And I've been working like a dog doesn't

And actually, doing quite well considering I'm facing deadlines that Superman would have trouble meeting. And not just because of his lack of basic accountancy experience, either. So it's one more day to finish off a lot of little bits and pieces, then the next week of other, more annoying and pointless, stuff to finish, then the week after that being pestered by auditors, and THEN it'll all be smooth sailing towards October 13th. Except that I'll probably have to teach the job to my replacement in that time, which is something I really hate doing too. Sigh. Still, just a month and a bit to go...

Also, my MSN messenger isn't working, and I suspect it's something to do with the unfathomable security programs this laptop comes equipped with. Honestly, I'd uninstall the lot of them if I had the faintest idea how to go about it. Nobody's ever going to hack into my computer - I'm much too nice for anyone to want to be mean to me.

I'm competing in the Mental Calculation World Cup in November, in Gießen, Germany, and that means I really need to start practicing. Or at least remembering how to do square roots, because I honestly can't right now. I used to be able to do them, I'm sure. Still, it'll be a lot of fun, I'm sure. The previous one in 2004 was great - the competitors were treated like royalty, with tours of the town (Annaberg-Buchholz) by the mayor, free accommodation and meals (at a restaurant that specialises in potato dishes - had I known that there were such places, I would have informed someone beforehand that I'm not all that keen on potatoes, and avoided the potato soup followed by baked potato and for all I know a potato-based pudding too but I'd given up on the food by that point). I also attempted and spectacularly failed a world record attempt at memorising cards, as well as competing unspectacularly in the calculations competition. So this time round, having failed to learn from my mistakes, I'm going to go for another record - 1 minute binary, which I notice has recently been broken by an Israeli guy I've never heard of with a very impressive 240. I'm pretty sure I can manage 270 or maybe a round 300 with a bit of practice.

By the way, the Mental Calculations World Cup isn't to be confused with the Mental Calculations World Championship, which is the MSO event. That's where I stole the idea of asking Andi to rename his world memory championship from, back in 2004.

Only smarties have the answer

I bought a tube of smarties today on my way home. I had vowed never to buy them again after they changed to the hexagonal packaging, but I was peckish and they looked appetising and I figured they'd been punished enough. It's not the same, though. There's no excitement, wondering what letter will be on the underside of the lid. And the new all-cardboard packs just look so cheap and nasty.

Still, there's good news too. In London I found a video of Bobobobs, the extremely weird cartoon series (originally Spanish, I think), that in its English translation appeared on channel 4 in around 1990. It's a very unusual space-odyssey saga about a large cast of little people who sail their wooden spaceship around the universe. They're theoretically on a quest to find a distant planet (Earth, according to the endless theme song) and save the inhabitants from dinosaurs, but in practice they just have a different adventure every week and never really get anywhere. It's one of those things you have to see to understand the appeal, so just take it from me.

My ear's burning. Someone's talking about me. Must be one of the people I just emailed - only three 'fan mails' to catch up with after a week and a half at the MSO, obviously nobody likes me any more. Or perhaps it's because I never get round to writing to people unless they write to me first. I'm terrible like that, it's nothing personal, I assure you.

What a headache

I went through the arduous process of enrolling at the university tonight, for my final year's CIMA course (which is nowadays called Strategic Level, because Final Level sounded too simple. And it was only called that for a couple of years - when I started CIMA back in days of old, it was Level 4), so I'm now officially a student again! I've got a card with an unflattering photo and NUS written on it! I haven't had one of those for ages!

I've also had a headache of a more literal kind on and off all afternoon. Too much work, in too little time.

So many topics, so little time

Well, I'm back home after all that London extravagance, and I find that there are dozens of things I want to write about tonight. A sort of blog backlog, or backblog, if you will.

Also, I still need to iron some shirts and trousers for next week before I go to bed tonight, so I'll keep this brief.

So, I didn't win any medals at the MSO, which is a bit disappointing. I always used to aim to win at least one. But then, I wasn't there at all for the last couple of days, and they didn't have the events I'm really great at, and I wasn't all that interested in it anyway, but it still annoys me. I was hoping for a last hoorah, like a typically zoomy flukey win in a poker tournament, but even though I was sticking closely to my usual strategy of bad play and outrageous good luck, it didn't get me very far this year. Indeed, on the last night I went out to a guy who combined both those skills much more adeptly than I ever did, and won two consecutive big hands with a better full house than another player had, cleaning me out on the second. Darn it.

But I'm pretty sure I won't bother going to the MSO again. If there's a memory championship there, I'll probably go along to that but not the rest of the event. The main problem with the MSO nowadays is that the only people who bother to come are the ones who take it very, very seriously - it's just too expensive and out of the way to attract the kind of person who just wants to play games for fun. So there are a lot of people there who spend half an hour before, during and after every event arguing about petty details of the rules. Which always gets on my nerves. And no, I don't do that to anything like the same degree in memory.

That wasn't very nice of me. I was intending to be all cheerful this evening, too. Must be the impending horror of going back to work tomorrow. Ah well, it'll soon be over...

Still here

Well, after all that I-can't-stop-blogging whining earlier this week, I haven't had the time to write anything. But since I said I would if I got knocked out of a poker game early, I feel morally obliged to say something now.

Boing!

There, wasn't that fun? I'll be back, really, on Monday. Or maybe on Saturday morning if I'm out of bed early enough, before going down to Crawley.

It's no good, I can't do it

No TV for a week? No problem. No sitting down and typing the first thing that comes into my head every evening? Not possible. So it's official, blogging really is an unhealthy addiction.

I did try to stand firm in the face of extreme temptation. I didn't write a thing last night about the fact that Joe McGann sat directly opposite me on the tube, not even when I walked past the Zoom Internet Cafe on the way back to my room at night. But enough is enough. I can't deprive my many readers of my nightly wittering for a whole week. I probably won't write something every night, just when I'm out of the nightly poker tournament early like tonight.

The MSO is still great fun, but somehow I get the feeling that I've outgrown it. Or it's outgrown me. Or outshrunk me, anyway. One or other of us isn't the right size, however you want to look at it. By which I mean that I'm not as enthusiastic about the selection of competitions there these days, I'm not particularly close friends with any of the regulars who still turn up every year, and I think I might give it a miss from now on unless there's a memory competition. Sad, but there are other things I could be doing with my time and money.

City-trained priest faces sex probe

I've just been looking through the nooks and crannies of my flat for the little clock radio that I always take to the MSO with me but don't otherwise use. So it's had two years to gradually become submerged by all the junk I hoard. I didn't find it, so I'll have to take my big portable radio with me, but I did come across a pile of local newspapers chronicling my appearance at the first MSO in 1997. Nowadays, of course, I'm so used to being an international celebrity that I don't bother to keep all the newspaper articles about me, but in those days it was something new and exciting.

If you're wondering about the subject header, that's the banner headline in the Boston Target directly above a picture of me which was attached to the smaller article saying I was going to the MSO, rather than the story about the priest. Yes, the Target did a story just about the fact that I was going to compete - the MSO went mad with publicity in the first year, and pestered all the local news hacks with press releases about each of the thousands of people who'd registered. And since every day is a slow news day in Boston (the vicar in question lives in Southend and was arrested in Romania, but went to Lincoln Theological College many years ago) I got some pretty hefty coverage.

Here's a couple of scans of the breaking news stories after I'd won the silver medal in the one-day intelligence championship. God, I looked ugly in those days. The hair's arguably an improvement over my current style, but I genuinely thought the moustache gave me a sort of suave, Clark Gable kind of look.


The Lincolnshire Free Press covers the entire county! 


This was a front page story, albeit in the bottom corner under the thrilling tale of a Boston couple who were no more than a couple of miles away when Princess Di died 

Anyway, today I'm off to the tenth MSO, and then straight down to the British Othello Championships next weekend. As I've mentioned before, the MSO is traditionally a week where I don't watch TV, or check my emails, or let anybody know whether I'm alive or dead, so this will be my last update till September, I'm afraid. But it's good to get away from technology and go back to nature once in a while. Even if most people's idea of getting back to nature doesn't involve going to the University of Westminster to play board games with nerds.

Gee willickers!

I mentioned nearly a month ago that I was feeling inclined to write about why I love Sniffles, the relatively unknown Looney Tunes mouse from the late 30s/early 40s, and then have always had better things to write about of an evening. Well, no more!

Here's our hero, listening to the opening bars of "Mutiny in the Nursery" in his third cartoon, "Sniffles and the Bookworm"

Sniffles first appeared in "Naughty But Mice", in 1939. It's been said that Sniffles was the first character created by the great Chuck Jones, although I'm not so sure about how accurate that assertion is. Anyway, Sniffles is perhaps the last gasp of the original policy behind Warner Bros cartoons - to copy what Disney were doing as closely as possible. Sniffles is pure Disney, at least in his first appearances. He's a small, cute mouse, who explores a series of beautifully drawn big stages, in gentle but extremely entertaining ways. Cute was already becoming rather unfashionable in cartoons at that point, with Chuck Jones and his fellows leading the way in the wacky revolution, but Sniffles appeared in nine cartoons in the next three years - quite an impressive strike rate for someone who wasn't Porky, Daffy or Bugs.

You can see a classic adventure here at Dennis's blog, along with no end of other great cartoons. Look out too for Sniffles making friends with an electric razor in "Naughty But Mice" - it's genuinely beautiful.

Sniffles's voice varies quite a bit from cartoon to cartoon, and nobody's entirely sure who provided it. It was probably any one of four or five perennially-uncredited female voice actors working for Warners at the time, whichever one was available on the day. But they all do a wonderful job with his wide-eyed innocence and gee-whiz exclamations.

Then, in the last of his original run of cartoons, "The Brave Little Bat", Sniffles goes out for a drive in his adorable little clockwork car, which breaks down in spectacular fashion. He takes shelter in an old mill, where he meets a cheerful little bat with what turned out to be a highly contagious case of verbal dysentry. Batty's dialogue is hilarious:

Sniffles: Hello!

