer training has been moved to Thursday afternoon instead of Wednesday, and the like. It wasn’t until the very end of the announcements that anything was unusual.

“Can Paul Riordan and Gavan Reilly come to the office, please? Thank you.”

An audible gasp arises in the rom. Uh-oh. You don’t get called to the office for behaving well, and everyone knows it. Silent but for our pounding hearts, Paul and I get up from our seats and leave the room. En route I ask him, “Any idea what this could be about?”
“I don’t know, did you get any results rechecked?”
“Oh, that’s it.” I had gotten 2 B’s in my Junior Cert results two months earlier and had sought second appraisals for each. How very wrong I was.

“Gentlemen,” said Fr Connell, as we arrived at his door in a collective cold, unsuspecting sweat. “I have news.” He handed us an A4 envelope each, and simply said, “Congratulations.” Together we smiled. We must have gotten a few upgrades. We opened the envelopes in the office, as was custom for exam results. What we received inside, though, surprised us. The letters didn’t contain the logo of the State Examinations Commission, or a harp anywhere. Instead, the letters were emblazened with the logo of NUI Maynooth. “These aren’t exam results,” Paul remarked, as if acting to shatter any remaining illusion.

“Certainly aren’t,” interrupted Fr Connell. “Congratulations, gentlemen, you’ve been invited to participate in the Irish Mathematical Olympiad.”

The what in the what now? We hadn’t time to ask for further questions, as we were ushered back to class – Finian’s protocol indicated that once your reason for classroom absence had been fulfilled, anything less than immediate apparition back at your desk resulted in a stern talking-to. Thankfully, the morning announcements were always made in the last few minutes of class preceding the 11am break, so there wasn’t long to wait to get to full grips with the content of this mysterious A4 missive. As I stood at my desk in the study hall a few minutes later, changing books at breaktime, I got to have a full look at the letter – however discrete, given the obvious pitfalls of being The Smart One in an all-boys boarding school.

It read that on the basis of my Junior Cert result in Maths, Paul and I – along with 298 other invitees, and 200 returning participants – had been invited to attend fortnightly maths lectures at any one of five training centres, beginning in January. The lectures would culminate in a national exam for the attendees – the Irish Mathematical Olympiad – taking place consecutively across the five venues, and with the top six results qualifying for the national team to take place in a parallel international competition. After consultation with my parents – who were as bemused as I about the notion of there being anything competitive about maths – I elected to go to the lectures in NUI Maynooth (the other venues being UCD, UL, UCC and NUI Galway) as it was only 20 minutes from home, and hence particularly conducive to ensuring the attendance of a just-turned-16-year-old at 9.30am on Saturday mornings in January.

~~~

We were pleasantly surprised. It was 11.10am; break time, and although the lecture theatre – Callan Hall, on the south campus – had been deathly cold, the morning had been much more palatable than we had anticipated. After some warm-up problems of the vintage seven-litre-and-three-litre-jugs variety, we’d moved onto some chessboard problems that, as we would learn, form a staple foodgroup of the mathematical diet.

An example: take a chessboard, 8×8, and take off squares from two opposite corners, so that there are 62 squares remaining. Is it possible to lay dominos across the board, each domino covering two squares, so that the entire board is covered?

The answer is a definitive no. Picture a chessboard in your head, and remove the squares from two opposite corners. These squares will always be the same colour, and so – let’s say the squares you remove are black – your board will have 32 white squares and 30 black ones remaining. Laying a domino on a chessboard will mean it covers one black square and one white, and because the number of white squares remaining exceeds the number of black ones, having laid 30 dominoes the board will be left with two exposed white pieces, which cannot lie beside each other, and hence the board cannot be covered.

~~~

Heartened by what we understood of the first day’s classes, Paul and I continued to return each fortnight, as the attendance slowly diminished around us. From the first day where about 120 people from the midlands and north-east had attended, the group slowly diminished to under 100. While the hassles of early Saturday transport may well have played a role in the dropout rate, what was more likely to see them staying at home was the frightening pace at which the material being covered became more difficult. The first week, it seemed, had been coercive in its ease: by the third week we’d gotten to the theorems of Fermat and beyond; by the fifth we were dealing with advanced combinatorics.

