Notoriety

It's a terrible thing to confess, but I would quite like to be on Celebrity Big Brother. I've never watched it, nor Normal Big Brother, and I only have the vaguest idea what goes on there, but I quite like the idea of being on a show for people desperate to stimulate a flagging or non-existent showbiz career. I bet they'd be interesting to talk to. I really do need to get an agent. Maybe that can be a new year's resolution too?

The longest possible time until more Christmas

Still, at least it's still Boxing Day. That's nearly as good. And also, last night's Doctor Who was freaking brilliant! God, next Christmas is going to comparatively suck without David Tennant to enliven the evening! Unless the new Doctor is even better, but I don't think that's going to be possible. Hey, maybe he's not leaving after all, and it's just yet another tease on the part of the creators! That'd be cool.

I think I've been watching too many American TV shows over the Christmas holiday, I seem to be using no end of yankee slang tonight. I'll stop it now. Anyway, maybe it's time I made some new year resolutions and posted them in my blog? Any suggestions would be welcome!

Memorising the future

Well, it's nearly the end of 2008, so let's look ahead to the memory competitions we'll all be enjoying in 2009. The memorysports.info website seems not to be working right now, so I'll be doing this from memory and occasional guesswork, but I think the calendar looks something like this:

March 7 - US Memory Championship, New York, 1-day TV-friendly format, only open to US residents but still fun to go along and spectate. I'm still thinking that I might go, but then I'm also thinking about jetting off to Las Vegas for Christmas because I got an email today recommending the Christmas Day menu in the buffet. I always get this kind of impulse at this time of year, it'll pass.

March 28 - Welsh Memory Championship, Cardiff?, 1-day National Standard format. Should be fun, run by Dai, whose enthusiasm is at times scary and who is sure to put in a huge effort into making it a great event. I'm hoping to see a big turnout to start the 'real' memory championship season! A great way to find out whether you're still in form after the winter break!

April... 9? I really need that website. - French Memory Championship, Maisons-Laffitte, 1-day National Standard format. After putting in such a terrible format at the first championship (which, for publicity-related technical reasons, doesn't count as a real French Memory Championship, to the organisers at least. This one in April is officially the First French Memory Championship, last I heard), I really have to go along to this and try to do something special. It'd be good to see it give memory competitions a real kick-start in France, too. Hoping for lots of new French and international competitors!

May? Maybe. - Cambridge Memory Championship? Cambridge? 1-day National Standard format? Okay, latest buzz is that the Cambridge MSO, on which I've piggybacked a memory competition for the last three years, probably won't happen in 2009. That leaves me without a cheap and available venue to host a competition. I might try to get a Beeston Memory Championship going, maybe seeing what my kind and generous employers can offer me by way of borrowing a room or chipping in with a bit of prize money. We'll just have to see.

May or June or never - North German and South German Memory Championships, somewhere in the north/south of Germany, half-day Regional Standard format. One or both of these events might well happen next year, and I must go along to one of them, one of these days. It's the only opportunity to try the 'poem' discipline these days!

July, probably - German Memory Championship, somewhere in Germany, hopefully Tuttlingen again because I know how to get there and it's a nice venue, 2-day International Standard format. I'm still annoyed that I had to miss this year's, and I'm definitely going to the one in 2009. It's the biggest non-world-championship event of the year, and will quite possibly get a bigger turnout of the best competitors than the WMC itself. It's very good preparation for the WMC, even if there's a four-month gap this time.

August 15-16 - UK Memory Championship, Simpson's-in-the-Strand, London, 1-day National Standard format (split over two mornings because they're sharing a venue with that big chess championship again). This year's was a big success, hopefully next year's will be even better! Yes, they're still having the prizegiving dinner at an expensive restaurant more than 24 hours after the competition finishes, which I would have thought would deter a big international turnout, but judging by this year's event I don't know anything, so I'll stop whining. I've just realised that I've now won the UK Championship two years in a row, and it would be cool to win it more consecutive times than Gunther won the German Championship, just for the sake of the history books, so that's my aim now.