Batty: I heard you come in, why'd you come in for? I'm glad you came in, 'cause I get kinda lonesome in here by myself sometimes 'cause there's nobody here but me and now you, where'd you come from? I live up there and I'm a bat, are you a bat? Hello!

All delivered rapid-fire without a pause for breath. Sniffles and Batty have an adventure escaping a cat (Sniffles's reaction to finding himself on a high roof beam is another must-see moment), and then that was the last we saw of him for a couple of years. He returned in 1943, having acquired Batty's speech mannerisms, in the altogether different "The Unbearable Bear"

Still directed by Chuck Jones, but this wasn't a Disney-style cartoon. The backgrounds are stylised and simpler, and the plot is fast, zany slapstick in the quintessentially Warner style - a fox burglar breaks into a policeman bear's house to rob it, but is discovered by Sniffles. ("What are you doing there? What are you doing with that safe? I know what you're doing, you're a burglar and you're burgling that safe 'cause burglars always burgle safes, why do they? Why are you a burglar? It's against the law to be a burglar 'cause burglars are crooks and I'm going straight upstairs and wake up the lady bear and tell her you're a burglar and she'll come right down and beat your old burglar head in...")

Thinking outside the box, the fox tells Sniffles that he's Robin Hood, you know, as robs rich blokes for the benefit of the poor. Sniffles is convinced - "Gee! Are you really Robin Hood? You don't look like Robin Hood but I guess you must be Robin Hood if you say you are Robin Hood 'cause Robin Hood wouldn't tell a lie. Hello Robin Hood, I'll help you rob the rich and give it to the poor and I'll stand guard and if anybody comes I'll warn you, like this!" (grabs a spoon and pan and starts banging it deafeningly loudly)

Then father bear comes home, drunk at three o'clock in the morning and not wanting to wake up his wife, who starts sleepwalking, and there's four-way chaos with Sniffles running around trying to help Robin Hood and chattering cheerfully away nineteen to the dozen. It's one of my favourite cartoons of all time, and as soon as I acquire the capacity to share my videotaped cartoon collection with the internet, I'll share it with you.

Sniffles only appeared in two more cartoons, and by the last one, "Hush My Mouse", in 1946, innocence was definitely fading. In the post-war era, Warner Bros were embarking on their golden age, but 'outwit the hunter' cartoons were hugely en vogue, and even Sniffles got in on the act. His chatter and naivete seem to be an act here, as he tricks a stupid cat trying to collect mouse knuckles for his exclusive restaurant. Then he disappeared, apparently unable to compete with the influx of new Looney Tune stars. He's continued to pop up now and then in these nostalgic times - he had a Tiny Toon Adventures counterpart (Little Sneezer), which is more than can be said for some more famous toons, and he made a wonderful guest appearance on an episode of Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries as recently as 1999, playing a Manx mouse. He never did lose the constant babbling. It's a problem that I can identify with...

Back to normality

Just for today and tomorrow. Which means that I basically have to fit two weeks of work into two days, with the year end accounts coming up as soon as I get back from the MSO. In among that I also need to tot up the BOF's accounts for the AGM in a couple of weeks - I'm going down to Crawley straight from London, without a trip back home in between, so I need to not only get the treasurer's report done before I go down there, but remember to take it with me.

All of which means that I had to work late tonight, and haven't got the time to write a great deal here. Sorry, fans!

I, quite genuinely, Haven't Got A Hat

As an example of how mentally and physically exhausting I find the world memory championships, I left my hat on the train last night. And I didn't even realise until this morning! Nobody seems to have handed it in, either, but I'll check again in a couple of days (I've got the day off on Friday). It would be terribly anticlimactic to lose the poor thing like that, after all these years.

Anyway, what other things happened on the last day of the world championships? We ran about five or six hours behind schedule, as usual. They really should stop using that timetable, because it really is impossible to stick to it. Ed helped keep things running smoothly by getting stuck in a lift at one point. When the prizegiving ceremony finally got underway, they announced the correct scores this time (in the individual category, at least - the team scores were wrong), but gave the wrong medals to everyone (there's bronze, silver and gold for each of the ten disciplines, with the discipline names written on the back. Impressively, I ended up with the gold for abstract images, and the gold AND bronze for names and faces! I certainly didn't expect that!). We swapped them among ourselves afterwards. I hurt my hands clapping so much. Clemens got so used to going up and getting medals that he forgot he only came fourth in the hour cards, and was halfway up to the stage for that one too before he realised.

Afterwards there was a celebratory dinner at Simpson's on the Strand, which I couldn't go to because I had to get home - by the original schedule I would at least have had time for a drink, but as it turned out I had to dash off straight after the prizegiving (Andi left before it, as usual). Tony Buzan, who seems to believe that all the competitors are millionaires too, had arranged a special cheap price by the standards of this poshest restaurant in London of only £25 each for the meal. I'm sure we were all very grateful - there was talk of people organising a rival dinner at a more reasonable price, but I don't know if that happened.

So that's it for another year. After today's trip to sunny Rotherham, it's back to work tomorrow for a whole two days before heading back darn sarf for the MSO. It's a tough life, isn't it?

It was nearly complete, it was nearly so sweet

Well, evil has triumphed over good, as Josh perhaps a little over-melodramatically put it, and Clemens remains the World Memory Champion. Lots to write about, but it's late and if I don't go to bed right this second, I'll never be able to get up in the morning and I've got to go up into the wilds of Yorkshire for a meeting at one of our companies. Had I known I was going to hand in my notice, I would have booked today off rather than arranging something like that for the day after the world championships.

Anyway, in brief I got 27 packs in the hour cards, which is huge and very cool - that put me fractionally in the lead with three events to go. I got a respectable 156 in words, Clemens and Gunther got roughly the same, Joachim got a massive 203 but Boris kept the world record with 214. But then I messed up all three trials on the spoken number, which is always a real possibility with me, and Clemens got his usual massive score, putting him safely in the lead and Gunther safely in second place.

That left me having to try for a very quick time in speed cards, and hope that Clemens didn't get a half-decent score. He did get a half-decent score (50 seconds) in the first attempt, whereas I didn't manage to get anything (tried 33 seconds but didn't come close to getting it right). What I should have done then is record a slower time and snatch second place, but I went for a very fast one again because a) having no chance of winning the title I might as well go out with a bang, or b) Andi was sitting next to me and quite obviously aiming to beat my record, although c) none of this occurred to me at the time until Gunther pointed it out and I was just set on a pattern of trying to go as fast as possible. So anyway, I messed it up again. And Andi did beat my record. And Joachim recorded a perfectly acceptable time to beat me for third place.

So in the end, it was exactly the same as last year, Clemens-Gunther-Joachim-me-Boris, only with much higher scores all round. Frustrating, because I was pretty darn close to my best form this year, and it just wasn't good enough. Still, it's given me a target to aim for next time round.

Anecdotes and rambling to follow tomorrow, assuming I'm awake. Memory competitions tire me out, and I don't think eight hours' sleep tonight is going to be enough...

Once More, With Feeling

Last night's entry was a bit dry and full of scores and statistics, I thought. There's a lot more to the WMC than that. I've just been to KFC with Boris, Joachim, Corinna, Daniela, Daren and James K (after Burger King with a similar group last night - junk food is brain food), and the conversations we have on that kind of occasion, as well as throughout the day, are fantastic. You'd be surprised how much there is to talk about on the subject of memory when a bunch of enthusiasts get together.

Anyway, today went pretty well, all in all. You may recall from last night's cliffhanger that Gunther was miles ahead, but with his best events behind us, and a whole pile of us fighting it out for second position. It turned out I only got 1440 on the hour numbers, which is disappointing - on the lower end of my estimate. Gunther, Clemens and Joachim all scored in the 1700s. Andi got exactly 1800, but Dr Yip topped the lot with 1820. Phil described it as a surprise, but it isn't really - he was always red hot on the numbers, and even now when he's only here to bring this year's batch of little disciples to experience the competition and hasn't been doing much training himself, he's still very good.

It's fun to watch people before and between events. The Germans tend to juggle - it's a national tradition (meaning Gunther does it and everyone over there thinks it must be great if Gunther does it), and it's meant to aid concentration. Others sit around chatting or staring into space, concentrating fiercely, depending on temperament. I'm a chatter, mainly. Ed always arrives at the very last minute, if not later. Some get there an hour early, just in case. There's the usual what-are-you-going-to-attempt-here kind of speculation, announcements like "Can anyone lend Daren a stopwatch because he's forgotten his?" (you'd be surprised how often this happens at memory championships. Clemens glanced at the four timepieces on his desk but decided he couldn't risk three of them breaking down. Someone found a spare one in the end.)

Names and faces, the first event of the day, went extremely well by my low standards. I scored 96, a personal best, and I think the 12th-best score on the day. Gunther did badly, as expected. Clemens broke the world record, Andi did well too, and Josh did a very impressive 156. Cornelia continues to be consistently very good at everything.

Speed numbers next, and I went for a safe-ish 324, and got 284, the best score in the first trial. Andi was the last to return to the room for this one, and Phil said (over the microphone and sounding probably a lot more venomous than he intended) "Congratulations on making us all wait, Andi." We were already running late by that point - memory championships always run late, by at least a couple of hours. There are no exceptions to this rule, and certainly not today. There was a bigger holdup between trials of the speed numbers when Joachim and Gunther asked for their scores to be double-checked (Gunther's was correct, but they'd genuinely made a mistake on Joachim). I tried a mad 468 second time round, but made a mess of it and didn't improve on my first score. It was still good enough to be the third best, but Gunther and Clemens both beat me. Operation catch-Gunther not going as smoothly as I'd hoped.

