Who will play me in the movie of my life?

In the Sunday Times article about the World Memory Championship yesterday, I'm described as "a bespectacled, slightly plumper version of the actor Rick Moranis". The writer of the article, who also believes that all memory competitors use a memory method called "mind mapping", has never met me (we talked on the phone for five minutes), and so I'm surprised to find that he thinks I'm plump. Or more so than Rick Moranis, anyway. Okay, I probably am, but how dare he conclude that I'm plump just based on the pictures of me that appeared in the Telegraph and the Mail? Everyone knows that their cameras add ten pounds and an opinion about illegal immigrants.

Well, according to the same article, we can expect to "temporarily lose between 4lb and 9lb of weight each day" we're out there, so when I come home three stone lighter, Rick Moranis will be the slightly plumper version of Ben Pridmore. Still, he's not the only person I've been compared to lately - the woman who arranged the interview on Central News insisted (before meeting me) that I'm a dead ringer for David Gest. I don't see that at all (although I've admittedly only seen one photo of him, I had no idea who he was and had to pretend I knew what everyone was talking about and then look him up when I got home - I don't watch "I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here").

Another thing that Rick Moranis and David Gest have in common is that they're 54 years old. I'm thirty.

Just to make it clear

Last night's blog was genuinely written by my brother, it wasn't me being silly. Normal blogging service will resume tomorrow! And then stop a couple of days later, because I'm flying to Bahrain on Wednesday and I don't know whether I'll be able to keep in touch while I'm there...

I'm drunk. I agreed to let my brother write my blog tonight.

Yer is my turn ter write blog, am moderately drunk but w'd like ter make couple of points. Firstly, m' brother is splendid, with being the world champion and all. Second, watch our televison programme as will have us singing. We were splendid at that too. Forthly, I would just like to add to ALICIA that your unique flat-faced beatuy has quite won my heart, and though I will be leaving Blaze Publishing soon for life of penury I would like you to join me in it. If its a deal-breaker, would add that preferred Lucy in sales before yer started but have gone off that harridan in preference f'r y'r. Lastly, m'brother does good Cher impersonation and is not bad at puling youthful second vocal in Shoop Shoop Song either. That's it, am done. One more thing, has great falsetto voice and will do so in Bahrain.

Cleaning is bad

I might have mentioned that I tidied up my flat recently. This is, of course, a terrible thing to do, and only brings sadness and complications to everyone's life. The major complication here is that I lost a bit of paper with legs scribbled on it. I'm still trying to work on drawing when I have a spare moment, and recently in a spare moment I was trying to get the hang of drawing someone running. And one of these doodles looked EXACTLY right, so I thought "well, I'm keeping this, so that when I have a bit more spare time and feel like drawing the upper half of a running person, I'll just copy these legs and I'll be sorted". But now I've lost the bit of paper, so I'm back to square one. I'm never going to be an artist at this rate.

I really haven't done enough training

What with being ill and/or lazy, I've really skimped on the all-important last-week-before-the-world-championship memory practice. And with my brother and the TV people coming round this weekend, I'll have to be really disciplined on the bank holiday Monday and do a whole solid day of non-stop cramming numbers and cards and things into my brain, just to get myself up to match fitness. Then it's give-the-poor-brain-a-rest time until the competition starts next Friday. Woo! And by give the brain a rest, I mean maybe spend some time working on a better system for abstract images, because I can do that without cluttering up my memory banks and it really needs doing.

Wow, only a week and a bit, and this whole memory mania of the last couple of months will be all over. No more competitions planned for months and months and months. It's sad...

Sartorial elegance

I found my old leather waistcoat recently, and I think I'm going to have to start wearing it again. It always looked cool, and since I seem unlikely to find a new hat before the world championships, and the cloak is too big and bulky to cart to Bahrain with me, I need some item of stupid-looking clothing to make me stand out from the crowd.

I'm also being forced to the conclusion that I'm going to have to take my big rucksack to Bahrain. I hate travelling with a big bag, but I've got a lot of cards and clothes and things to ship over there, and there really is the possibility of me having to take a trophy home with me (although I hate to leave space for that, because it jinxes the whole thing), and there's no way I can manage it with my little bag. Drat.

Snotty follow-up

For some reason, last night's brief post got lots of comments that I wanted to reply to, so, as an alternative to thinking of something else to write, because I still feel rotten and I think I'm going to have an early night, I'll reply here.