November 11-14, World Memory Championship, somewhere in Bahrain, 3-day World Standard format. The big one, and still a long, long way away from where any of the competitors live (although I've been emailing a new guy in Oman who's all in favour of the location), but I think the memory world is getting used to it by now. And to be fair, it's a long journey for the European and Chinese contingents alike, so that's probably a good thing. And this year's did go very well, so I think we can hope for another great event with hopefully a big turnout again. I'll be there, about 80% probably. 95% if I win another free trip. :)

I've started using emoticons lately. I don't like it, but I find it's necessary to stop people taking me too seriously. ^.^

That's my favourite: ^.^

According to the official World Championship website, by the way, "Registrations are now being accepted. However this year to assist the the smooth organisation of the evenr, and to ensure the number of competitors expected is accurate, no registration will be deemed to have been confirmed until the registration fee of UK£50 has been received by the WMSC"

I did get the impression that people weren't happy with my entirely accurate prediction that the actual number of competitors would be roughly half the list of registered competitors, and that the boasts that this year's championship would have the most competitors ever would turn out to be wrong. I'll refrain from saying anything like that this time round. My new year's resolution is going to be to stop jeering at these people who annually give me money and plaudits for no good reason.

So that's 2009! There will be championships in places like Australia, Poland, Norway, China, Japan and such like too, but I don't know where or when and I very probably won't be able to go to them. Having a job is great because it gives me the money to travel the world, but bad because it doesn't give me enough time off to spend the whole year travelling. It's a catch-22 kind of thing.

Another new year's resolution is to read Catch 22 and start applying that expression in more informed ways.

And another one is to start memory training again. I haven't really done any to speak of since the world championship, and that's probably bad.

New York, New York?

Hmm, should I go to the US Memory Championship in March? Quite a few people I know are going to be there, and it was fun watching the proceedings a couple of years ago, and it would be extremely cool to visit New York again. Granted, it's not quite as cool as the New York in Lincolnshire, but it is easier to get to by public transport.

Any Americans out there want me to visit them?

I need to go to Derby more often

It's the place where all my fans live! In the space of about twenty minutes I had three people ask me if I was the one from that programme - two of them in fact had seen me on multiple different shows! And five minutes after this fan mobbing, I passed another man who whispered much too loudly to the woman he was with "That's him who was on the telly that time."

For the benefit of anyone who's reading this, I do much prefer it when people come up and say hello to me, rather than pointing and whispering. I get paranoid, you see. Especially when I'm shopping - whenever I hear a tannoy announcement saying something like "Staff announcement, could Sarah come to till seven please", I automatically assume that it's the employees' secret code for "Hey, look at that fat, bald, big-nosed man over there! Doesn't he look stupid! And he's reading the comics even though he clearly doesn't have any children of his own!" I assume that the staff at every shop have a wide range of millions of such codes ready for use, and that every single one of them relates to laughing at me.

So really, don't point and whisper if you see me. It's not good for my mental state.

As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted

What happened was, my laptop stopped working. It'd been playing up for some time, but then it took things to a new level, and the keyboard stopped working properly. I tried all the things I could think of - deleting and reinstalling the drivers, shouting at it, hitting it, you know the kind of thing, but that only seemed to make it worse, and it wouldn't even turn on. At this point I decided that since it's Christmas, and Christmas is about buying oneself expensive presents, I would get myself a new laptop. So I did, in the fun of late-night shopping in Derby. However, the new laptop turned out not to work properly either, so then I had to take it back the next night for a replacement. However, NOW, I'm finally back on the internet and ready to think about perhaps buying things for other people.

Incidentally, I've still got my reliable old desktop, getting on for its tenth birthday, but it hasn't got the right kind of socket for my internet cable. Somewhere I've got a dongly thing for converting the modern-style cable into a USB connection, but I'm damned if I know where it is since I moved. I'm sure it'll turn up some day, possibly in a museum.

