Apart From Handsome Good Looks,

I am also blessed with that thing where you can not spell words or recognise letters in their correct order, dyslexia,

photograph Getty Images, (I was joking about the good looks), even easy words such as blur, brown or sword, I can write with 2 or 3 alternatives that to me all look correct, sord or sorwd look no different to me than the correct spelling srowd, thankfully I have a word speller/checker to help me out, but regular readers will know sometimes howlers slip through, sad but there it is, and for that reason a word game called Scrabble is totally off limits for myself, so I was amazed to read that Nigel Richards, a 57-year-old New Zealand scrabble phenomenon, had won the 2015 French-Language Scrabble Championship despite being completely unable to have a conversation in French, but he even beat that this September when he won the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship despite not speaking the language at all!

How did he do it? Well, the same way he won the world championship for French-language Scrabble – by memorizing a remarkable number of Spanish words, without bothering to learn their meaning, “The challenge was a bit crazy, but he learned French vocabulary in only nine weeks. He’s a fighting machine. To him, words are just combinations of letters. I’m perhaps exaggerating a bit, but he comes up with scrabbled (words with more than seven letters) that others take 10 years to know,” Yves Brenez, vice president of the Belgian Scrabble federation, said about Nigel in 2015, according to John Baird, secretary of the Christchurch Scrabble club where Richards played his first game, he “can look at a page and retain the whole thing, it sticks like a photograph. On top of that, he’s obviously got a very good ability to mix up letters and see the word possibilities.” I can only dream of playing Scrabble, sad but true.