It's officially Christmas

The shops are filling their shelves with seasonal merchandise, the 2010 comic annuals are out, it won't be long before everywhere is full of decorations and the merry sound of carols! Which makes it all the more inappropriate that it was hot and sunny and lovely today. I feel like I'm living in the southern hemisphere, although that might also be something to do with the fact that I'm standing on my head as I write this.

Mysteries of the Orient

Japanese TV want to fly me out to Tokyo to have my brain scanned! A free trip in return for some tedious documentary filming sounds like a good deal to me. It'll be some time in October, assuming they don't change their minds or find a cheaper way to do it without buying plane tickets for me. Maybe I can go and visit Ayumu the chimp while I'm there!

It's good that I'm going to Japan, because my brother's threatening to outdo me in the globetrotter stakes - having never in his life so far been farther away from home than Wiltshire, he's now got a job in Harbin, China for the next year at least. And I don't know if you've ever checked on a map, but that's a heck of a long way away. Still, hopefully next year's world memory championship will be in that neck of the woods (I forget whether anyone's told me yet exactly where in China they want it to be) so I can visit.

Anyway, it's the weekend and if I don't do lots and lots of marathon memory practice over the next two days I'm going to lose the world championship this year and be banned from competing ever again due to general rubbishness, so I'd better get on with shuffling cards. Also, I need to learn Japanese...

V.F.D.

I've signed up to become a 'volunteer reading partner' - spending an hour a week helping primary school children with reading. It's one of those 'corporate social responsibility' things that Boots is keen on, and the idea behind me volunteering is that, much as I like my job, I do sometimes feel like I'm not exactly helping people or making the world a better place on a regular basis. I mean, at best I'm tangentially contributing in a minor way to enabling Boots customers to enjoy reasonably-priced cosmetics, but somehow that just isn't as fulfilling as it could be. And improving small children's reading skills might turn out to be fun as well as beneficial to the world in general. It's also a scary kind of prospect that I might well back out of at the last minute, but we'll see...

Forget that Northern Ireland thing

I've decided that it makes more sense for me to support Bahrain. They're playing Saudi Arabia tonight, with the winner going on to play New Zealand for a place in the world cup finals. And the second of their two games against New Zealand is on the last day of the World Memory Championship in November - it would have been a great double sporting event if only they hadn't changed the venue. Just picture it, we could have had all the excitement of the speed cards, then sat around watching the footy and impressing the press people with memorisation of international football trivia. It would have been in all the papers.

Except I would doubtless have gone to bed early, because I'm always dead on my feet after the final day of the world championships, and missed everything.



Postscript: Bahrain scored an equaliser in the last minute of injury time to win on the away goals rule! Yay! Go... whatever the national football team of Bahrain are popularly known as!

Red card

I need to get some new cards. I've had my current load for a good few years now, and they're getting to the point where they're too old for proper memorising - they might well start to stick together when I'm trying to nimbly flick them between my fingers in the space of twenty seconds or so, and that would be really annoying. Of course, it's too late now to get new cards for the world championship, because brand new packs are too slippery and I'd be liable to drop them. I'll just have to reward/condole myself after the competition with a big pile of brand new playing cards, and break them in over the course of the winter break.

Hey, maybe I could ask the organisers to just give me lots of cards instead of a trophy or whatever the prize is?

Because you demanded it

A regular reader (and I didn't even know I had any) has pointed out that I haven't mentioned my sainted grandmother on this blog for a long time. This is quite remiss of me, since I only saw Grandma last Saturday, and she's still alive and well and as brilliant as ever. Considering that, as she often likes to point out, she's eighty-nine years old, she's actually in great shape and likely to carry on having my visits to and conversations with her go unreported in my blog for years to come. I'll make more of an effort to give her a passing mention at least, seeing as I know she's got a lot of fans out there.

Apparently people do see her on the street, recognise her from the telly and stop to chat about whatever I've been up to recently. It's the price of fame, you know.

