Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires

My passport expires in June next year, and what with lots of countries insisting you've got six months still to go on it before they let you in, that means I need to sort a new one out as soon as I get back from Tokyo.

It's rather sad, you know, because this current passport of mine was the first one I've ever had - just ten years ago, I never considered that I might ever go abroad. Nowadays, of course, I'm hopping on a plane every week and zooming off to some far-distant land, but back in 2000, going to Washington DC was scary and exciting. Turned out to be fun, though, which is probably a good thing, because I might have never gone anywhere ever again if it had turned out to be nasty. I should write to the city and say thanks.

I'm not going to win the World Memory Championship

Just can't get into training at the moment. I've got to do something this weekend before I set off for the Mensa thing in... Tamworth? Telford? Somewhere that begins with T, anyway. I hope it's Tamworth, that's much closer. But anyway, I need to find the time on Saturday morning (conditional on me having prepared my presentation, although I can always do that on the train or in my hotel room on Saturday night) for a good long memorising session. Because I'm conscious that I haven't practiced enough, and when I feel like that, I do badly at memory competitions. Positive thinking is essential for good memorising. I should mention that in my presentation.

Tell you what, let's save a bit of time by looking up right now exactly where I'm going at the weekend (for a gala dinner on Saturday before the 'Ben Pridmore demonstrates his spectacular talents' bit on Sunday lunchtime - I hate gala dinners, and since that's the only payment I'm getting for this beyond doing a favour for the old acquaintance who's organising the whole event, it makes me wonder why I agreed to it in the first place...) so I don't have to spend Saturday morning making travel plans...

Bristol. Why did I think it started with T? And Bristol is bleeding miles away! Okay, that settles it, I'll do an hour numbers practice in the morning and spend the long train journey preparing my speech/slideshow. Pictures drawn by hand, with the mouse-pad on my laptop.

Starting to believe my own hype

I have planned out the general kind of thing that I'm going to do at this stupid Mensa presentation, but I haven't written it down. It occurred to me that speaking with notes at a presentation about memory is probably a bad thing, but really, that's exactly the kind of misconception I'm intending to try to debunk - do people assume Usain Bolt never needs to catch a bus, because he can just run everywhere? There's a better analogy out there somewhere, but I haven't worked out what it is yet. Anyway, I need to go on some kind of campaign to stop people asking me how to remember where they put their car keys. It really annoys me.

I've still got a cold

And I've also got the slight annoyance of having promised to do an hour-long talk/presentation on the subject of memory for Mensa members on Sunday, and haven't prepared anything for it. When asked if I'd like accessories like a laptop and projector to aid my presentation I said yes, sure, why not, so now I've got to create something on Powerpoint too if I want them to think I know what I'm doing. It's a hard life, being a celebrity.

Reading and sneezing

I've got a cold and would appreciate sympathy. I've also got a new old book, as part of my continuing quest to actually read some books that edumacated people have read - "The Woman In White", cost 50p from a charity book stall. I have a vague idea that they did a BBC adaptation quite recently, so I might be jumping on the bandwagon like some kind of dreadful wannabe-intellectual, but I'm hoping that I'm thinking of someone else, and the book is still known and cared about only by stuffy old people with too much time on their hands. It's quite good, actually.

I'm rubbish at memory

Sorry for not blogging yesterday, but I was hanging out with my imminently China-bound brother. If it's any comfort, we did spend the time productively, including thinking up an advertising campaign for a beer targeted at sissies.

However, I'd set aside today for some more long-distance memorising training, but I just haven't been in the mood to do anything. I've had a sore throat for the last three days, and I feel fed up. And also, I think some books I ordered from Amazon have got lost in the post. It never rains but it pours. But never mind, I'll spend some evenings this week doing nothing but memorising stuff, just to get me more in the mood...

How to contact me

People often seem to have trouble working this one out. Just find my email address, it's dotted around the internet in various places if you look it up. It's zoom_zoom_ben and it's a UK Yahoo account, you can work it out from that unless you're an evil blog-scanning, email-address-harvesting computer.

