Just keep your bottle and use your heads

For want of anything better to do today, I went to see Nottingham Forest play Birmingham in the cup. Freezing temperature and no goals, but it was still a fun experience. Forest were mostly the best team, but they didn't really look like winning. The penalty miss was worth seeing, though - Robert Earnshaw basically minced up to the ball and daintily chipped it over the crossbar.

Maybe I'll become a Forest fan in 2010. It's about time I started supporting a local team, and perhaps it'd put an end to all those people thinking I still live in Derby. It's the internet's fault. Or possibly my fault for not having my own website that tells people where I live nowadays. I've only got myself to blame.

It's not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me...

Someone sent a text message to my landline yesterday, read out by that robot voice, which went along the lines of "Happy New Year, everyone! Just to let you know, I'm moving into my own place, at the following address in Liverpool. Bye!"

I don't think this is from anyone I know, it's probably a wrong number, but just in case, and you're the person who's moved into a new home in Liverpool, send me an email? Because I deleted the message and I don't remember where it was.

Isn't that an exciting way to start a new decade of Zoomybloggery?

Hootenanny!

Note: The following has been slightly edited, much as this goes against my stream-of-consciousness principles, in case I get sued by the person I originally named in Resolution 4. He has been replaced by Wilson, the Space Aubergine, a character I just invented who bears no resemblance to any human or aubergine living or dead.

Happy New Year, everyone! My resolutions:

1) To develop a new kind of trousers that are somewhere between the full-length kind and those weird three-quarter-length ones that cool people wear nowadays, and become a millionaire by selling them. The secret to this will be to buy lots of normal trousers in bulk and sell them to people who are one-eighth of a leg taller than the people the trousers were designed for.

2) To encourage people to wear skirts on top of their seven-eighths-length trousers, thus doubling the profits of my clothing company and making me a millionaire.

3) To start up a clothing company of some kind in order to facilitate resolutions one and two, and encourage gullible people to invest hugely in "Memory Clothes plc - the only clothing company endorsed by a World Memory Champion as far as is known", thus making me a millionaire before I even sell any trousers or skirts.

4) Consult someone like Wilson, the space aubergine for advice on how to encourage gullible people to invest in manifestly unprofitable schemes like the above, but present the request for help in such an exciting way that instead of me paying him for the consultation, he gives me lots of money as well as the advice, thus making me a millionaire before I even act on the advice received.

5) Set some lateral-thinking expert like Edward de Bono the challenge of re-ordering my resolution list in such a way that I don't have to do the resolutions in sort-of-reverse-order-except-for-the-first-two, because that would just be confusing. Also require him to pay me an entry fee sufficient to make me a millionaire, for the privilege. And also, while he's at it, to rewrite resolution number four so that it doesn't look like some kind of scathing Private-Eye-style satire of Wilson, the space aubergine's business dealings (about which I know nothing), because that wasn't my intention at all, but now when I come to look at it... well, I'm too lazy to change it, anyway.

6) Having become a millionaire, five times over, give the money away to someone else, picked at random from the world's population, because being a millionaire would be no fun at all. And besides, what would I resolve next year?

The 2000s

You know, this decade has been generally memory-themed for me, starting with my first competition (and simultaneously my first introduction to the basic principles of memory techniques) in 2000. I sort of feel like the 2010s should also involve some entirely new challenge for me. I should make an effort to enter as many new and unusual competitions next year as I possibly can, in the hope that one or more of them will click for me in the same way as memory has. That way, in December 2019, I can sit back and say 'Yep, now I'm the undisputed world champion snail-shell-rotator [or whatever my new hobby turns out to be], I can move on to the challenges of the 2020s without feeling at all like I've already achieved everything I'm going to be remembered for in this life...'

Rain is rubbish

I'm fed up of living in the part of the country that never gets the snow. I realise that I hate snow when I have to go out in it, but I don't really need to go out for the next few days, so I'd like to be able to look at it from the window. So yes, I'm going to have to move somewhere arctic. Or just anywhere else in Britain.

Barton in Fabis?

Hey, I've just noticed there's a village called 'Barton in Fabis' really quite close to here, over on the unfashionable side of the River Trent. That's probably what the street I live on is named after. And I always assumed it was just somebody called Barton. Maybe I'll go there and see what it's like, but I probably won't.

Happy That-Bit-Between-Christmas-And-The-New-Year!

I don't know why I never blog on Christmas Day, even if I'm at home in the evening, nor why I didn't blog last night either. Perhaps my latest new year resolution will be to actually blog something every night, like I always intend to. Anyway, yesterday I was helping out in the big Boots store in Nottingham, and today I've been devoting my time to doing absolutely nothing at all. And now I've got seven more entirely work-free days before I have to go back to the office in the far-distant future world of 2010.

I've got plans for this next week. I'm going to learn to speak both Japanese and Chinese, get back into the routine of memory training again and also clean up my flat and do all kinds of productive things. At least, those are the plans. We'll see what happens in reality.