But never mind, event six is Historic Dates, my trump card. By this point Clemens had almost but not quite caught Gunther up, and I was lagging about 700 points behind them. Worryingly far, in other words - the standard is much higher than last year, and there's a lot more competition. But, after another lengthy delay when it turned out they hadn't made enough copies of the English-language version (expecting the Hong Kong contingent to want it in Chinese, but they didn't), I did produce a whopping 96 - a new world record and lots of lovely championship points. After announcing the results, Tony came to me and said "So, do you want to change the scoring system because you're just too brilliant?" (the scoring system was genuinely wrong back in 2004, thank you very much, and I think the new one's fair enough - and anyway, I need all the points I can get this year!)

So, after six of ten disciplines, here's the leaderboard:

1) Gunther Karsten 4459
2) Clemens Mayer 4423
3) Ben Pridmore 4103
4) Joachim Thaler 4090
5) Cornelia Beddies 3608
6) Andi Bell 3581
7) Boris Konrad 3222
8) Ed Cooke 2654
9) Corinna Draschl 2416
10) Yip Swe Chooi 2128

My original plan was to be in the lead by this point. As an illustration of how much tougher it is this year, in 2005 at this point I was winning, with a score of 3471.

Final event of the day was hour cards, and it was obvious that I'd have to do something good to have a chance going into the final day. Luckily, I think I did. Attempting thirty packs, more than anyone else, I did write down thirty plausible full sequences in the recall period. A couple involved educated guesses, but I would hope that I got at least 25 right. If I didn't, I'll be annoyed with myself, because it will be silly errors. But the buzz is that Gunther did disappointingly, and Clemens isn't all that great with cards, so if I've beaten both of them, it'll be a great finish.

Andi didn't recall any - he realised he wasn't going to get a good score and so left. But he is more here than he has been for the last couple of years, and talking in terms of definitely coming back on top form next time round. Which can only be good for the WMC.

Tomorrow it's random words, spoken numbers and speed cards. The first two of these I can do good scores on, but often don't. Clemens is very good at spoken numbers, and I'm going to need a top-notch performance to beat him. And I need to get a pack of cards in somewhere close to thirty seconds to make sure of it. I love the WMC!

Day One

...went just about according to plan. Although I know I could have done better than I did. If you remember, the plan was to do really badly in abstract images, which I haven't bothered to practice at all, and then to make up for it in the other two disciplines today, binary and hour numbers.

I did indeed do very badly in abstract images - a score of 57, which equates to about 220 championship points. Gunther, as in Cambridge, did really well - 228 raw score, about 920 points and a world record. He's been working on the new discipline, and obviously has come up with a much better system than everyone else. Slightly concerningly, my other main rivals all had good scores too - Clemens got 151, German Wunderkind Cornelia Beddies (who would have got a mention yesterday if I'd had time) 140, Joachim 130, Boris 129 and Andi (who to nobody's surprise made a surprise last-minute appearance) 120.

But that's okay. Because I knew binary is one of my best disciplines, and I could catch up there with a good score. Of course, it's also one of Gunther's best too - he and I are always miles ahead of the rest of the field there. I attempted somewhere in the region of 5300 digits (having asked for extra ones specially - you're normally only given 5000 to memorise in half an hour), and ended up thinking I'd got a score of about 3500 (I'll explain the scoring system another time, or you can look it up yourselves if you don't know it already). It turned out I'd underestimated myself, and when the papers were marked I found that I'd fractionally beaten my existing world record - 3710, whereas the previous record was 3705!

Gunther got 3452, Joachim 2832, Cornelia 2521 and Clemens 2385. Andi only attempted 2250 and ended up with a score of 1980, but his best could be yet to come. He seems to have been doing at least some training this year, and is taking the event more seriously. After two of ten disciplines, the leaderboard looks like this:

1) Gunther Karsten 1778
2) Joachim Thaler 1228
3) Clemens Mayer 1200
4) Cornelia Beddies 1190
5) Ben Pridmore 1156
6) Andi Bell 975
7) Boris Konrad 880
8) Corrina Draschl 628
9) James Paterson 621
10) James Ponder 576

We haven't yet had the results of the hour numbers - I went for 2340, and got maybe 1600. Possibly a bit better, possibly a bit worse. It's going to be a close-run thing. Gunther may seem to be flying away, but today's three disciplines are probably his three best. He tends to struggle with the cards, so unless he's improved a lot in the last year the pack will catch him up in event seven, hour cards, tomorrow afternoon. And in names and faces (event four, first thing tomorrow) he's normally, as Boris tactfully put it, even worse than me. Also tomorrow are historic dates, which I should win, touch wood, I usually do, and speed numbers, which I've also got a good feeling about (last year I won it when I didn't think I would, so by that logic I'll do terribly this time round).

I love the WMC! Not just the competing, but the hanging out with the other memorisers. They're a great bunch, one and all!

Runners and riders

Limited time tonight - I've gone into an internet cafe and realised I've only got enough money on me for half an hour. Rather than look like a pauper and go out for more money (I can just see everyone in the building looking at me in these circumstances and thinking "he's going out to the pawnshop or to beg money on street corners), I'm pretending that was what I was going to use in the first place, rather than an hour like I was intending.

Anyway, having wasted all my time writing the above, let's talk about the weekend ahead. Just been to the competitors' briefing, delivered by Phil (who for all his good points isn't a natural speaker and was almost as incoherent as me at Cambridge when explaining the rules and regulations) because Tony's busy doing interviews. And a drink afterwards with some of the other guys, of course, to discuss what we think is going to happen. So I thought it would be good for the benefit of my non-memory readers to know who to look out for while they're following the scores on the internet over the next three days.

Assuming they're updated on the internet. They usually aren't, but the official website always promises to.

So let's look at the top ten in the world ranking list, with brief notes. Omitting the world number one for obvious reasons, we start with:

2) Astrid Plessl (Austria, age 22) (or thereabouts. Most of these ages are rough guesses, and I probably shouldn't be including them at all)

WMC history: 12th, 2001; 6th, 2002; 2nd, 2003; 2nd, 2004

Astrid wasn't there tonight, and the probability is that she won't be competing this year. Which would be a crying shame. She came very, very close to winning the world championship two years in a row, and if she retires from competitions now without winning it it would be a great injustice. She started out famous for her natural memory (high scores in the poem and words, the disciplines that you don't use artificial systems for so much), but between 2002 and 2003 got really good at the systems too. If she's kept in training, she'd be my top rival this year. Hoping she defies expectations and shows up.

3) Clemens Mayer (Germany, age 21-ish)

WMC history: 4th, 2004; 1st, 2005

The reigning champion is obviously the man to beat. He hasn't failed to win a competition he's entered since November 2004, and he's committed to keeping that up. He's burst onto the scene in only a couple of years, and although it's been said that he's never beaten the likes of me or Andi or Astrid when we were at the top of our games, he can hardly be blamed for that. He did all that was necessary to win, and it's possible he's capable of much more when he's pushed.

4) Dr Gunther Karsten (Germany, mid-40s)

WMC history: 3rd, 1998; 5th, 1999; 3rd, 2000; 2nd, 2001; 3rd, 2002; 4th, 2003; 8th, 2004; 2nd, 2005

Ever-present in the top ranks at the world championships for many, many years, but never quite as winner. Last year's performance for second place was his best ever, so he's still improving. His seven-year run as German champion was ended by his protegé Clemens in 2005, but he's a good outside bet for the world title this year. Never write him off.

5) Andi Bell (England, 37?)

WMC history: 3rd, 1995; 2nd, 1996; 2nd, 1997; 1st, 1998; 3rd, 1999; 2nd, 2000; 3rd, 2001; 1st, 2002; 1st, 2003; 7th, 2004; 26th, 2005

Andi also wasn't there tonight, but he never came to the briefings even when he was a serious competitor. He's said he won't compete this year, but I'd actually be more surprised if he doesn't show up tomorrow morning to take part, however half-heartedly. Arguably the best competitor ever, he put in his apprenticeship for many years coming second to Dominic O'Brien (his 1998 win was the year Dom didn't take part) before finally blowing him away and setting new standards for the "sport" in 2002, his participation has been half-hearted for the last couple of years. But if he's been training on the sly, anything's possible. His nine consecutive years of top-three finishes might never be beaten.

6) Dominic O'Brien (England, getting on for 50? Or am I being unkind?)

WMC history: 1st, 1991; 1st, 1993; 2nd, 1994; 1st, 1995; 1st, 1996; 1st, 1997; 1st, 1999; 1st, 2000; 1st, 2001; 2nd, 2002; 6th, 2003

The legendary eight-times champion definitely won't be competing this year, unless there's something we haven't been told. He keeps saying he isn't completely retired, but it's looking more and more like he is. Conventional wisdom is that he couldn't keep up with the much higher level of performance from the top competitors over the past few years, but that might not be the case at all. He never had to stretch himself to his limits in his glory days, perhaps he's capable of another win yet.

7) Joachim Thaler(Austria, 18)

WMC history: 15th, 2002; 3rd, 2004; 3rd, 2005

Still very young, and still improving, Joachim is the only person to finish in the top three in each of the last two years. He beat me last time round, and Clemens the year before, and although he's pessimistic about his chances for a podium place this time round, it's certainly not impossible.

8) Jan Formann (Denmark, late-50s)

WMC history: 16th, 1999; 4th, 2001; 4th, 2002; 5th, 2003

Not much has been heard from the super-eccentric Dane for the last couple of years. His last competition was the World Cup (not to be confused with the World Championship) in 2004, when he finished a close second behind me. He used to be the undisputed world's best at the number-disciplines, although Gunther seems to have taken over that mantle now. I hope Jan also makes a surprise return, because he adds a lot of colour and fun to the championships.

9) Boris Nikolai Konrad (Germany, 22)

WMC history: 6th, 2004; 5th, 2005

Boris has been leader of the chasing pack at a lot of competitions over the last couple of years. I would certainly back him to make that final leap into one of the absolute top-level if he keeps up with it - he's very enthusiastic and deeply involved in the politics of German memory. This year he's got a good chance of making the top five.