Anyway, now I'm at liberty to gripe about modern times to an uninterested audience, while I was shopping I heard (in what is admittedly a refreshing change from the usual Christmas songs, much as I love them) the cover of "Run" by someone who was on Pop Idol or something, which I'd heard about before but never heard sung. I hadn't actually realised it was that song - I quite like it, and when I heard someone say "Run", I thought to myself 'oh yeah, I think I like that one, what does it go like?', but it's only now that I've put the thoughts together and formed bigoted opinions.

Really, that is so very not a song for the likes of this Pop Idol woman, whoever she is (I forget the name. Possibly Leona Lewis). That's a real song, it's the kind of song you don't sing unless you've written it yourself and belong to a moody, scruffy band who play guitar quite badly but write good enough songs that it doesn't matter and who have a cult following. Pop Idol women (come to think of it, Leona Lewis, who may or may not be the singer I'm complaining about, might have been off The X-Factor. I only know her name because I remember one of those music channels being rude about her attempts to pass herself off as a real singer) should do covers of chirpy seventies songs that everybody's forgotten, not of recent cool songs that real people like. It's an outrage, I tells ya. Actually, the cover isn't all that bad - the woman's not a very good singer, but it's a good enough song that any version of it is listenable-to. But it's the principle of the thing.

Forgive the brief posts just lately

Lots of things getting in the way of regular blogging. Most recently, my laptop died. I'll tell the full story some time when it's not bedtime. Please, keep reading! I'll start blogging properly again tomorrow!

Two days of stacking shelves...

... really makes your feet hurt. Not that I was using my feet to stack shelves, of course. That would be silly. Although it would have been fun to watch. No, I meant that spending my working day standing up comes as a bit of a shock to the system when you're used to sitting in a comfy office chair all day. Still, I'm back home now, and it's been a fun trip. Although my flat is c-c-c-cold, because I turned the heating off before I went away. Should've left it on the timer, but never mind, it'll warm up soon. Meanwhile, I'm going to go and snuggle up with a hot water bottle.

They knocked down the Regal!

The old Regal cinema in Boston actually stopped being a cinema years ago, and became a nightclub which then closed down. But that was no reason to demolish it! It was great when it was a cinema. I disapprove of change.

I'm rubbish at being a celebrity

I had a call just before leaving the house tonight to catch the train down to Boston. It was that BBC News website guy, who I'd forgotten had arranged to come and film me on Wednesday. So now I've had to postpone that until next year. I really do need to make more of an effort at publicising memory sports, like I promised I would. Maybe I should start sending out hundreds of press releases, explaining at great length that I'm the world's greatest genius, like a couple of other people I could mention...

Okay, I remembered, and it was pants

That thing I was meaning to blog about: I moved my bed the other day and found two pairs of pants and four socks that had fallen down the back of the radiator in the days of the previous occupant. This is great! It delays the time when I'll have to buy new underwear by at least another couple of years! I suppose, if I was strictly honest, I should track down the guy who used to live here and send them on to him, but then it's possible that they're not his, and they've been down the back of the radiator for decades. They do have a sort of seventies feel to them.

Also, I'm going to Boston tomorrow night for a couple of days. More of that 'get the head office workers out into real stores every now and then' thing that I did a few months ago, and I thought it might be a good excuse to check out the old town and see what's happening there these days. Probably nothing, but you never know. There's probably Christmas decorations. So I'll be staying in the only nice hotel in Boston, the White Hart, and they told me they've got internet access, so your daily blogging service should be uninterrupted. But you never know.

What was I going to blog about?

There's been something in my head that I've been meaning to mention for ages, and at odd moments I think to myself "I must blog about that tonight," but then by the time I sit down in the evening to do it, it's gone. It won't be anything important, it'll be an observation that coke is better than pepsi, or vice versa, so don't expect wonders, but hopefully it'll come back to me soon.

