Lemsip

I've got a bad cold, I haven't done nearly as much memory training as I intended to do this weekend, I'm fed up with it raining all the time and I think I'm getting arthritis in my right thumb. Also, I've got to go to work tomorrow. And I bought a lottery ticket yesterday and didn't get a single number.

Still, to look on the bright side, I can get Nick Jr 2 on my telly now, so I get to watch Maggie and the Ferocious Beast every evening!

Also, I currently hold seven of the seventeen memory competition world records (eighteen if you count the poem), including four of the ten world championship ones, and I'm wondering how many more I can get. I'd really like to have more than half of them some day - that'd be something cool to boast about to the general public, who wouldn't have a clue what I was on about. I can maybe get the speed numbers record back if it all goes well in Bahrain, hour numbers is a lot less likely (Gunther will probably beat his own record and go over 2000 this year), spoken numbers is within the realms of possibility, but only just. Words, names and abstract images, no chance at all. But on the other hand, I would hope that the four records I hold already are pretty safe, even if I don't beat them this time out.

Another claim to fame I'm after is winning the world championship more than three times in a row. I realised yesterday in the course of the Mail interview that nobody's ever done that before. Of course, that's a goal that it's going to take me until 2010 to achieve (by which time it will be the future and we'll be holding the space world memory championships on the moon), so we're talking long-term ambitions here. So that ought to keep me still interested, even if I do win it again this time!