Jemfy: Hugs!

Gregory: As I said in the comments section, you (and anyone else interested in learning about my memory systems or just wanting to chat with other memory competitors) should check out the memorysports yahoo group. I can't remember now why I called it memorysports, when I think the phrase 'memory sports' is silly and never use it myself, but I did, and it's too late to do anything about it now. You'll find answers to all your questions (or failing that, a place to ask your questions and subsequently get answers) there.

But in brief - I have a single object for each pair of two cards, I place three of these in each location, and thus use only nine locations for each pack of cards. I'm all in favour of squishing as much information as possible into each location, others aren't, I think everyone should use the system that works best for them. Play around and see what feels good. I go through the deck by turning over two cards at a time and putting them in a pile in front of me. This is monstrously inefficient, although I've practiced enough over the years that I can do it really, really, REALLY fast, and I'm planning after the WMC to switch to fanning through the pack with the whole thing in my hand. I think that'll be faster.

And when you say "I started doing this in July and I am completely stuck at 1:45", do you mean you're under two minutes for a pack of cards and you've only been doing it for a month? If so, that's pretty darn impressive and I don't think you've got anything to worry about. These things take time and practice. You'll get faster.

Anonymous person whose comment I deleted: I'm flattered that you think I deserve more publicity than another well-known memory man who's on TV a lot, but you could have conveyed the point without launching into a foul-mouthed tirade of personal abuse against this other guy, followed by a surprising and equally passionate digression on the subject of the media's anti-Serbian bias. This blog really isn't a place for insulting other people (unless I think they really deserve it), sexual swearwords (unless it's in a context that makes me giggle) or politics (unless I want to say nasty things about the Daily Mail in return for them giving me lots of free publicity - and the whole Daily Mail thing, I should make clear, is more of a private joke between me and a Mail-reading but otherwise sensible friend than something I deeply believe in).

Katy: Shnuzzles! And I postponed the interview on Friday, went to it on Monday morning instead when I was less busy at my current job. It went quite well, but I don't think they're going to offer me the job - mainly because it'll involve frequent trips to their other office in Windsor, and I don't drive. Shame, but such is life.

Simon: Did you tell me that you've started using a two-card-image system? If so, I forgot about it. Good luck with it! It's a lot of work to get it fixed in your head, but I really think it's worth it.

Everybody who couldn't be bothered to comment: Just to show there's no hard feelings, I'll answer an imaginary question of yours too. What's my favourite unusual snack that would make most people go yuck, you say? Well, I like cheese and jam sandwiches. It's something I picked up from my dad, it's a strange taste but I really like it. I just had one for tea, and while it's made me feel sick, that's probably more to do with me not being well than the sandwich itself.

Snotty

Ugh, I really am feeling rotten today. Just thought I should let you know, in case anyone wants to give me a hug to make me feel better, or something. Hope I get rid of this cold before the world championships. But speaking of which, the Sunday Times want to talk to me now! That's definitely a step in the right direction from the Daily Mail! Although what with work and needing some last-minute practice, I could do without the distraction...

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!

I'm gonna live forever

I now get 185 pages on a google search for my name, and most of them are about me. Now that's fame.

I did the interview with the Mail this morning - they also wanted to photograph me in the Brazilian Mystery Cloak, which is going to become more famous than the hat at this rate (assuming I find a new hat). I can envisage my clothing having fights and not speaking to one another.

Weekend plans

Memory, memory and more memory, with a bit of being interviewed and a bit of cleaning up the flat if I'm good. I've made significant strides in cleaning up the living room tonight, after a good solid chunk of memory practice, so who knows what I might achieve if I keep this up?

Two weeks till the world championships! Woo!

I don't care if it's technically summer!

All the shops that might be expected to sell me a new black fedora or similar are only selling 'summer hats' - either straw hats or floppy cloth ones. This is disgraceful. Yes, wearing a big black hat in the summer sun is uncomfortable and not something that any sane person would do, but why are the shops so prejudiced against the insane? I'm going to have to go to Bahrain wearing one of the straw cowboy hats I've had sitting in my flat since that cowboy murder party years ago (the straw hat I bought in Stuttgart got ruined last Sunday when the TV people decided it would be cool to film me cycling in the rain). I'm not sure the straw cowboy hats are good memory hats - I can prop my stopwatch up on them, but it sometimes falls over. It doesn't do that with a good hat. I need a big black hat. Maybe someone else will leave one on a train so I can steal it?