10) Lukas Amsüss (Austria, early 20s)

WMC history: 17th, 2001; 14th, 2002; 7th, 2003; 9th, 2004

Sadly, Lukas definitely can't make it this year, due to work. But his previous WMC positions do him a disservice, he's another major chasing-pack guy, with a particular talent for speed cards. Also a lot of fun.

I don't have time to mention anyone else, but watch out for the likes of Ed Cooke, Josh Foer and Yip Swe Chooi too!

Your fifteen minutes start now

There's a song from years ago with the refrain "Your fifteen minutes start now..." that always comes to my mind when I'm starting my stopwatch going for a period of time for memorising or recall. Even the ones that aren't fifteen minutes long. I don't remember which song it was, or what the rest of the words were, but that bit's very memorable.

I'm free from work for the next four days, yay, and going down to London tomorrow morning - meeting the Alzheimer's people, with accompanying interview by Women's Weekly magazine. I've had more publictity-heavy buildups to the world championships. Then it's just a case of finding the hotel, finding the competition site, going to the 6pm competitors' briefing that's never really worth going to, and getting a good night's sleep. This might be my last blog entry until the competition's over - I'm not taking my laptop, and I probably won't have the time to find an internet cafe. But you never know - if I get bored tomorrow night I might give my last-minute opinions about the weekend ahead. I'll get off to a bad start with the images, but then hopefully do something special in the binary and hour numbers to show the others who's boss.

Sniffles and Bimbo are constantly pestering me to write about them like I promised, so I'll do that next week. Maybe with screenshots!

Packing

And more than 24 hours before it's strictly necessary, too! But don't worry, all I've been doing tonight is finding boxes to put my cards in, putting my cards in them, and putting the boxes into a larger box. Which makes me giggle, because in writing it like that I've reminded myself of an excellent webcomic called Living In Greytown, that I used to read years ago (it's finished now, as has its sequel, Lizard).

But I was talking about cards. I don't normally keep them in the boxes, they sit on my desk in teetering towers with a rubber band around each pack. So I had to dig up the flattened, crumpled boxes from the depths of my desk's drawers where all kinds of strange things lurk. The reason for this is that for the first time I'm taking my own cards to the WMC this time round. Competitors are allowed to bring their own or to use the ones provided, and I normally choose the latter option, but last year they didn't bother to shuffle them before giving them out, so I got a couple that were in sequence. I thought of pretending to memorise them and hoping nobody noticed, but got replacements instead. I'll also bring my own recall sheets for the cards, which I may or may not use, depending on what the provided sheets look like (if they're plain paper, I'll use my own, but if they're the normal kind with a column for each suit where you just fill in the number, I'll go with those). Some competitors have their own extremely fancy recall sheets for numbers as well as cards, with the spaces to fill in numbers divided into sections, but I don't go in for that kind of thing. I prefer a recall page as blank as possible, and if I can't remember a sequence I'll count out the appropriate number of empty spaces and mark it with little dots. I'm a minimalist.

Good grief, that was close. Just before posting that, I selected the whole text to copy it in case the computer or Blogger crashes while I'm posting (I always do this, I'm paranoid), and pressed ctrl-V instead of ctrl-C, replacing the text with some rubbish that was on the clipboard. Luckily, it turns out you can do ctrl-Z to undo here. You really do learn something new every day!

Almost forgot

I nearly went to bed without writing anything tonight. But it's okay, I've deliberately put my memory on ice this week in the buildup to the WMC. I did have a try at abstract images using a clever new system I thought up, which turns out not to work at all. I still have no idea how I'm going to approach that one in the competition, which could be a problem, but it's not one I'm hugely worried about. It's a silly thing anyway, that they'll hopefully get rid of or change before next year (if I keep pestering them).

The follies of men's youth

I've been reading my old blog posts tonight, and I can be quite fascinating at times, can't I? Makes me think that I need to start doing interesting things so I can write about them in more detail. And yes, I did hand my notice in at work today. I was going to think about it a bit more, but I got butterflies in my tummy every time I thought about it, and I didn't want that getting in the way of the world memory championship, so I decided to just get on with it and resign. It felt pretty good, all in all. So now I'm resolved not to think about it or anything else for the next week, and just relax, clear my brain and do a bit of last-minute practice with abstract images because I'm not nearly prepared enough for them. Everything else, though, I'm pretty sure I can make a decent stab at. I'm not as match-fit as I'd like to be, but I'm better than last year, and I didn't lose by much last year. Fingers crossed, eh?

Things that need to be clarified

1) That Frosties advert that everyone thinks is so terrible? It's brilliant! I mean, what's all the hostility about? It's singalongable and catchy and funny, and it raises public awareness of Frosties, which can only be a good thing.

2) Also, Airplane II: The Sequel, which I saw for the first time tonight, is really funny too. I've never bothered to watch it before because everyone says it's not much good, but it turns out that everyone in the world has been lying to me all these years.

3) These clarifications are not just my opinions, they're the objective truth. I'm automatically right about everything. It's quite a burden sometimes.

4) I'm still not sure about the whole handing-in-my-notice thing. I'm tempted to leave the decision until after the WMC, although that might not be the best idea because I'm always at my most I-hate-my-job-ish immediately after a big competition. I'll see what I feel like when I wake up tomorrow.

5) Butter.

World Twister Champion 2006

Title suggested by Vicky, although in fact I didn't win at Twister. I shouldn't really have been playing at all, with my knees being what they are, but you know what it's like at these parties. Crispy and Sleepy couldn't come at the last moment because Crisp's not well (possibly infected with lethal bacteria from her new job, so I think we should all send get-well-soon-type happy thoughts to her and hope she's okay), so I had to go to the scary almost-strangers' barbecue by myself. But it turned out to be fun after all. I'd write more about it, only I've had too much to drink considering I need to be practicing memorising cards tomorrow, and it's late, and I've just cycled home in the pouring rain so I'll probably get hypothermia if I don't go to bed rather than sitting around in my undies typing incoherently.

I've got sixpence, jolly jolly sixpence

Remember that thing I wanted to talk about but couldn't in case talking about it jinxed the whole thing? Well, now the official secrets act has been repealed and I can go ahead. I'm wealthy! I've just had £16,631.04 paid into my bank account, courtesy of my dad's pension scheme. Which certainly came as a surprise to me - my mum and brother have the same amount each too. Add that to the money in my bank account, and it comes to just over £20,000. Does that sound familiar? I got the letter telling me about it last Saturday, exactly a month after writing this about what I'd do if I had £20,000 or so.

So should I do it? Hand in my notice at work, take a year off, write those books, do those college courses, join that hypothetical gym? I'm inclining towards yes, I should. The universe quite clearly wants me to. I can't quite delude myself into thinking it's what my dad would have wanted me to do with the money (he really wouldn't have). I've given myself the weekend to think about it - I'd want to give two months' notice at work (rather than the one that I'm obliged to give) so as not to leave anyone in the lurch, and if I did it on Monday it would neatly round off my career at Nord Anglia the day before my birthday. I could be a wage slave until the age of 29 years and 364 days, and embark on a whole new phase of my life in my thirties. I won't be able to splash out on anything extravagant, but I can just about live for a year with those kind of expenses for twenty grand.

The only thing that worries me is whether I would be able to motivate myself to do cool things if I didn't have to get up in the morning every day. I'm thinking if I structure things around college courses and routines I'd be okay - from past experience I really do need something like that so that I can fit the fun things around it - if I don't have a day job, I don't do extracurricular things either and just spend my time lounging around doing nothing.

This kind of earth-shattering decision isn't the kind of thing I should be doing on the last weekend before the world memory championship. Crispy and Sleepy are coming round on Saturday night, so I can drunkenly discuss the pros and cons with them and see how much I can remember of the conversation the next morning. The plan is to do a 30-minute binary practice tomorrow morning, hour numbers after lunch, then we'll go round to Vicky's barbecue and have a good time, then on Sunday night when I've recovered a bit, do an hour cards. Hope I can stick to it.

Another thing that worries me - everyone is going to say "Yes, you should quit your job and become a gentleman of leisure! That sounds cool!", because it does sound cool. But I'm quite aware that it's not the right thing for me to do on any kind of long-term or intellectual level. On the other hand, though, my decision is pretty much a foregone conclusion. When have I ever chosen the option marked "leave things the way they are and do the sensible thing"?

And feeling guilty about spending it all on myself when the world is full of people suffering? I think I can get used to it. I've never claimed to be a saint. I squandered my redundancy money from Parkhouse on good causes, after all, and if I write a bestseller or become a professional snooker player, I can pay the money back to my conscience.

I don't break rules, I just bend them... a lot

I normally have a rule about not commenting on news items in this blog (mainly because that's what everyone else does on their blogs, and besides, who wants to hear my opinions about current events when they could read me rambling on about cartoon characters for pages? That reminds me, I never did get round to writing that promised essay about Sniffles, did I? And I'm also in the mood to try and get Bimbo, the unusually-named male dog cartoon character from the 30s, the public attention he's been deprived of for so long. But not tonight. I was going somewhere before I got into this parenthetical profusion of purple prose, wasn't I?), but I seriously hope this latest mess involving planes isn't going to stop people getting to the WMC next weekend. Last year the strike at Heathrow stopped some competitors from attending, and the timing of this thing is majorly annoying.

There's been a decided lack of publicity about the WMC this time round. Last year we got quite a bit of press coverage by playing up the England v Germany angle, but this time the people who run the event seem to have decided on a policy of doing nothing at all and hoping someone notices it. I also have no idea how many people are going to be there. Word has it that the German contingent will be smaller than last year, although it will include Clemens, Gunther, Boris, Alisa(?), the usual gang, so I'll have someone to make a contest of it. From Austria there's definitely Joachim and hopefully Astrid, I'm sure Andi won't be able to stay away despite what he says even if he doesn't properly compete, so I can't moan about a shortage of top-level competition.