Around March, the exact nature of what we were dealing with was finally revealed to us. The Olympiad competitions, it was explained to us, were only open to pre-University students, and the syllabus up for examination, therefore, was an amalgamation of the second-level maths syllabi of each participating country. This it seemed, unintentionally favoured particular countries: Ireland, with its 40-minutes-a-day, often only four-days-a-week maths teaching, can only ever hope to cover a certain amount of material. China, on the other hand, teaches its teenagers for six-and-a-half days a week, and hence can cover much more. The end result was that while we learned rudimentary probability and basic integration on weekdays, our Saturdays slowly became consumed with advanced inequalities, game theory and optimisation. We were also made subtly aware of an analagous fact: because there was so much material to cover, and because pre-University students who competed in the national Olympiad were invited back the following year, it usually took two years’ worth of attendance to stand a real chance of making the international event, so that while the 2003 event in Tokyo would be out of reach, if one had the resiliance to make it through two years’ training. And all the while, the crowd grew thinner and thinner, ultimately leaving us in a room of twenty on the top floor of Logic House on the old campus of St Patrick’s College in Maynooth.

Ultimately it came to May, and the Irish Mathematical Olympiad. In the end 22 people – myself and Paul among them, though we’d probably both admit to being more interested in the company than the teachings – sat the papers in Maynooth; we heard rumours on the day that only UCD had mustered more entrants, and that only nine had stayed the pace in Galway. The papers, we had earlier been told, would take most of the day, and so it proved: the Irish Mathematical Olympiad, or IrMO as it was usually known, was spread over two papers. Each paper was three hours in length, and contained five problems. We had also, somewhere in between, been broken to the harsh truth of the difficulty: on average, participants scoring 30% would stand a great chance of making the national team, and anyone managing 40% was effectively guaranteed of securing international competition.

As we finished the day, jaded after the intensity of a days’ work that definitely outranked the Leaving Cert in difficulty, I didn’t want to engage in much of a post-mortem afterwards. Truth be told, I remember very little about the day’s problems, other than the fact that the four months’ extra tuition had proved quite fruitless, in that ultimately I had used none of the new techniques I had armed myself with in attacking the questions before me, and had resorted to rudimentary Junior Cert techniques with the occasional advance in mental logic in breaking down the decade of tests. While I felt a couple of questions had been brought to a fair conclusion, surely my inability to apply what I had been taught would put pay to any hopes of a big finish.

~~~

“Thank God it’s over,” I thought, as we left the church. It was a Friday night a few weeks later and the children’s choir that my mother had now run for three years was finishing up in advance of the end of the school year. As the most ably equipped next-of-kin, having studied piano for twelve years by then, I had no choice but to act as the keyboardist/organist for the choir – a joyless job that I quickly took to hating, What teenager, having spent a week at boarding school, would want to kick off his weekend spending 90 minutes with shrieking children playing music he quite despised? The summer break could never come quickly enough.

As we set foot inside the door at home – myself still lugging bags brought home from school, having not had a chance to get home for a brief respite first – Dad seemed to be smirking. “You’ve just missed a call.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Do you know anyone called Gordon?” I didn’t. “He’s just after calling now, you just missed him, he said he’d ring back, but he said that he was from the college, in Limerick, and that he was organising the maths thing, the Olympiad, and he said that he’d marked your paper, and that you did very well,” – and at this point he could contain the smirk no longer – “you made the team to Tokyo.”

The only reaction I can remember having is dropping the coat I was carrying to the floor, and saying, “Fucking hell!”, as Mum yelped, and then yelped again.

After Gordon – Lessells, who worked in the Maths faculty at the University of Limerick – had called back and I’d confirmed that yes, I’d quite like a trip to Tokyo, thanks very much, we made the usual phone calls: both sets of grandparents, Fr Connell, and so on.

The next time we heard Fr Connell’s breathing over the intercom preceding the daily announcements, we were again in English class, and my only recollection of the announcement is that another classmate – now a senior inter-county footballer – thought the notion of pride in someone qualifying for an international competition in maths so ludicrous that he guffawed loudly, and couldn’t stop himself until long after whatever congratulatory message my Principal was making was long finished.