I've forgotten something

I was going to write something specific tonight, and I'm pretty sure it was going to be about memory. But I've forgotten what it was.

So instead, I'd like to make a job offer - I would gladly pay someone to say no to other people on my behalf. I didn't manage to turn down the Daily Mail - I explained that I'm very busy lately what with work and the world championships coming up, but it ended up with me cheerfully agreeing that the writer can come round on Saturday morning to talk to me. And I really need to be training all weekend too, since next weekend I've agreed to parade in front of the TV cameras again even though that's the last weekend before the WMC and I really, really, really need to be training all that weekend.

Also, I have neither cancelled the interview on Friday nor asked my current employers for the morning off. I like to adopt the attitude that if I don't do anything, the whole situation will sort itself out to my satisfaction somehow anyway. Strangely enough, it usually does, too.

What to do?

I've been offered an interview for a rather cool job in Burton-on-Trent on Friday morning. It's something that's been in the pipeline since before I started the job I'm at now in Nottingham - they wanted to interview me while I was in Germany, then the boss went on holiday and now they still want to see me. So they're at least a little bit impressed by my CV. Which is weird, really, since they job spec asks for a graduate, with experience of the strange accounting software they use (which I've never even heard of before now). But like I say, it sounds like a good job, and it pays rather significantly more than the one I'm doing right now.

On the other hand, the one I'm doing right now is a nice enough job, pays enough to keep me going and they've been very generous in letting me take time off to go to Bahrain right in the middle of when I should be producing the year end accounts (as an aside, I have to stop getting jobs with companies with a financial year end in July and August - it's always going to clash with the WMC), and I'd feel bad about taking Friday morning off to go to an interview for another job.

I've already said yes to the interview, because as you might remember I find it impossible to say no to people, so I'm going to let somebody down one way or the other. Maybe I'll hire an actor to impersonate me at either the interview or the job. Or two actors, to do both! Then I can stay at home and watch cartoons all day! Or ooh, even better, I'll hire a third actor to stay at home and watch cartoons all day, while I go out and rob banks, safe in the knowledge that I have three cast-iron alibis!

Some forever, not for better

I've said it before, but it bears saying again - the old house looks so SMALL! I still can't get over the whole perspective issue. The whole of Tumby Woodside seems to have shrunk, in fact (and it was never exactly big in the first place). But number 2, Chapel Road, especially.

The place has changed completely since I last saw it - the front hedge is three times as tall, so you can't see the house from the road. There's a new fence that stops you seeing through to the back garden, there's a new brick porch around the front door, and what used to be the lawn is now all gravel. And TINY! It's a few steps from one end to the other of what used to be the lawn - it used to be big enough for a full-scale football game (if I could bully my brother into playing football with me). While Nick was talking to the current owner's father and preparing to film me going into the house for the first time, I was picking out the few bits and pieces that are still the same - the bit of concrete marking one side of the driveway, the cherry blossom tree (now surrounded by other plants rather than standing on its own), the little hole at the corner of the hedge that you can hide in if you're small enough, the old roof tiles that don't match the newer ones on the other houses in the row (my dad didn't want to waste the money on getting them replaced - a decision vindicated by the fact that apparently they've just started leaking in the last couple of months). There wasn't much, and it was all too small, but it was good to see the few little familiar bits.

The house has just been bought by a London policewoman called Alex. She's still in London until she gets promoted to sergeant, when she'll be able to relocate to Lincolnshire. And judging by the dumbbells in the bedroom, you won't want to tangle with her when she does - I couldn't life them with both hands! So the house is pretty much empty right now, just a few bits of furniture, all the wallpaper's stripped off and it's waiting to be redecorated all over. It was Alex's father, Ron, who let us in and obligingly waited in his car while the TV crew did all the filming. She also has a brother who was in The Boot Street Band. The pictures and knick-knacks that are in the house already are all police-themed.