Meanwhile, I notice that the UK Snooker Championship is taking place at the Telford International Centre. Now, don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against Telford, I thought it was great when their football team got to the quarter-finals of the FA Cup back in nineteen-eighty-whateveritwas, but I don't think a town should claim to have an International Centre unless it's a place that someone outside Britain (or even someone outside Shropshire) has ever heard of. But that's just me being nasty for no reason.

Local Hero

I've been meaning to mention for a while that that interview with me has now appeared in the Beeston Express and been posted on the internet for the world to see. It's probably worth making it clear that I didn't actually claim that the reason I didn't win the world championship for the last three years is that I didn't take part, nor did I neglect to mention (as I always do when I end up telling that pi story) that I never recited it and would probably have only made a mess of it if I'd tried, and have forgotten the whole thing now anyway. Still, Grandma got a namecheck, which is the important thing!

Rain, sleet and snow

Few of these things seem to fall on me while I'm cycling to and from work. I've been with Boots for five months now (doesn't time fly?) and I've only had a couple of light showers on the way in, in all that time. Which is good, since I don't own any waterproofs, so if I get wet on the way to work I basically end up staying wet. Perhaps somebody will buy me some for Christmas. And some new work trousers. I'm reduced to wearing the ones with small and inconspicuous holes in the legs but which at least zip up properly.

Alternatively, I could stop being a dishevelled old tramp, start acting like a comfortably-well-off financial analyst and buy myself some decent clothes. I'll check out the charity shops at the weekend.

How to hold a successful conference

The whole memory performance went very well, except for one little thing. The little thing in question was the zip on my trousers, which seems to have lost the ability to stay closed. I didn't notice this problem until after I'd stood up in front of sixty people and memorised a pack of cards, so I have no idea exactly what kind of display I put on for them. Nobody mentioned seeing anything out of the ordinary, but perhaps they were all being polite. I did have to spend the rest of the day discreetly adjusting myself at regular intervals. This will teach me not to buy cheap work trousers. Or, possibly, not to buy 34-inch waists when I know perfectly well I can't fit into them any more.

Anyway, this reminds me of my theory of how to organise a good conference/course/official gathering of any kind. I've noticed over the years that there is always a set pattern when the event takes a break for tea and biscuits. Everybody, without exception, goes for a jammy dodger. Only when all the jammy dodgers are gone does anybody take a different kind of biscuit, usually with a cheerful grumble about how the jammy dodgers are always the first to go. The small proportion of attendees who managed to get a jammy dodger spend the rest of the conference in a happy frame of mind, whereas all the others leave in the evening feeling vaguely dissatisfied but not quite able to put their finger on why.

You might think that the solution would be to provide more jammy dodgers, but in fact that isn't the case. A large part of the satisfaction factor is knowing that you got one of the good biscuits, while your peers who weren't quite as fast as you had to make do with a garibaldi or, if they were really really slow, a shortbread. The actual key to a successful conference which everybody leaves feeling fulfilled is to hold numerous tea-breaks and strategically position the seats and the biscuits so that everybody attending gets exactly one jammy dodger during the course of the day. The feeling of 'yay, I got one' outweighs the feeling of 'aw, I didn't get one' by at least five to one, so a maximum of four tea-breaks should be provided.

This didn't apply to today's conference, as all the biscuits on offer were equally nasty, and yet everybody still seemed to have a good time. Must have been the excellent lunch.

Homework

There's a departmental conference at a hotel tomorrow and I've been roped in to be the Offical Boots Memory Man again and entertain the crowd with some memory tricks. This is actually quite cool, because I'm still pretty bad at performing memory stunts in front of an audience, and it's embarrassing if I'm called upon to do something impressive and make a mess of it. Showing off in front of Profit Protection Managers is good preparation for next time something like Blue Peter comes up (I mean, they'll never invite me back after that shambles, but someone else might...)