I tend to ignore people who add me as a friend on Facebook if I don't know who they are and they don't leave any kind of message (actually, I sometimes ignore people I do know, who do leave a message - I quite rarely get round to visiting Facebook and updating my friends list). Also, please don't send a message to the other Ben Pridmore on Facebook and tell him you're a big fan of his memory skills, because he doesn't like it. And you definitely shouldn't add me as a contact on LinkedIn - I joined the site because someone told me to, years ago, never did anything with it and now I've finally deleted my account. Nor should you really contact the World Memory Sports Council, or the Alzheimer's Society, or anyone else I've been vaguely associated with in the past and ask them to pass a message on. It's much easier to just find my address and drop me a line directly.

Oh, and it's a really, really bad idea to find my phone number in the phone book and phone me. I'm never in, and I never listen to my messages. Also, I hate phones.

Mister can you tell me where my love has gone?

Those super-cool Japanese TV people are inviting me to Tokyo for a whole week! Flying out on October 22nd or 23rd and back home again on the 29th! This is very cool, because I was planning to take some time off work for a bit of memory training, and it'd be cool to do that in a hotel in Tokyo, with occasional breaks to see the big city. Now I just need to learn Japanese, and possibly buy some souvenirs to give to the Japanese people, seeing as whenever Japanese TV crews film me they always give me a goodie bag of really nice little gifts...

Indescribable!

Nestlé are relaunching Cinnamon Grahams cereal as if it's a new product, calling it Curiously Cinnamon, descending on office buildings and giving out free samples to the workers and holding a competition in which you can win £250 of Tesco vouchers (possibly the least exciting prize ever offered by a breakfast cereal) by describing the 'indescribable taste' of Curiously Cinnamon. The tagline for the "new" cereal is apparently "the indescribable taste of toasted cinnamon squares".

Now, it may just be me, but when I hear the phrase "indescribable taste", I automatically assume that we're talking about something that tastes awful. Since when is "indescribable" a flattering way to describe food? To me, the only thing "indescribable" describes is these guys:

Come to think of it, it probably is just me.

And on an unrelated note, aargh! I've just seen a trailer for a film called "The Invention of Lying" that uses the same basic idea as the first chapter of my unpublished masterpiece "The Adventures of Jayce and Alex"! Ricky Gervais stole my idea! And now I'll never be able to offer the story for publication until everyone's forgotten this latest movie!

Not enough hours in the day

Not if I want to fit in a great deal of lying around watching telly in the evenings, anyway. So I haven't typed up my transcripts from the othello yet, and nor am I going to write a big long blog tonight either. But on the other hand, I am enjoying watching How I Met Your Mother on E4 every night.

Still, I should probably be spending more time memorising things in the evenings, what with the world championship being so soon. I'll do that tomorrow.

Hello To Othello

The good thing about the Nationals is that although they take place over two days, they don't start until the Saturday afternoon, so even if they're in Frimley Green it's possible to travel down on the Saturday morning without getting up early. So I did, and what's more the weather was really nice, so even the walk from Farnborough Main station to the venue was entirely pleasant. And I didn't get lost in the slightest! I can follow Google Maps "walking" directions with no difficulty at all, it seems, even when I'm walking and not cycling! And what's more, walking between the two Farnborough stations takes no more than fifteen minutes, not the 22 that thetrainline.com tells us.

Since there hadn't been any delays in the trains on the way there, I even had time to drop into a nice-looking pub for lunch, and bumped into Adelaide, Geoff and Imre, who'd had the same idea. The highlight of lunch was concluding that it would be really brilliant if being brain-scanned in Japan (which is definitely happening, by the way) accidentally stripped me of my memorising ability. There would be no end of documentaries about that! And I'd never get tired of it, because I wouldn't remember having made any before!