And then there'll be a reasonably large British contingent. Me, Ed and at least three Jameses would break all recent records for sheer numbers, even if nobody else comes along. It seems we won't be getting a Brazilian team after all, Globo having decided to spend their money on a Brazilian championship next year instead, which is a shame. And there'll only be the one Norwegian, it seems. I have no idea about Malaysians, or Indians, or Jan (the one and only Dane who's ever competed in these things). There'll be Josh from the USA and Tansel from Australia and Pierre from France and HaiZhan from China who hasn't competed before but has been exchanging emails with me lately. It should be fun, anyway.

I'm more interested at the moment in researching Irish history. Talking with my assistant Patrick at work today I realised that I don't actually know anything about the country - it's only just next door, after all, and I know we have a proud history of going over there and subjugating and killing people, so I think I should know a bit more. I want to get a book out of the library or something - I'm suspicious of most websites.

Scheduled outage at 4:00PM PDT

According to the little toolbar thing on the top of this create-new-post thing. It's three minutes to ten here, and I have no idea what PDT is, so I'm hoping it's not six hours behind real time.

Anyway, I'm feeling a sense of achievement tonight, because I've replied to a bunch of emails (I'm kind of a recluse, but I still manage to get into no end of correspondence and if I let it build up for a couple of days it becomes quite a task to reply to everyone), done a load of memory practice (got 385 in speed numbers, which would have been 425 if I hadn't transposed two images - 468 is definitely possible on a good day, now I just have to decide whether to attempt it first time at the WMC, or go for something safer and then go for the big score on the second trial), watched Liverpool play football badly but still win (they're still playing but they've just gone 2-1 up with a minute or two left), and watched some Battle of the Planets and Betty Boop cartoons all in the four hours since getting home.

It's The Mind

I've finally got round to sending off my entry form for the Mind Sports Olympiad. Longtime fans will remember that I didn't go to last year's, for the first time since it started in 1997, and I did feel guilty about it. But this year I'm going for the classic MSO experience - staying in a student hall of residence like I used to in the early years when I didn't have any money, competing in lots of games that I don't even particularly like just so as to have something to do, late night poker, no TV for a week (got to dig out my little clock radio so I can have the pleasure of listening to slightly out-of-tune London radio stations all night), lots of unhealthy food, it'll be great.

I'm also almost certainly going to skip the last couple of days in order to go to the othello nationals in Crawley. Now that the WMC has been moved and I only have two major mind sports competitions clashing that weekend, it's only fair to go along to the othello after a week's MSOing. Especially since I'll have to do the treasurer's report at the AGM before the competition starts. Besides, there's still the outside possibility of qualifying for the British team at the Worlds in Japan in October, which I would really love to do. And although 'outside possibility' here means 'no chance whatsoever because I'm not nearly a good enough player even when I've been practicing rather than barely playing at all for months now', it's still enough to give me a gleam of hope in the eyes.

So come along to the Mind Sports Olympiad if you want to play me at azacru, stratego, pacru, acquire, othello, twixt, mental calculations, decamentathlon, entropy, abalone, boku and lots of poker, and to the British Othello Championship if you're British and want to play me at othello more than you can do at the MSO.

Incidentally, I still haven't written the memory tips that the Alzheimer's people asked me for. It should just be a matter of churning out a few bullet points of the usual waffle that everybody says in this kind of situation, but I want it to be actually profound and useful and meaningful. Which, as you might have noticed, isn't something I'm very good at.

(I do have something important and earth-shatteringly significant to write about, but I'm not going to just yet until it's all sorted out for fear of jinxing it. Updates shortly, hopefully. Now that's a cliffhanger worthy of Doctor Who, isn't it!)

War of the worlds

Vole-like aliens invaded Earth in the year 1937. They arrived en masse in about thirty-seven flying saucers equipped with death-ray devices and small gerbils and set about slaughtering humans with the intention of subjugating the human race and forcing them to design new card games for the vole-like aliens' entertainment.

However, since the people of Earth at that time were also rather vole-like, nobody believed that the aliens were in fact alien invaders at all, and just assumed it was some kind of practical joke organised by the new television service. Even when the aliens barged into Downing Street, cut off the Prime Minister's head with pinking shears and declared that Earth was now under their rule, nobody took them seriously and just laughed about it. The aliens got back into their spaceships and left, disappointed with the reception they'd had.

Having assumed that his horrible demise was a practical joke, Neville Chamberlain was none the worse for wear and carried on with his business. But the incident had made him consider the possibility of contact with extraterrestrial lifeforms, and one night at a party he wrote the snappily-titled "What is to be done should real aliens ever invade and assassinate the Prime Minister with pinking shears or some such device" essay, which was published (due to a misunderstanding) in the Dandy the following week.

The essay detailed the process by which aliens would be repelled, and hinged around three people who would be required to do the entirety of the fighting while the rest of the world's population hid in underground shelters. Although a good plan, it didn't consider the ravages of time, and somebody really should have updated it by the time the vole-like aliens returned in 1993. By now immediately recognisable as aliens, they were taken seriously, and everyone immediately dropped what they were doing and dived into the shelters. Global warming having caused them to be flooded in the meantime, of course, the entire world's population were drowned.

The three people, chosen at random from the phone book in 1937, were by a happy coincidence still alive, and after several days' fighting, came to an agreement with the vole-like aliens which satisfied everyone except Bertram Cox. The aliens departed happily and left the three surviving humans a small cat made of green electricity in return for Bertram's underpants and left kidney. Today, on the thirteenth anniversary of that epic and anticlimactic settlement, we celebrate the memory of Earth's three saviours, Bertram and the other two whose names I don't recall, and take the day off work in order to throw bricks at sheep in a ceremony instituted last year in Belgium.

Retail therapy

I went to Birmingham today, rather than practicing memorising things like I was supposed to. But I've got an excuse, sort of - my mother phoned me in the morning to blame me for pretty much everything she's ever done, which put me in a bad mood and feeling like I wanted to go out and take my mind off things. I much preferred it when she forgot I existed for years on end. Anyway, I'm not what you'd call a great shopper. I tend to cave in to high-pressure salespeople asking tough questions like "Can I help you?". If I don't say "Yes, please sell me everything in your shop," I feel guilty about wasting their time and cluttering up the store unnecessarily. But sometimes I can't help going into shops I have no intention of buying from or even any interest in the things they're selling, just because they're playing cool music. There was a clothes shop today blasting out "All These Things That I've Done" by the Killers at top volume, which is the kind of song you just have to sing along to if you're me. I wouldn't be seen dead in the kind of clothes they were selling (you know, the kind of normal clothes that everyone else wears, horrific things like that), but I think I did a pretty good job of feigning interest in the things for five minutes until the song finished and I could beat a hasty retreat.

I did do an hour cards practice this evening after getting home, so I'm not too worried about letting the memory stuff slide. Attempted 30 packs, possibly got as many as 27 right although I haven't checked yet and there are probably several mistakes. That would probably be enough to beat everyone at the WMC.

It's official, I'm fat and lazy

I started today with a couple of firm resolutions. Lots of memory training, and since I'd run out of sweets in the house, no going out and buying more. No training whatsoever and a metric buttload of sugar later, I'm feeling slightly guilty. It is, for those not keeping track, two weeks to the world championships. My standard of preparation is much better than last year's, but much worse than the year before's. I did do a full weekend's workout the weekend before last, and if I do a load tomorrow I'll still be happy with the day's work. I've rather unwisely accepted an invitation to a barbecue next Saturday night, so I'm not sure how much training I'll manage to fit in around that. Theoretically I could do lots and lots, but theoretically doesn't generally cut much ice with me.

I'm sounding like a stuck record here. I should be talking about something new and original. Hey, "Come On Eileen" is just coming on the radio. How long have I had it on? Not more than an hour or so, and that's the second time this song's come along. Same DJ too - it's Suggs on Saturday nights from six till ten. Perhaps he forgot. Or perhaps he just likes the song a lot. It is a good one.

I was thinking of telling an extremely tasteless joke about an advert on the radio, but I don't think I will. People expect certain standards from this blog.

My boomerang won't come back

The TV channel Boomerang is in its annoying "Scooby Summer" mode at the moment. This means that it quite literally shows nothing but Scooby Doo cartoons every single day from 6am to 9pm. I'm all in favour of a bit of Scooby every now and then (I even like Scrappy), but I can't imagine what makes them think people want to watch it constantly every single day. It's just plain silly. Hopefully they'll revert to normal again when it stops being summer.

There's also a free plastic boomerang with this week's Beano. I'd rather like to be able to throw a boomerang (in the sense of throwing the thing in such a way that it comes back, I mean), but I have a feeling that it would take a bit of practice, and practice of the kind that has to be done in wide open spaces. And I'm not self-confident enough to do that kind of thing somewhere where people can see me. So barring a trip to the Sahara desert or Antarctica, I suppose boomeranging is just not a skill I'm ever going to acquire. It's a darn shame, because imagine how cool it would be to be out in the park, nonchalently pick up a boomerang that someone's left lying around and throw it in a perfect curve. Then wander off while everyone goes ooh and aah and who was that handsome boomerangist?

Rail Rage Redux

My train this morning was sitting in the middle of nowhere for twenty minutes because of a cow on the line. I really have nothing to add to that.

Rail rage

Remember me saying yesterday that I was going to go into work early today? Well, that was the plan, but then when it came to getting out of bed in the morning I decided to snooze for another five minutes and woke up just in time to get up, get dressed and dash down to the station to catch the 8:38. Only to get there and find it had been cancelled due to a technical fault. So I was half an hour late, and had to stay late tonight to get things done.

I really hate working late. I don't get paid extra for it, even if I manage to get in on time in the morning, it's just out of professional committment or possibly just not wanting to get told off for missing deadlines.