Of course, it does mean spending the evening memorising numbers, interrupted only by the football (I was hoping Chelsea would lose, but never mind). Still, I really do need the memory practice, too, so I shouldn't complain.

Yarrrgh, work is bad

Busy days at the office leave me comparatively inarticulate, sorry. Roll on Christmas, when I can stay in bed for four solid days and do nothing!

Phone's ringing

Yesterday I had a phone call that I just missed by half a second. I did 1471 and found that it was a number I didn't know with a Nottingham area code, called back and there was no answer. Being a superhuman genius, I quickly deduced that it was a phone box, and that the caller must have been my brother, who hasn't got a phone. Nobody else in the country uses phone boxes these days, after all. I typed the number into Google, just in case there's a directory of all public phone numbers in the country on the internet (turns out there isn't, but there is a list of all the phone box numbers, without any attached address. Just in case you want to call one at random, I suppose).

I rang back again, but still nobody answered it. I was hoping that someone would pick it up and tell me where this phone box was located - if it was just down the road from his flat, I could cycle down there and see what he wanted, and also tell him off for being too lazy to come here himself and tell me what he wanted (he's only about a minute away), whereas if it was in the city and next to his favourite pub, I could call that and accept his invitation to lunch/booze/debauchery.

Don't people answer the phone any more if they hear a phone box ringing? I know there was that film about a man who answered a phone and bad things happened, but it hasn't stopped me from theoretically answering phones. It's actually much more exciting than answering your own phone, because it could be anyone in the world, and they almost certainly didn't want to talk to you at all! And you might help a stranger who wants to pinpoint his brother's whereabouts!

There was a happy ending - he called back a bit later on, and only wanted to check whether I was in so he could come round later on his way back from Attenborough. But even so. Answer the phone, next time a phone box rings at you!

19 days?

Wow, Christmas sort of sneaks up on you, doesn't it? I was wondering whether I should put some decorations up in my flat - I don't normally bother, seeing as I live on my own and don't generally drag people in off the streets and force them to look at my walls, but seeing as it's a new flat and it's big enough to accommodate quite a lot of sparkly tinselly things, maybe I should.

On the other hand, I am extremely lazy. Maybe I won't bother.

Zoomy Clarifies Your Confusions Regarding British Weirdnesses

This week's blog entries, and the comments readers have appended to them, made it clear that I need to explain a few things here.

1) Mince pies are made with mincemeat. Mincemeat, despite the name, doesn't contain any meat, and I'll have to get back to you about how much mincing is involved. Probably none. It's made with raisins, apples, sugar and things.

2) Black pudding is not, as Americans might think, an unusually-coloured variety of a sort of gooey dessert. It's made with (and I worked in a factory that made them for six and a half years, so I know what I'm talking about) dried blood powder, leftover fat from butchering legs of pork, bread rusk, seasoning and whatever other ingredients are left lying around the factory.

3) BBC TV, rather than being funded by commercials advertising products viewers might like to buy, is funded by money from everybody in the country, who are required to buy a TV licence. The TV Licence people are famous for pretending that they are able to detect whether somebody has a television in their house by means of fantastic radar devices, and sending out threatening letters to every address without a licence claiming that they have an army of inspectors who might come round to your house at any moment and catch you watching TV, whereas in fact they don't do any of these things, ever.

The good thing about the licence is that you can watch BBC channels without having your favourite shows interrupted by commercial breaks. The bad thing is that you have to give the BBC money for the privilege, and many viewers feel that it's not worth it considering that the BBC no longer show anything worth watching.

A few years ago, the BBC had a big advertising campaign stressing that the licence fee is great, because it enables the corporation to experiment with unusual and innovative TV programming rather than being desperate to deliver viewers to its advertisers. They've stopped doing that now, acknowledging that everything they show these days is a desperate attempt to attract as many viewers as possible.

Any more questions?