Anyway, the competition took place at Frimley Green Football Club, which has got a whole lot of football pitches either in it or next to it, I wasn't quite sure. The main pitch is right outside the room where we were playing othello, and FGFC were at home on Saturday afternoon (they lost), so it wasn't a perfectly quiet place. But it did mean I could just step outside the door between rounds and watch the game, which was great. On Sunday I had to walk down the path to the big park with four more football pitches on it to see the action. And then I always seemed to get there just as they were stopping for half-time, or at the moment when one of the teams in a women's game decided the referee was being unfair to them and all walked off the pitch en masse.

I don't whine about this very much, preferring to just project an air of noble suffering, but if I didn't have bad knees, I would be out every Saturday or Sunday afternoon, playing football (badly) for a small local team. Being World Memory Champion is only something I do because I can't play football. If someone came up with a miracle cure, I would ditch the whole memory thing straight away and devote myself to a career as an unsuccessful amateur footballer.

Anyway, the usual prelude to the Nationals is the AGM of the BOF, at which the real excitement came from a text from France (who were also having their nationals on the same day), informing us all that Bintsa had been apparently caught cheating with a PDA, and had been doing this for the last year or so. Now, I'm not a technical person - to me, "PDA" means Pocket Dragon Adventures, my favourite cartoon, but I think in this context it means some kind of little computer or mobile phone, presumably with an othello program on it. Opinion was divided on whether this whole thing was a joke of some kind or not, and on exactly how it would be possible to cheat at othello with a PDA in your lap without anyone noticing. Still, it gave everyone something to talk about, and made our AGM's resolution to buy four new clocks seem quite tame and unexciting.

We also played some othello, but I don't remember much about that. The interesting thing about my games was that they were either extremely close or completely one-sided thrashings - no scores in the 20s for either player in any of my nine games, and only one in the 40s (I was desperately trying to maximise my disc count in the last game, against Roy, so that I could say 'no 20s and no 40s' to my uninterested blog-audience, but only managed to win 49-15 in the end). I did also have two draws, which is pretty unusual in othello - and what's more, the second draw was against Julian, who had himself also had another draw in a previous game. How many times has that happened in the British Othello Championship? Probably no more than two or three at most.

I ended up on five points - four wins, two draws, three losses - which isn't too bad, although I was never really in the top part of the leaderboard. I did get slaughtered 63-1 by Imre in my first game on Saturday, and then annoyingly beaten 33-31 by Michael in my first game on Sunday - annoying because I counted the ending with about ten moves to go (it was one of those cases where there's only one vaguely plausible ending) and worked out that I ended up with 33 discs, then a couple of moves later re-counted and realised I'd made a mistake and I actually only got 32, then another couple of moves later noticed that I'd missed another disc and I only got 31. I doubt that I had a win anywhere, but it's still annoying.

Anyway, those two ended up in the final and Michael won, so yay for him because he's never won it before. And I was eighth once you work out the tie-break, so I'll qualify for the world championship if five of the people above me find some good reason not to go to the worlds (and if Geoff, who finished 9th but is entitled to play for Britain in the WOC by virtue of winning the BGP earlier this year - we really love those three-letter abbreviations in the othello world, don't we? - ends up playing for Australia). I'm not holding my breath.

Which reminds me of another thing - Geoff's moving to Denmark, so now the chairman of the British Othello Federation will be an Austrian who lives in Denmark, an extremely groovy and eccentric state of affairs that is very much what the BOF is all about.

Home from the green green grass

What a fun weekend, I'm glad I decided to go after all. And the five-and-a-bit-hour journey home wasn't too unpleasant either. But I'm still too tired to write about the competition, so I'll wait till tomorrow to talk about it, except to say that I was generally mediocre and Michael Handel won the British Championship for the first time, in considerable style.

Frimley Green

They play darts there, as I understand. But tomorrow and Sunday, they're playing othello there instead. And by 'they', I mean me and the rest of the British othello posse. I actually decided yesterday that I wasn't going to bother with the nationals this year, because getting a train back on Sunday night is a long, tedious process that is almost certain to result in me being marooned at midnight somewhere en route, probably Penicuik, when the various trains are delayed, diverted and cancelled.