Enough work-talk. I've done too much of that lately. I still haven't written that 150-word memory for the Alzheimer's people. Having decided to write about my dad and his clown costume from the first Red Nose Day (he got on the school bus with me and demanded that everyone give him money), I find that I'm really struggling to put it into words. It's just because it's going up on the internet, with my name on it, with people to read, so I want it to be just right. And I know that that description also applies to this blog and I don't have a problem with writing this, but you know... it's different, somehow.

Butterscotch Angel Delight

Isn't nearly as nice as I remember it being. Once again nostalgia can't stand up to harsh reality.

I was going to write about something slightly more lengthy and interesting (well, maybe not interesting - an essay about why I love the hugely underappreciated cartoon character Sniffles - but certainly lengthy), but I think I'll go to bed instead. I need to be in work early tomorrow because some fool's scheduled a three-hour meeting of minimal use or interest to me in the middle of the day and I've got lots of real work to do. These things are sent to try us. And when I moan about something like this, the audience have to ask me whether I've written those books yet. Keep me on my toes, please.

Just for you, Mike

Seeing as Mike Carroll, who if I had a fan club would be not only the president but also the person who does the fiddly jobs of printing and stapling the newsletter and sending it out to everyone, is always on at me to get some more photos taken of myself and shown to the world, here's me and my brother drunkenly but passionately singing at his party last month.

I'm still not going to get a camera - they're just too much hassle all round, and besides, I'm camera-shy. Except when it comes to VPS get-togethers, and those photos can stay restricted to VPS people, thank you very much. I don't think the world needs to see me in Lursa's dress.

Normal service

As I've mentioned before, I don't like posting on here while I've got my brother staying with me over the weekend. I don't know why exactly, since he reads this anyway, but that's just the way my mind works. Anyway, I haven't got anything too exciting to say, so I've probably spared you loyal readers a couple of days' worth of tedium by not forcing you to read me droning on about nothing in particular.

It's going to be all work and a strictly minimal amount of play for the next couple of weeks - not just work in the accountancy sense, although that's been a bit of a drag lately, but work on winning the WMC, which has luckily still been fun. But evenings and weekends of the next 14 days are hopefully going to be taken up by memorising cards and numbers, followed by a week's break before the competition. I'm definitely committed to winning it this year (and hopefully by a huge margin too, if I'm at my best and nobody else has got all that much better since last time).

As for the day job, I don't seem to have been firing on anything close to all cylinders for the last couple of weeks. There's been a load of stuff that I'm finding it impossible to get excited about, and I've just generally felt that I'd much rather be somewhere else. I think it's the time of year. Ever since 2002, my life has tended to start a new adventure of some kind in November, and it worries me that there's nothing on the horizon this time round. November 2002 was when I left my job at Adams, I started at Parkhouse in November 2003, in November 2004 I changed jobs and offices at Parkhouse and started working with a different set of people, and in November 2005 I started at Nord Anglia. But I am seriously thinking in terms of handing in my notice and wandering off into the wilderness again, and I need more people to tell me that that isn't a good idea at all, please. Because believe me, it isn't.

I've broken my TV aerial

I don't use the thing, because I've got cable, but it sits on my telly to look decorative. Or at least it did until I knocked it on the floor and broke it. I suppose I could sellotape it together, but it wouldn't look as cool. Or would it? Maybe it would look cooler, actually. Yes, I will sellotape it. Forget I said anything.

I'm mentally writing a novel at the moment. It's been floating around my head in various little threads for years, but now the thing's coalescing into plots and paragraphs of purple prose. I think I'm going to have to write it down and see if anyone will publish it. I know I said I was going to write that stupid memory book, but you try telling my brain that. Maybe I'll write both. And then publish them, together with "Jayce and Alex" as a three-pack. It'd be different, anyway. I don't want to say what this novel's about in case someone steals or derides the idea (I'm very sensitive). But I think it's going to be pretty good.

Something I missed

It's now a year and five days since I started this blog. Not counting the false start in October 2004. Hooray!

I wrote to all the memory people I was meaning to write to (except one who I just realised I forgot, darn it), and put in a good bit of practice tonight. Did a pack of cards in 27.20, a new personal best - it was the kind of recall that took the full five minutes of hard thought and finished with a bit of guesswork, but they all count. I seem to do my best times when I haven't tried speed cards for a week or so, so I should be good for the world championship if I stick with the plan of doing a final mega training session on the weekend before. With my brother coming round this weekend, I've only got two more after that. Ooh, nerves building up. I'll admit I had a slightly anxiety-based dream about doing abstract images at the WMC last night. But a bit of nerves is good for you.

Hi, fans

I have a huge pile of "fan mail" (by which I mean emails from people involved in memory competitions, who aren't actually fans of mine so much as rivals) to answer, and I was planning to go through it all tonight and get it out of my inbox. But in the end I decided to sit around doing nothing instead. I get like that sometimes. So if you're expecting an email from me, it'll be tomorrow, probably.

It's getting to be the silly season when everyone goes crazy about "memory sports". Well, the vast majority of the world's population still hasn't heard about it, but a few more people than usual realise that the World Memory Championship exists, and it maybe gets a mention in a couple of newspapers and things. This is the height of fame and fortune for us mnemonic types. I'm actually quite looking forward to it at the moment, and hoping I get the local paper tracking me down and interviewing me again. I'll get over it.

Also, I've blown a fuse, in the more literal than usual sense of the phrase. I need to get a new one and I have no idea where to get one from in Burton during my lunch break. But the current situation involves either having the kitchen plug sockets working, or the living room ones. And yes, I haven't got a real kitchen so the kitchen sockets are about six feet away from the living room ones, but it's still an inconvenience. Why can't this house have the kind of fuses I can deal with, that you put new wire in like my old place? I've never had to cope with these cylindrical things before.

Hanging out with the impaler

I dreamt last night that my best friend was a man called Ethan, known to his friends as Vlad. He was a really nice guy, and it was kind of disappointing to wake up and remember that he doesn't exist. The dream didn't see fit to narrate how he acquired the unusual nickname, so we can only speculate. As to why my subconscious mind came up with the name in the first place, I can only assume it's because one of my neopets (the one I adopted and didn't name myself) is called 0_Vladimir_0, Vlad for short. And the name Ethan must be because I was thinking about the Transformers comic storyline featuring a character called Ethan Zachary recently, although why anyone would want to be friends with the man who killed Optimus Prime, I can't imagine.

Meanwhile, in the waking world, I'm trying to think of a memory. Any memory from my life will do, as long as it can be expressed in 150 words (so I can see this is going to be a problem for me, I can't say good morning without launching into a rambling three-volume epic). It's for the Alzheimer's Society Million Memories campaign, which will be launching in a couple of months with interviews and top tips on how to keep your memory sharp from some guy called Ben Pridmore. What, couldn't they find any real celebrities to do this kind of thing?

Anyway, my mind's a blank. So far they've got "Lynda Bellingham's special family Christmases; AA Gill's unforgettable trip to Paris; Richard Briers and his first home on a struggling actor's wage in 1960s; and Jo Brand's first and dangerous driving lesson", so I need something along those lines. But now I can't think of anything that's ever happened to me prior to sitting down and typing this latest paragraph.

Roundheads and Cavaliers

Since I haven't talked about comics for a while, I thought it would be fun to express my opinions of "Civil War", the epic storyline consuming Marvel comics at the moment. For the benefit of readers who aren't into American superhero comics, the two main publishers (Marvel and DC) have taken to doing this kind of mega-crossover to excess in the last couple of years. It has the effect of temporarily boosting sales when an individual issue of any superhero comic is part of a wider crossover, so the logic is that if they do it all the time, sales will go on getting higher forever. Last time they went down this road, the bubble burst in spectacular fashion and Marvel went bankrupt - the problem is that what people buy comics for in the long term is the characters and their ongoing storylines, and when they're being constantly derailed by a story being part 274 of an epic that expects you to pay hundreds of dollars to read the whole thing, it gets old pretty fast. On the other hand, Marvel nowadays have lots of money because their movies have been so successful, so that's not such a big deal now. And, more importantly, Civil War is actually really good. Unlike "House of M" last year, which was diabolical.

The idea is that a major tragedy caused by second-string superheroes the New Warriors, which kills hundreds of children in small-town America, sparks a huge public reaction and finally persuades the government to put through a law forcing people with superpowers to register with the authorities, get proper training and work under government supervision. Which is actually quite sensible, but it goes against the superhero tradition of anyone just being able to put on a mask and go out and fight crime. So all the world's superheroes pick a side and end up fighting each other. It's an interesting idea that hasn't been done before on this kind of scale. The individual heroes' storylines have mostly been well done, especially She-Hulk (which gives the New Warriors the kind of serious treatment they've been lacking for years now) and Thunderbolts (which is always great and seamlessly incorporates this storyline into its many ongoing plots). The only ones I haven't bought after reading them in the shops are Wolverine (which has atrocious art) and X-Factor (which gives a token acknowledgement to the Civil War background and carries on with its own impenetrable plots).

We automatically sympathise with the rebel anti-registration superheroes, but they're making an effort to give coverage to the other side too - Spider-Man, at least for the moment, is firmly pro-registration, even revealing his secret identity to the world, and in the latest Civil War issue Captain America and his rebels are decidedly out of line, starting a big fight when Iron Man and his join-the-government-team gang just want to talk. I'm enjoying the whole thing, and looking forward to seeing where it goes (although you just know that it'll end with the whole thing being swept under the carpet and the status quo restored, like they always do. Maybe with Spider-Man's wife written out somehow because the idiot in charge of Marvel doesn't like her).