International affairs

Does anyone know anything about the upcoming Slovenian Memory Championship? There's a website, but it's all in some foreign language (I don't actually know what language they speak in Slovenia nowadays) so I don't know any details about it. It clashes with the British Othello Championship, in the even more exotic and mysterious locale of Frimley Green, so I can't go along and see what it's like, but I hope some information about the event will somehow leak into my consciousness. I've never heard of anyone Slovenian even taking an interest in memory competitions...

Come on you greens!

I've become Northern Irish. I was watching their game against Poland tonight, and it was terribly exciting - much more so than England's boring friendly match. I'm going to get some kind of green hat and follow their remaining games avidly.

And because that sounds a little low-brow and I wanted to give the impression that I've also done something worthwhile and educational today, I decided to wander randomly around the internet until I found a significant historical character I'd never heard of. So now I'm extremely interested in the life and times of Taira no Kiyomori. Wow, he was cool. Although I feel sorry for his unfortunate grandson...

Turn on the radio, daddy-o

I think I've mentioned it before, but I always buy the Radio Times. It's the one thing I'm snobbish about - I can't stand the idea of someone coming into my flat and seeing one of those nasty, garish, cheaper TV guides sitting on my coffee table (I don't think I've ever mentioned that I've got a coffee table in my new flat, now I come to think of it - there's no avoiding it, I'm turning into the middle classes) and thinking I must be the kind of person who exclusively watches soap operas and reality shows. So when the Co-Op down the road didn't have any RTs left tonight (and I'm not going up into town, my leg still hurts) I decided to do without knowing what's on telly for the next week. I suppose I could always look it up on the internet, but I doubt I'll get round to it. But if I miss the football, it'll be the Co-Op's fault. I'd stop shopping there, only that would be betraying my socialist principles even more than buying the Radio Times and owning (well, renting) a coffee table.

1404

I happened to notice that this is blog entry number 1404 in this thing of mine. By an interesting coincidence (well, maybe not interesting, but definitely a coincidence), that's the number of digits I attempt to memorise in 30-minute numbers. It's a strange number, but that's because it works out to 6 lots of 234, and my journeys all accommodate exactly 234 digits. If I'd put any kind of forward planning into my journey design, I would have made them 25 locations long, instead of 26 (or maybe even 40, to fit nicely in with the 40-digit rows of numbers we're given), and given us some nice round numbers, but it's too late now. Seriously, it is too late - a few years ago I tried to design some new journeys that were something other than 26 locations, but it didn't work at all. I'm completely stuck in a 26-location mindset, just because the first thing I used a journey for was memorising a pack of cards, and before the "Ben System" came into existence it took me 26 locations to memorise a pack.

Anyway, long disciplines like the 30-minute numbers are on my mind at the moment, because it's time for me to get stuck in to hour numbers and hour cards training whenever I've got a free weekend. It takes a good few trial runs before the WMC before I can really produce a good result, and we haven't actually got that much time left now.

The only trouble is, I haven't been in the memory-training mood just lately. I had quite boundless enthusiasm early in the year, and I'm sure it will return (I think possibly it's influenced by the movements of the planets), but it's probably going to be a real struggle to sit down and memorise this weekend, even if I'm not doing anything. I don't think I've got plans, but to be honest I can't remember. I'm not that kind of memory man, as I keep trying to explain to people.

Rain!

So, have we had summer now? Is it going to be cold and dark and wet for the rest of the year? Because I feel short-changed by the weather just lately.

Anyway, if you feel that my blog isn't terribly entertaining at the moment, why not go and read My Milk Toof instead? I think it's a work of genius.

Leg up

I didn't write anything yesterday because my knee was sore. What, you didn't know I type this thing with my freakishly long toes? Well, now you do. Anyway, it's somewhat better now than it was - I took the day off work to give it some more rest, although that did mean letting myself in for a mind-numbingly boring day.