And have you ever tried getting a train ticket to Farnborough North on thetrainline.com? It sends you to Farnborough Main, and then the last leg of the journey is walking, 22 minutes (exactly) from the one station to the other. I haven't checked the prices, but I expect it costs more, too.

Anyway, after telling everybody I wasn't coming, I thought that maybe I could cope with a five-and-a-half hour train/tube/walking journey if I leave fairly promptly at four o'clockish (I'm expecting the tournament to run ahead of schedule as usual and me not to get to the final as usual - although I did end up in the 3rd/4th play-off in 2004, I remind you), as that'll get me to London before the last train of the night that stops at Beeston leaves (all the later trains force me to get off at Long Eaton or even, heavens forbid, East Midlands Parkway, and get a bus).

But I still wasn't entirely sure about whether to go or not, so I decided to go to playok.com and play (ok) a few games of othello, to see if I was in good form. If I ended up winning, I reasoned, I'd go to Frimley Green and long journeys be darned. Having then lost five games in a row against mediocre opposition, I decided to go to Frimley Green anyway, because I wanted to. Never put your fate in the hands of your othello-playing ability, people.

Now all I need to decide is whether to stay up and watch the first of the new series of Peep Show, or go to bed early in order to be good and refreshed for the competition tomorrow. Choosing the first option forces me to find something to do for an hour to avoid Derren Brown on telly, but I'm sure I can manage that if I really try. Anyway, wish me luck, and I'll resume bloggery on Sunday. If I get home early enough.

There's just one thing I don't understand

Why is there a Sea Life Centre in Birmingham? Who goes to Birmingham wanting to see sharks and giant sea turtles? And isn't it really inconvenient to ship all that sea life overland to the middle of a big city? And what do they do if the big tank springs a leak and they need to fill it with more sea water?

It's a working man I am

Sorry I didn't blog anything yesterday, but I was tired after a day of stacking shelves, and I didn't realise I hadn't blogged until after I'd turned my computer off for the night. My memory is bad, you know. However, after another day of hauling a wide range of desirable products around a store that strangely keeps its stock three storeys above the salesfloor, I'm feeling quite invigorated. I think everyone who knows me knows that I'm not really what you'd call a manual worker - I've never had a job that involved anything other than sitting at a computer, and I'm really quite feeble as a result - but it's good fun to do something different. I could quite happily change careers and haul haircare products from one place to another all day long, provided they still paid me what I get now for being an analyst, of course.

Also, on an unrelated note, I've noticed lately that the best way to get a reply from me is to send me an email and not a Facebook message. I think it's because I'm terribly lazy, but since I don't use Facebook very often, I only see the notification-email and replying to it involves at least another two or three clicks of the mouse, so I tend to put it off until I can be bothered. Whereas if I've got an email, I go through my inbox at least once a fortnight or so and make a point of replying to everyone who's expecting me to...

Brum

I'm going to Birmingham for the next couple of days, working in the big High Street store. Just for a change of scene, you know. I can't remember the last time I went to Birmingham, actually - I used to go there fairly often, but it's about twenty minutes longer on the train from Beeston than it is from Derby and somehow that tips it over the edge of 'too far away to be worth the trip'. So I'm hoping to find the city so enthralling that I want to visit more often in future. Hopefully there will be fireworks and escaped zoo animals of the non-violent kinds, and balloons.

I'm memorable!

Also memorable are 2808 decimal digits or 36 packs of cards in an hour, I'm sure of it. Didn't have much luck memorising them today, but the important thing is that I attempted to, and every time I do that it gets my brain more accustomed to the hour of solid concentration and the extensive mental imagery involved. If I can find another weekend or two to practice before the WMC, I'm hopeful that I can do something world-record-breaking there.

Not that I'm going to have many free weekends over the next couple of months, what with the British Othello Championship, the Mensa Annual Gathering (remember that I promised to do some kind of presentation there? I seem to have forgotten to weasel my way out of it...), that potential trip to Tokyo, an important bon-voyage kind of get-together with my brother, a birthday party (York, weekend after October 14th, anyone?) and probably other stuff too. Maybe I should quit my job again.

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...