But the previous owners have done a heck of a lot of things to the inside of the house - for some reason they've blocked off the door between the lounge and dining room and knocked another one through at the other end of the wall. The fireplace that my dad built himself is all gone, and there's just a few scraps of the old wallpaper on the lounge walls. What used to be the dining room is now a kitchen, and what used to be the tiny kitchen is now a sort of study. They've moved the back door along the wall too, and replaced it with French windows. The bathroom's still the bathroom, but the fixtures have all been replaced. I was just marvelling at how small the rooms were - how did we fit the piano, record player, sofas, armchair, TV, shelves and things into the lounge and still have so much space? How did we enact so many epic Action Force adventures in the minimal floor space of the dining room? And yes, the kitchen was always cramped, but it doesn't look like it could ever have fitted the sink, wasing machine, cooker, fridge, freezer and a bit of space to walk between them.

And upstairs, my bedroom looked like a cupboard! No furniture in it at all, but it's so tiny now, I couldn't believe it. Likewise my brother's room, although the view out to the kitchen roof is familiar - nobody's replaced the tiles there, either, even the couple that are broken or the wrong shape. Funnily enough, the only room I didn't get the shrinking feeling is my dad's room - obviously, because that's the one room in the house I didn't spend much time in when I was little. It's weird, but that room is still the size I remember.

And as for the garden - there's a wooden summer-house out on the front, the old brick shed is still there but the garage and bike shed are gone. The grass is neatly cut and flat, there's no blackberry bushes. The hedges there are also ten feet high - the previous owners really liked their privacy - and there's a new row of tall trees hiding the back garden from anyone in the fields behind. But duck behind the trees and there's a couple of feet of the garden I remember, overgrown and wild, before the wooden fence which, wonderfully, still has the rusty metal pole tied to it. I never knew what that pole was for, but you could hold onto it and stand on top of the fence in the corner of the garden where we had our base (Bjorn House, with "Bjorn" pronounced in a strictly English way). I looked for the old wooden flooring, but it's either gone or overgrown.

It was a strange experience - tiny bits of the house are still the same, the rest is so different it's scary. I still sort of think of it as the place where my dad's living, and I can pop down to see him any time. It's weird to see that it hasn't just stayed the same all these years...

This old house once rang with laughter, this old house heard many shouts

Actually, I'm too tired and headachy to write at length about my trip to my old house tonight - I've only just got home and I've got to be up early tomorrow for work. So I'll leave it till tomorrow except to say that it genuinely looks so much smaller now, I was amazed! Especially since I lived there till I was twenty, brief dalliances with university aside, and visited it frequently until I was 23. I haven't grown significantly since then, as far as I know, so why do I remember the place being so much bigger?

Instead, I'll post tonight that the prize fund for the World Memory Championship has just been announced (woo!) and there are very nice prizes for the top ten competitors (double woo!). I quote:

The total prize fund will be US$ 30,000.

This will be divided in the following way.



The World Memory Champion 2007 will receive US$10,000

The Silver Medallist will receive US$ 5,000

The Bronze Medallist will receive US$ 3,000



Competitors achieving 4th to 10th place in the competition with each

receive US$1,000



I am sure you will agree that this exciting news will dramatically raise the profile

of the Mind Sport of Memory and contribute to making the 2007 World Championships

in Bahrain the best yet.



Our grateful thanks go to Shaikh Hamad and Intelnacom for their tremendous support

Presumably the remaining $5,000 will be embezzled by someone in a position of power. But even if the prize fund is actually only $25,000, that still makes it the biggest ever by a long way! And since so few of the world's best memorisers will be turning up, anyone who can scrape together the cash for a flight to Bahrain stands a very good chance of making back a good part of the cost. Hopefully this'll inspire a few last-minute entries (and hopefully the WMSC don't really mean it when they say registrations close a month before the competition, because that's just silly).

It'd take a dozen skivvies, his clothes to wash and scrub

Woo, the football season is back! And with it comes Match of the Day on the BBC on Saturday nights, coinciding nicely with the othello tournament on kurnik! I can get back to my usual Saturday routine of avoiding seeing the football results so I can be surprised when I watch the highlights. Which is going to be a bit harder this year, with Derby being back in the Premiership. I haven't heard any celebrating fans running through the streets this evening, so they probably lost.

Normally speaking, staying up till nearly midnight isn't a problem, it being Saturday, but tomorrow I need to be up at the crack of dawn to get a series of rail replacement buses down to Boston, so I can be filmed hanging out in Tumby Woodside. Times like this I need reminding why I agreed to this whole documentary idea. I'm still getting used to working five days a week again, I can do without giving up half of my weekend too. Moan, mutter, grumble...