~~~

Having sinced read Angela’s Ashes, I know that the rain we had in Limerick that June is not atypical Shannonside. At the time, though, I feared the apocalypse.

The University of Limerick had invited the six qualifiers – I, of course, had come sixth – to the International Mathematical Olympiad to a week’s training on-campus, aimed at giving us the further leg-up we would need to stand any real chance of competing. Some of the other promising entrants, who had scored well in the IrMO and would stand a chance of making the following year’s international team, were also invited for the first two days’ classes. Again as it turned out, they needn’t have bothered, as the material explained went far over my head. While the first two days’ tuition was bearable, in that I could hide somewhat anonymously amongst a larger group, the latter days came close to breaking me altogether.

I nearly quit in Limerick. I remember getting a call from home, who were still all delighted at their teenage son getting to represent his country, and nearly cracking into tears. My distinct words were, “I don’t think I’ll do it again next year.” I felt scared at being caught out; of revealing that I’d bluffed my way through the IrMO and that while I was taking extensive notes in the classes, I wasn’t understanding any of it. My five fellow contestants, all male, thought I was merely playing up my youth by cheekily admitting I’d cleared the IrMO by only using Junior Cert material. It seemed nobody seemed prepared to accept that I may not have deserved my spot. Diarmuid, who had made the team to the 2002 IMO in Glasgow, reassured me that if I’d finished sixth in the IrMO then I deserved my spot, because IrMO could not be bluffed through. Hugh, a rookie whose father happened to be the team organiser for the year (and who, it would later transpire, had just completed a perfect Leaving Cert of nine 9 A1′s), assured me that having managed the IrMO with Junior Cert maths was a sign of tremendous potential and of great natural ability to tackle problems without needing further education in how to do so.

I was still unconvinced. While I enjoyed the comfort of hanging out with five lads, all of similar intellect and age to myself, it was the times where – on their own initiative – they would huddle down over past IMO problems that made me feel most inadequate. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to learn more and do well; I just couldn’t understand the material. There seemed to have been a mystery time, within which I was apparently visiting cryogenia, in which the other five had been taught things like the identity of ‘pfi’ and other such numbers you could otherwise only encounter when getting change for a 100 Drachma note.

Though I was edgy about my mathematical pedigree, I couldn’t stay down for every long. There was, after all, a free nine-day trip to Tokyo coming soon.

~~~

Part two will be posted here tomorrow.

Nowhere is this more visible in their rail system. Today* we were standing on the platform at the Hauptbahnhof waiting for our S-Bahn back to the airport. On the screens at the platform, we were advised (bilingually) that the rear section of the train would be the one going to the airport, while the front half would be splitting and heading onward. Hence, passengers should board the train “in the A section”. How was the A section signified? There was a sign at that end of the platform.

“The train will arrive in three minutes.” And it did.

“The train will arrive at the airport in 51 minutes.” And it did. And the airport itself? Voted the best in Europe for the last four years: easily laid out, open, warm, airy, well spaced out, and never cramped. All this from a city with a population of about 1.3m, not a huge amount bigger than Dublin’s.

Compare this to Ireland where you’d be lucky to predict which platform any train might arrive or leave from on an hourly basis; where trains cost more than the minimum daily wage, and where combination tickets for more than one public transport service involve brittle, unreliable swipe tickets that don’t work on most buses. And don’t get me started on Dublin Airport – though, to its credit, Terminal 2 really ought to be referred to as Terminal 4, because piers A and D would be named as terminals anywhere else in the world, not least for the reason that you could fit small eastern European republics between the check-in desks and the departure gates.

And that’s not the only example. When the Germans built roads, they did it the right way – big, wide, open, and with no speed limit (I don’t advocate their complete abolition, but when was the last time you heard of a fatal collission on a motorway?). In Spring of 2007 when I lived there, VAT was raised across the board. Now, when the economy gets sluggish? They’re cutting it again. Put more money in peoples’ pockets, and they have more to spend.

Clever, clever people? Not really – just a country who understand that the earlier you spend money, the cheaper a project becomes, and with the profound sensibility to simply think things through.

* which is now yesterday, as I couldn’t get online to publish this post.