DC are also doing an epic storyline in a rather different way at the moment - instead of crossing over into their regular comics, they're doing an additional weekly series called '52', on account of it runs for 52 weeks. I don't normally read DC, but I'm getting this because I think weekly comics should be encouraged - I hate waiting a month or more for the next issue. The gimmick here is that it's in real time - each issue covers a week in the life of the DC universe, while all their other comics have jumped ahead a year in the lives of their heroes. So in '52', we get to see a world where Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are all missing, without it getting in the way of the other comics. We're eleven weeks into it now, and it's been very entertaining. Although the latest issue is focusing on the least compelling of the various interconnecting storylines, so it isn't as good.

If you want to get into the world of superhero comics, either of these is a good place to start. Try "Civil War" especially - see if your comic shop can get you all the comics so far, it's worth giving it a try.

My new favourite golfer is Ben Bunny

Isn't that a brilliant name? Although I mainly answer to 'Zoomy' nowadays, I still like to be called Benjamin Bunny as a term of endearment, and I can't imagine how cool it must be to be really called that. Actually, it's probably not all that cool at all, and he's probably tired of all the jokes by now. He didn't make the cut (by a long way), so it's obviously better in golf to be a Tiger than a rabbit.

Anyway, I don't suck even slightly today. I've done a half-hour binary, hour numbers and spoken numbers practice run, bought all the little household bits and bobs I've run out of in the past week or seven, ironed a shirt and pair of work trousers, done at least one other significant thing that I was going to mention but have forgotten, and made a half-hearted stab at cleaning my kitchen sink. I'm great. Now I'm going to play an othello tournament on Kurnik, and see if I can win a game for a change.

News in brief

In what has been hailed as a remarkable scientific advance, technology has been developed enabling horses to communicate with chickens. The device, which looks like a cross between a gramophone and an unusually hairy woodlouse, translates the horse's whinnies and body language into a combination of clucks, foot-scratches, pecking and so forth easily comprehended by a chicken. The scientists responsible for the new invention are now working on their next project - a similar apparatus which will allow the chickens to reply. After that, they might work on a way for humans to work out what the horses and chickens are saying.

Another scandal has engulfed the world of athletics after an Olympic gold-medal-winner tested positive for spinach. American runner Jack Mercer had been hailed as a hero after setting a new world-record time for the 100m sprint of three and a half seconds, a feat made even more remarkable by the fact that his feet had been glued to the starting blocks by an unknown miscreant, but has now been stripped of his medal and banned for life. "I yam disgustipated wit' myself," he told reporters.

A mass murderer has been unexpectedly acquitted due to some legal technicality. Raymond Roland had cheerfully confessed to killing upwards of three thousand people over a busy six-week period in 2005, and had been expecting a life sentence. But for some reason it became legally necessary for the judge to dismiss the case and set Roland free. "It was some kind of thing to do with some old law, I think," observed Mr Justice Puckles. "It's unfortunate, seeing as the man in question has every intention of going out and killing more people, but that's the law."

And finally, the fire brigade were called out to the village hall in Manchester this morning - not because of a fire, but because the town clerk had dialled the wrong number when ordering a pizza. Because the fire brigade are not allowed to leave a building without extinguishing a fire, the entire Blue Watch had to sit in reception for three hours while the staff searched for a match or cigarette lighter. During this time, six million people perished in a major conflagration in the building next door.

It's not good when...

...you can't think of a single thing to blog about apart from work. Well, I'm not going to bore you with tales of thrilling budget preparation or complaints about the purchase ledger department. What might be more interesting is that I'm going to one of the nurseries tomorrow afternoon - part of a scheme to make everyone in the company more aware of what goes on in the other parts of it. I'd rather be working, to be honest. I like children in principle, they're the best way of perpetuating the species that I know of, but when I come into close contact with actual ones, they tend to get annoying very quickly.

For some reason, though, children invariably like me. It must just be because I'm so sweet and loveable.

Run away and join the circus

It occurs to me that I've spent most of my life moaning about my job and never done anything constructive about finding an alternative. I keep resolving to actually write a memory book and get it published, and then I always find something better to do with my time. Well, no more. I'm fed up of hearing myself whinging mentally about how cool it would be to really be a semi-celebrity. I'm going to really, definitely do it, and if I don't everyone reading this is entitled to make jeering comments about me at every opportunity.

None of which will save me from a day of budget meetings tomorrow, of course, but at least it will give me some kind of sense of achievement in the long run. Probably.

Be Not Proud

It occurred to me that I haven't written anything surreal and nonsensical for much too long, but I don't seem to be in quite the right mood. I just started writing something about a spy, but it wasn't even remotely funny, so I abandoned it. Instead, I'll hope I haven't done so already and talk about the fact that the Brazilian TV people all thought my name was Pridemore instead of Pridmore. This happens to me a lot, and not just with Brazilians. Admittedly, Pridemore sounds more like it should be a name than Pridmore does, but that's not the point. The Pridmore family has a long and distinguished history, probably, and just because nobody with the surname has ever become world-famous doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it.

The name Pridmore seems to have confounded all those people who compile books of surname meanings. Most of them omit it altogether, and even the most exhaustive websites can only speculate that it probably started out as a place-name, although nobody knows where the original prid-more might have been. Perhaps one of my ancestors just decided to make up the name by stringing random letters together. There's a proud tradition of illiteracy in the family, so maybe someone called Pridemore just forgot how to spell their name one day and it stuck.

It's an anagram of Ripe Dorm. Or More Drip. Or 'orrid MEP.

And when I'm drunk I dance like me dad

I've recently developed a habit of going around in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the neck wide open, and whenever I see myself in a mirror I think "Wow, I look cool like this!" I'm quite consciously aware that I only think this because that's how my dad always used to dress, but the way I see it if I'm happy with the way I look, that's the only thing that matters. It's not like any objective observer is going to think I look cool or stylish or handsome whatever I'm wearing.

Anyway, today I had lots of time to go around like that, because getting home from work was more of a hassle than usual. Because of the usual three or four different and contradictory excuses, there were no trains running at all tonight - the guy in the little room at Burton station who gives announcements on the tannoy eventually just said that he had no idea when the next train would be arriving, and recommended that we all get the bus instead. And the bus from Burton to Derby goes all round the houses through Tutbury and Hatton and Hilton and anywhere else you can think of and takes an hour to cover the ten-miles-as-the-crow-flies. All of which meant that I left my bike at the train station so I'll have to walk down to Derby station tomorrow. My life is one earth-shattering disaster after another, isn't it?

I did contemplate cycling home all the way from Burton - it would possibly be good for me, and it would be fun to see if I can still cycle ten miles without dropping dead (I used to do it twice a day at one time). But eventually sanity prevailed - I don't actually know the way, I always get lost when I try to follow road signs, it's all A-roads where I'd get knocked down by speeding cars or back roads where I'd get knocked down by wild farm animals, and the sun was blazing away like nobody's business on the hottest day of the year, and me without a hat. I also contemplated getting a taxi, but thought better of that kind of extravagance.

I Suck

I have done absolutely nothing all day today. Quite literally nothing, just sat around watching TV or reading. Couldn't even be bothered to cook a meal tonight, so I went out to McDonald's. It's hotter than a really hot place and just not the weather for being industrious and hard-working. Or that's my excuse, anyway.

One thing I've done today is taken another step towards the end of my rather strange project that I started a few months ago - to watch an episode of Baby Looney Tunes daily and write a review and analysis of it (just for my own entertainment, you understand, because I don't think anyone else would want to read it - BLT is unjustly despised by most serious cartoon fans). I kind of dropped it during the World Cup and with all my travels, mainly because it was hard to keep the motivation once I'd got onto season 2, which is almost uniformly awful and not a patch on the first season. But having watched "Duck's Reflucks" (a rare misfire from Marlowe Weisman, who's one of the best writers of this kind of cartoon in the world) today, now I've only got two more episodes to watch (both of them dreadful ones), and then I'll need a new similar kind of thing to occupy half an hour of my time in an evening.

Thundercats might be fun (I've got every episode of that on tape too), and that's the kind of thing I could publish on the internet because some people might really enjoy it, but it's a bigger task that takes up more time - episodes are 20 minutes long instead of 11, and there's more plot and continuity to talk about, not to mention an absolute goldmine of nitpicking of plot inconsistencies. Or a comic like Alpha Flight or Defenders, although there's plenty of detailed analysis and criticism of those out there already. I'm making great strides in my effort to collect every Warner Bros cartoon, but still missing a few hundred, so I can't review those from start to finish yet.

I could devote the extra time to training for the world memory championship so as not to make a complete fool of myself there, but then again you can work too hard on things. I'm going to go and lounge around reading comics rather than ironing shirts or making myself a packed lunch for tomorrow.

That's better

After spending all yesterday yawning as well as feeling the usual post-memory-performance urge to resign and run away to join the circus, I stayed in bed till after midday today. Now I feel all refreshed and ready for the challenge of sitting down and getting on with training for the WMC. Absolutely have to do at least one hour-long discipline tomorrow, and then next weekend I'll try to do a full practice WMC (ie all the disciplines except things like words and dates that don't need so much work). Then there's three more weekends before the championship - my brother's coming over for one of them and another might be taken up with hanging out with other people, so time is running short. And if I work at it properly, I might still have a chance of winning. Touch wood.

I also need to clean this flat up. I've got a shiny new gas oven (should have titled this post "The New Gas Cooker Sketch") and it looks out of place amongst the filth and clutter of the rest of the living-room-cum-kitchen. It also shows temperatures in celsius, which is irritating when I'm used to gas marks. I like gas marks, they're so completely stupid. Who would invent a scale of cooker temperatures that have nothing to do with any temperature scale? And for reasons I haven't quite figured out yet, it plugs in to the electric mains. It's got one of those buttons that makes an electric spark to light the hob, but then so did the old one and that didn't plug in. I suppose I should read the manual, but I don't really want to know that badly.