It's not like there's nothing I need to do around the house, like cleaning up the place, or arranging for someone to come and replace my gas meter like they keep sending me letters saying they want to, or sorting out an appointment to give blood seeing as I'm out of USA-visit quarantine now, or arranging to get internet banking set up on my new computer for the BOF account (without which I won't be able to compile my treasurer's report for the AGM in a couple of weeks) or even doing some memory training, but I feel that if you're going to spend the day off work sick, you have some kind of moral obligation to lie around doing nothing all day. And besides, I've got a bad leg so you can't expect me to do anything.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I'll be fit to limp back to work tomorrow, so all will be well.

Laid up

I aggravated my old knee injury last night, by falling out of bed while trying to stagger to the bathroom in a hurry because I was feeling sick. I had been drinking to excess, yes, but I prefer to attribute the nausea and lack of balance to some kind of virus, probably affecting the inner ear. So basically, I've spent today lying on the settee with my left leg propped up on the arm, watching telly and recovering from a virus-related headache I'd developed.

It's the first time for a good few years that I've had any serious problem with my knees, and I'd forgotten how painful and inconvenient it can be. Still, at least I don't have to go to work tomorrow, and I should be limping less by Tuesday.

This has been a cry for sympathy from Zoomy's Thing, a subsidiary of Horseradish Tree Productions. Thanks for listening.

Three days off work

It would be a perfect opportunity to do a full trial run of the world memory championship and really kick-start my training for November. But actually, I'm going to spend the weekend hanging out with family members and doing nothing productive at all. And I don't even care.

I will, however, devote the bank holiday weekend to thinking up something interesting to blog about. Look forward to it!

Behold the amazing memory man!

I like when my job allows me to memorise things and not do any work for a period of time. It doesn't happen very often (which is good, because it would get boring if it did), but today I was roped in to help publicise our department's John O'Groats to Land's End charity walk by memorising all the 72 stages of the journey, complete with dates, distances and nearest Boots stores. See, that's a good way to spend a couple of hours of a work day. Also, I was very impressive and everybody thought I was great.

I'm faster than lightning! Well, very slow lightning, anyway...

I do hate to blow my own trumpet, but I am really quite good at memorising a pack of cards quite quickly. If you doubt it, you could check out this video on Florian's awesome website! Complete with trumpet music!

It really is a lot of fun to watch - I look like I'm in fast-forward riffling through the cards...

Doctor Who and the Giant Squid

While I'm still suffering from a lack of blog-subject-inspiration, I feel like I should record that I also recently watched the Doctor Who serial "The Power of Kroll" for the first time ever, and really liked it. Which is a little strange, since the prevailing opinion among fans seems to be that it's awful. It's actually well-written and entertaining, and the bad special effects don't really get in the way of the excitement too much.

By tomorrow, I'm sure I will have thought of something else to write about other than things I've watched on video.

I can't think of anything to write about

So I'll just mention that I watched Pulp Fiction on video yesterday morning, not for the first time, and wow, that's a great movie. I wish I could write something like that.

Return of the pirate

I dug out my old bandana to cover my head while cycling to Nottingham and back today (I felt like the exercise, and the trains aren't running anyway due to engineering works), and on two separate occasions small children pointed out that I'm a pirate. Personally, I think it makes me look more like a space cowboy gypsy beatnik hippy, but I suppose young people nowadays watch nothing but pirate movies. It's a terrible shame. Still, I do think I look groovy with the bandana and shades and leather waistcoast ensemble I had on today - it's the kind of outfit that will look even better when I'm sixty or so, provided I'm also skinny and ruggedly wrinkled by that point, like some kind of really cool aging rock star.

Busy doing nothing

Yep, there's nothing like a lazy Saturday. Gives one time to refresh important life skills, like how to win at Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Doesn't really give you anything exciting to blog about, though...