General chit-chat

I met a guy at the party on Saturday night who I got on extremely well with and spent a long time talking to about this and that, until my brother accused us of being 'like a pair of woodpeckers, only talking to each other'. This is either a common expression that's passed me by all these years, or one of those phrases that only he uses.

On Sunday, I bought a fantastic graphic novel - a collection of all Alan Moore's Future Shocks from old 2000ADs. I'd read most of them before, but it's brilliant to see them all at once. And here's another reason to shop at Page 45 in Nottingham rather than Forbidden Planet - the guy on the till asked me what else Alan Moore had written, because the name sounded kind of familiar. I thought he was joking, but it turns out he was entirely ignorant of Moore's work. Now, I suppose I shouldn't expect someone working in a comic shop to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of every comic ever written (although most of them do, because who else but a comic geek wants to work in a comic shop?), but not knowing Alan Moore? If there's a single most famous writer currently producing comics, it would have to be him. Everyone who works in Page 45 can chat with you about any comic you care to name, and recommend good ones. It's the personal touch I appreciate.

I'm undecided about how much to practice speed cards before Saturday. My natural inclination is to do quite a lot, although with most championships I normally leave off training for the week beforehand. With cards, though, you can lose a couple of seconds if you get out of practice for a day or two, and there isn't going to be a huge amount of memorising in Hattingen (12 packs at most, which is nothing, really) so I don't need to worry about not having a fresh journey to use.

One of the presents I got my brother was a Harmidge leathercraft set. Make your own real leather comb case and clothes brush holder! I found it in a charity shop where it had possibly been sitting for a good thirty years - the picture on the packet shows two children with late-sixties/early-seventies hairstyles and clothes looking with delight at the pack's contents - three little pieces of leather that you have to sew together to make the comb case. You also get a comb and clothes brush, needle and thread. Possibly the most exciting birthday present anyone could hope to get.

And a Jem video, which I'm inclined to write about at greater length another time, because I watched it and realised I'd forgotten just how darn good Jem was.