Making up for lost time

Okay, I've done very little blogging for the last several days, for various reasons, so tonight you get a whole lot. Before I start talking about something that some of my readers might possibly want to hear, could I please direct your attention here? It's the E Nesbit short story "The Cockatoucan", which I've just discovered is available online and read for the first time. I've been looking for it (in my usual passive way of looking for things, which means I've been sitting around and waiting for it to fall into my lap) for quite some time, since I heard that it is practically the only work of fiction in the English language to feature a character called Pridmore.

Now that I've read it, I can say that it's not Nesbit's best work, but I urge you to go and read it anyway, just for the unusual Pridmore-content. She's an unpleasant nursemaid who gets turned into an Automatic Nagging Machine.

And while we're talking about children's books, I noticed today that my copy of "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" has an obvious edit in it that I've somehow never spotted before - on page 53, "This is not good and I know why. A mouse has cut the wire. Good-bye!" The 'good-bye' is in a slightly different font and has the tell-tale faint rectangular outline around it that shows it's been literally cut-and-pasted on top of the original text.

A quick Google search for "a mouse has cut the wire" shows that roughly half of the results say "Good-by" after it. Have any of my readers got an original edition and can confirm that the recent edition amended the outdated spelling? I'll feel very clever if you can tell me I'm right to make that deduction.

Right, was there something else you wanted to know about? Oh, yes, the Derby Memory Championship. The excitement started on Friday night, when Nik (who was born in Russia, lived most of his life in Norway and is now over here studying) and Dai (who's Welsh) arrived at my place, after an extensive and very enjoyable day's filming with the ITV people. It's going to be a very fun programme. I had successfully cleared just enough floor space to accommodate them both, and even though I'd never met either of them in real life before, neither of them turned out to be the kind of person who'd murder me in my bed, which was nice.

We set off for the community centre bright and early, which was a good thing since we went in Dai's car and I gave some very bad directions. But when we eventually found the place, everything went smoothly from then on. We were joined by our very select crowd of competitors - Gaby and Dagfinn, who can take credit for the competition not being cancelled when it became clear that nobody else was going to turn up, since they'd already booked their flights and hotels and in Gaby's case her week-long sightseeing holiday in Britain - and Phil, bearing a big box of memorisation and recall papers provided by James Paterson. My gratitude to both of them is overwhelming.

The actual competition went pretty well for me. I'm completely out of practice at spending a whole weekend memorising, but I managed to keep the right mental state going anyway, once I'd warmed up a bit - I only managed mediocre results in the random words and binary, but after skipping names and faces to do a final set of interviews with the TV crew, I produced a quite respectable 995 in 30-minute numbers, which I haven't practiced at all. I'm sure I can do 1200 or so in Germany with just a little bit more effort in the meantime. Then I did the TV-special world record attempt with Ray Keene and various spectators in attendance, which I'm going to refrain from talking about since the TV people want it to be a surprise. Although the show won't be on TV till later this year, by which time there will hopefully have been other memory-related headlines.

That was the end of the first day's excitement, and we went to Burger King to celebrate. Nik was reluctant, since he tries to eat healthy food as much as possible (people with that attitude should probably stay away from me at memory competitions), but faced with not only my insistence that junk food is very much the way to go if you want to be a great memoriser, but also Dagfinn's enthusiastic agreement and reportedly his psychologist wife's wholehearted condoning of my 'eat food that makes you happy and you'll do better in life' philosophy, he gave in and had a bacon double cheeseburger. A victory for the forces of fast food! We'll soon have wiped all that omega-3 stuff out of existence!

Sunday, being free from the stress of TV cameras, was quieter and simpler, but no less interesting. I started off with a new record of 17 packs in 30-minute cards (attempting 18 and the only problems came right at the end of the 18th pack), I gave my new abstract images system its first trial run and got a personal best of 142 - with a bit more work, it's going to be really good, I'm sure - and followed it up with an acceptable 320 in speed numbers and a decent 90 in historic dates. I still want to get those two world records back, but it'll have to wait until later this year. I had to skip the spoken numbers event - there'd been a problem with the file James had sent to Phil, so I had to create some new numbers myself at short notice on Saturday night - and we had our only delay of the competition before it, waiting for the noisy cistern in the otherwise perfectly quiet venue to finish filling up before we could begin.

That only left speed cards, but despite having two chances to break my own record, I didn't manage to do it. I recorded a snazzy time of 22.88 in the first attempt but the recall was pretty awful, and the second time round I took it just a bit too slowly, stopped the clock at 26.58 and failed to remember it properly anyway. Still, I'm sure it'll all go right at some competition in the near future.

So, I won, Gaby came second and claimed the prize money. Oh knickers, just now as I type this I remember that I promised James J that I'd get him photos of the prize-winners. And I didn't. Hmm, Gaby did take some pictures, we might be able to come up with something to go on the Science House website... Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Dagfinn came third and took the second-place-apart-from-Ben prize and Nik scooped the best (and only) beginner money. So it's a good thing that only four people came to the competition, because everybody was able to leave with significantly more money than they arrived with!

Except me, obviously. My monetary state is really, really not good at the moment. If I don't get a job and/or a big pile of money some time soon, I'm going to have serious problems here. Still, never mind, something'll turn up, I'm sure...