I have GOT to learn to say no on the phone!

The Daily Mail phoned me tonight and I ended up agreeing to let them send someone round to interview me next Wednesday night. I should have said something along the lines of "Sorry, I don't really want to be interviewed", but as regular readers of my blog will know, I'm not good at that. So I said that I'm quite busy at the moment, and let myself be talked round.

Seriously, the Telegraph was bad enough, but the Daily Mail? I do have a strict rule in this blog of not talking politics, and I only break it very occasionally, but I do have quite extreme left-wing views, and it's not that much of a secret. So why is it only the right-wing papers that want to talk to me? I'm the kind of typical weirdo bearded lefty Guardian reader (except that I don't read the Guardian), aren't they curious about the world memory championships? Is the Mirror completely uninterested in the mechanics of memorising a pack of cards? Doesn't the Socialist Worker want to make me a pin-up of the week?

I'm going to get out of this, I can't actually appear in the Daily Mail.

The problem with working

Is that I go to work, juggle numbers, come home and do nothing exciting or blogworthy a lot of the time. And I'm in a bit of a lull between memory championships. I should be training in the evenings, but I haven't been in the mood this week. I'll try to do an hour numbers again on Saturday, and maybe hour cards too. But I need to get into the habit of doing some speed and spoken numbers in the evenings, because that's what I need to work on.

Who knows, maybe something interesting will happen to me tomorrow?

It was quite a day

Donald woke up on the morning of his thirty-seventh birthday to find himself not in his bed, but lying in the middle of a mini-roundabout, tied by the wrists and ankles to a tree trunk and blindfolded with what a quick probe with his unusually long tongue suggested was a medium-sized woman's handkerchief. "What's going on?" he asked.

A medium-sized woman took off the blindfold and started to untie him. "Surprise!" she said.

"Prudence?" said Donald, a little confused. "Why am I tied to a tree trunk in the middle of a mini-roundabout?"

"I wanted to bring you here as a birthday surprise, so I drugged you last night and dragged you here. I don't own a car, so I have to travel everywhere by dragging a tree trunk around."

"But why a mini-roundabout? Many lazy drivers drive over the painted white circle over the edges of which your tree trunk is dangerously jutting. We're not entirely safe here."

"I had to stop here because I ran out of petrol. I was heading for the car park half a mile down the road."

"Wait a minute," said Donald, with a look of dread on his face. "A car park half a mile down the road from a mini-roundabout? There's only one place in the world where that occurs! We're in WELWYN GARDEN CITY!"

"Yep!" said Prudence, finally freeing Donald from the trunk. "Happy birthday! I knew you'd like it!"

"Like it?!" Donald screamed. "Like it? I hate Welwyn Garden City! You know I can't ever bring myself to go within fifty miles of the place! I've told you about it several times - when I was ten years old I was chased by a rabid pig through the streets of Welwyn Garden City for seventeen hours until it was finally killed by a white hunter! It left me permanently psychologically scarred!"

"Oh," said Prudence, frowning. "A pig? I thought it was a rabid horse."

"But you did know it was Welwyn Garden City? And still brought me here?"

"Well, yes, but I checked with the Lady Mayoress before we came that they weren't intending to have any rabid horses roaming the streets today. I didn't check for pigs, though."

"There might be rabid pigs? Seriously, what's wrong with you?"

Prudence sniffled and her lip wobbled. "I only wanted to give you a birthday surprise! I thought you'd like it!"

"I wanted to spend my birthday with my wife and children! It's not that I don't appreciate your gesture, but we just work together, we're not even particularly close friends. You could have just sent me a card. Oh heck, here comes a rabid horse!"

"It can't be! The Lady Mayoress promised me!" Prudence screamed as the horse bore down on them. Abandoning the tree trunk, which was subsequently towed away and crushed into a cube, the two of them ran headlong through the streets for eighteen hours until the horse was felled by a collapsing statue of Disraeli.

"Sorry the birthday surprise didn't work out quite the way I'd expected," Prudence gasped, lying down in the gutter to catch her breath.

"Don't worry about it," Donald smiled. "It was a surprisingly pleasant experience, all in all. Apart from the bit with the horse."

This has been a presentation of the Welwyn Garden City Tourist Board. Come to Welwyn Garden City. A great day out for all the family.