Sleep!

Right, I'm worn out after another Saturday of moving heavy objects from one place to another. I need a real weekend, the kind where you sit in front of the telly and do nothing, or maybe do some memory training if you're feeling conscientious. I'm going to bed. I'll make up for this skimpy blogging tomorrow.

Moving house again

Well, I know I've spent the last week talking about my new flat, and I'll stop now, but I really do like the place. I've very nearly got everything unpacked and put away, and I could maybe get back to some memory training if not for the fact that Grandma, that big copycat, is moving tomorrow, from an upstairs flat to a downstairs one in the same building, and I'm helping her out. I might become a removal man full-time, it might give me more free time to do other things.

Although writing this just reminds me that I need to email lots and lots of people about memory-related subjects. I'll have to spend the rest of tomorrow doing that, and then, maybe, spend Sunday actually memorising things.

Plant life

Another thing about this new flat is that it came with a couple of plants. There's a plastic flower thing, and a sort of big tall thing with leaves. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm pretty sure it's not plastic and so probably needs some kind of looking after if I don't want it to die. I'm not what you'd call an expert gardener, as you might have guessed from those first few sentences, and watering plants sounds so easy in principle, but gives rise to all sorts of complexities when you come to think about it. Is that too much water? Not enough? Is this one of those plants that dies if you put water on it? Is it likely to bite me if I get too close? Does it need sunlight? Fresh air? Music? Should I just get rid of the thing before I inevitably knock it over and get mud all over the nice new carpet?

Room to spare

There's a room in this flat that is either the guest bedroom or my study - it's got a bed, but now it's also got my desk and all my memorising paraphernalia too. I'll memorise in it when I haven't got someone staying here, and use it to accommodate guests if anyone ever wants to come and visit me. It's also got a little shelf, on which I've dumped a random selection of my books, for the education and enlightenment of my guests - I'll list them some time when I'm less lazy and see what that says about me - and also, serving as bookends, two of my memory trophies, so guests can recoil in amazement at the sight of the ugly great Memory World Cup 2004 (which used to be a silvery colour but has gone a fascinating array of tarnished shades, I can only guess at what the thing is made of), and the 3rd-place-in-the-world-championship trophy 2003, made of good Malaysian pewter and still the same colour it's always been. Although the little bit on top is about to break off if anyone touches it ever again.

This is a great flat, it really is.

Oh this rain it will continue...

Wow, serious downpour outside as I sit down to type this (laptop perched on a box full of comics I haven't put away yet). I'm trying to stretch my inadequate memory and recall whether this summer has been more or less rainy than last summer, but I can't be sure. And since I don't trust weather statistics quoted by any other source, I suppose I'll just have to never know.

Anyway, before it started raining, I was going to observe how cool it is that they're turning on this Large Hadron Collider thing in Geneva tomorrow. I really like the idea of a device costing billions of pounds that smashes things together harder than anything's ever been smashed together before. I especially like the name - I'm a big fan of the recent trend in science to give things simple names like the Very Large Telescope, and I hope to see a lot more similarly-named, vastly expensive and completely unnecessary devices being built in the future. After all, the money would only have gone to waste if they hadn't built these things, and it probably wouldn't have ended up going to the impoverished and needy anyway...

I'm back on the grid!

Woo! Yay! New swanky two-bedroomed, just-down-the-road-from-work, cable-phone-and-broadband-connected flat! If you're ever moving house, I recommend... well, I can't remember what they're called, but they're the first removals firm in the Derby Yellow Pages. And they're cheap, efficient, friendly and didn't lose, destroy or eat any of my posessions. And they were impressed by my trophies, even though the nice-looking ones were packed away in boxes and the only ones they saw were the big ugly metal ones that are awkwardly-shaped and wouldn't fit in anything.

During the excitement of moving, another man on the street recognised me from the telly and said hello. He then turned to his girlfriend and said "He can memorise a whole pack of cards." The girlfriend replied "Yeah, right," in a tone that made it clear she believed he was lying. I'm surprised by this. Is it so completely unbelievable that someone can memorise a pack of cards? Actually, there are quite a lot of people who can do that, you know.