Rio: incipit secunda pars

To resolve last night's nailbiting cliffhanger, Alberto phoned me just about the instant I'd stopped writing. Alberto Dell'Isola Rezende Medeiros, is interesting not only for having more names than most people, but also for being at the forefront of Brazil's emerging gang of memory enthusiasts. He's also the person I have to thank for the trip - he persuaded Globo not only to put him on the show and fly him to the world championships next month, but to bring me out there too. As usual with people I've only known through emails, he is in real life absolutely nothing like I'd imagined - I was thinking earnest young student rather than fun mid-twenties maths teacher. It turns out that he likes all the important things in life - cartoons, the Beatles, classic arcade games and so on, and is a really great guy to hang out with.

So, on Tuesday afternoon Globo sent a car again to take us both down to the Village. Verônica, the other person I have to thank for the trip since she made all the arrangements and is also a lot of fun, escorted us to the studio dressing room where my outfit was waiting. Presumably operating on the principle that the less of me is visible, the better I look on TV, they'd got me a big black cloak, complete with hood, to go with the black suit and playing-cards tie. I looked seriously cool. We spent something like three hours hanging around while they recorded another bit of the show (a man won a makeover of his car by conducting an orchestra after minimal training, and I had a really vivid memory of my dad watching a similar show years ago and saying "the orchestra know what they're doing, they don't need to look at him...").

Eventually we went through to the studio where an enthusiastic audience (composed entirely of attractive young women, which surprised me a bit since the show is obviously aimed at all ages and genders) were cheering Luciano and a singer who performed a rather good if Eurovisiony song. Then it was Alberto's turn to go on stage and perform. He did a very cool thing with a gossip magazine he'd memorised, describing what was on any page Luciano, the singer or an audience member asked for. Then he did day-of-the-week calculations rather faster than I can do it as an encore. They had a calendar appear on the screen behind him showing the correct day of the week (or, in a couple of cases, the correct day of the week for a date other than the one he'd been asked, which caused some confusion).

So then it was my turn to come on ominously in cloak and hood (and snazzy headpiece with microphone attached that somehow gave it an even more Star Wars look - Alberto had already been insisting on calling me Master Yoda until I pointed out that Ben Kenobi would be more appropriate and slightly more flattering) and do the card thing. Luciano shuffled the pack, spread it out on the table in front of me and gave me a minute to memorise them (during which he whispered distractingly in Portuguese about what I was doing). I made a complete and total mess of things, so he re-shuffled them and did it again. I messed up in less dramatic fashion that time, but it was still embarrassing. He suggested using that take, but I insisted on doing it again, and luckily got it all right the third time. I think it'll look good on TV - I was trying to be unsmiling, cool and intellectual as the cloak seemed to demand, but I'm not sure I kept that front up the whole time (it's hard not to giggle at moments like this). Still, they're going to send me a tape, and if you're in Brazil you can see the finished product on June 22nd.

Henrique Athayde, a Rio-resident memory guy, had joined us in the dressing room and taken photos (I hadn't brought a camera with me as usual), and the three of us went back to the hotel for dinner before a night out on the town. Alberto had challenged me to a duel at StreetFighter II, but it turned out that the big arcade in Rio didn't have a single Capcom fighting game. Disgraceful. He had to beat me up on Virtua Fighter 2 instead, although I won on Daytona US. Then we went to the bowling alley nearby, played three games and equitably won one apiece. It's fair to say there wasn't a great level of skill on display, although strangely enough the scores got better after we'd started on the tequila.

A certain amount of alcohol later, we hailed a taxi back to the hotel, singing raucously all the way home. Henrique went back home and Alberto and I decided it would be a good idea to end the night by walking along the beach delivering what I think were really quite cool and harmonic renditions of Beatles songs at top volume. As I was still wearing my good black work shoes, I made sure to take them off and put them at a safe distance from the sea before going for a paddle, only for a huge wave to immediately come along and soak them. So now they smell of the sea and are full of sand as well as holes. Twenty degrees celsius at midnight!

Having finally gone to bed at about half past one, I had plenty of time in the morning for a lie-in, although my body didn't seem to agree, waking me up at about five o'clock as it had done all the time I'd been in Brazil. So then it was just a matter of being driven back to the airport (Globo's driver again, at my beck and call all week!) and heading home.

So, in summary, I got a wonderfantabulous three day holiday for free in return for two minutes' work. You've got to admit that makes me pretty damn cool.

Rio: Phase one, in which Doris gets her oats

I'm writing this the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper in my lovely room on the sixth floor of the Royalty Hotel, Rio de Janeiro. It's 5pm on Monday and just starting to get dark. I'm impressed by the cosmic coincidence that in Derby, where it's four hours later but in the other hemisphere, it will also be just getting dark. Anyway, I'm intending to type this up and stick it on my blog, so if you're reading this now it's safe to assume that that's what I've done. It occurred to me that it might save some time when I get home, because this holiday's going to have a lot to write about and I've got a spare moment now - I'm assuming Alberto's going to call at some point since I told him what room I'm in but somehow neglected to ask him his room number in return. I'm improving my Portuguese in the meantime by watching cartoons - Clifford O Cachorrinho is Clifford's Puppy Days, although I'm pretty sure the title translates literally as Clifford The Puppy, possibly with an extra diminutive suffix on the end. See, I'm multilingual!

Anyway, this was meant to be an account of the holiday so far. Let's start with book reviews. I decided to get two new books for the trip - John Banville's "The Sea", which regular readers will recall me saying ages ago that I was going to buy, and while I was in the bookshop and not being entirely confident in the ability of "The Sea" to keep me going all through the four days away from home (it's not all that long), I decided to see if there was anything by Flann O'Brien that I hadn't read (remembering that the first trip I blogged about, I waxed lyrical over O'Brien's work). The only one they had was "Best of Myles", a compilation of the column he wrote for the Irish Times under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. These columns, by the way, are exactly what I would love this blog to be like, if only I was a halfway competent writer. They're hugely clever, witty, inventive and just plain funny.

Having picked my two books in such a random way, I was rather surprised to see that the writer of one had obviously read and enjoyed the other. Not only is there a character in "The Sea" called Myles, but both books include a pun involving a Primus stove and the Latin phrase "primus inter pares", which CAN'T be a coincidence.

And speaking of The Sea, I can see it from my window - the hotel's right on the beach. The smell of sea air, I only realised today when I smelt it, is something I haven't experienced for a good three years. It's lovely, and the beach here is wonderful. You can't really understand how much I love a nice beach without appreciating where I grew up - in and around Boston, Lincolnshire. Firstly, it's thirty miles in any direction from the nearest hill, which makes me admire inclines whenever I see them (and the mountains around here - wow!), and secondly, the nearest beach, where we always went for holidays and days out, is Skegness. Now, I quite genuinely would recommend Skegness to anyone, it's a great place, but if your idea of the seaside is clean, sparkling white sand and pure blue water topped with shiny white wave, gleaming in the sun... you might be disappointed. Skegness is on the North Sea coast, and the sea water is the colour and texture of thick mud (with, by all accounts, a generous quantity of raw sewage mixed in). So I love a good beach, and even the lack of donkey rides here doesn't put me off.

It's also hot! It got up to about 29 degrees here today. I had the morning free (I got in late last night, just in time to see the penalty shoot-out, and was asleep by half seven), and spent it walking around the beach and the bit of this ginormous city within walking distance of the hotel. Globo, the TV company, have paid for me to have three meals a day at the fancy hotel restaurant, but there's only so much posh food a man can take, so I had lunch at Bob's Burgers next door. Delicious!

Then this afternoon Globo's driver came to take me to the studio, which turns out to be a long journey along some terrible roads - they reminded me of the Old Hammond Beck Road in Boston, although that's not a reference anyone reading this will understand, so I don't know why I'm writing it. Suffice to say that they were full of potholes and bumps, and indeed at one point the whole road had collapsed into a huge chasm, so we had to go over into the wrong lane where it wasn't quite so deep or wide, to get over it. Still, we got to the studio in one piece, and it turns out that 'studio' isn't really the word. 'Village' comes closer, but only if Derby is also a village - it reminds me more than anything of the town built by the Globex Corporation in that Simpsons episode - there are lots of big studios (Globo do all the big Brazilian soap operas and things), exterior sets, offices, buildings all over the place, it's fantastic. I met all the people behind the show we're recording tomorrow. I demonstrated my amazing ability to recall the cards in Portuguese and they looked at each other and said "Maybe you can do it in English, and we'll have a translator." I don't blame them.

I memorised another pack in English for the crew (slowly, and with mistakes, but they were still impressed), then the presenter Luciano came in (he's more Ant and Dec than Noel Edmonds, I've decided) and I memorised another one (perfectly) for his benefit, plus a string of numbers he wrote down. Everyone liked it. He took me to meet Scorpio (okay, he isn't actually called Scorpio, he's Marcel I think, although he does have a beard), the big boss, and I did another pack for him. Not perfectly memorised, mainly because he was saying "Wow!" and "Look at that!" all the time I was memorising, as if the fact of me looking at the cards was in itself somehow amazing, but he still thought it was cool when I could recall most of them. My standards of impressiveness in memorising are much higher than everyone else's, I need to remember that and not worry about getting jeered tomorrow if I take 90 seconds to memorise a pack. Anyway, that's filled an hour and two sides of A4, I'll write more tomorrow but now I should go and find Alberto (who I notice I forgot to write about today although I met him for the first time).

It's a fact, I'm back, yeah I'm standing on the rooftops shouting out...

Ah, back in non-sunny England. I'm in an internet cafe in London - I should really be on a train home to Derby to get some sleep, not having had more than four hours or so for the last two days, but after the plane journey I'm fed up of sitting down while being moved from A to B, so I decided to have a walk around the big city while I'm here. Lots and lots and LOTS to write about Rio, which I'll do when I get home, today or tomorrow night (got to work tomorrow, need my beauty sleep). This Wish You Were Here special will come in two parts - I wrote part one of the travelogue with pen and paper on Monday afternoon and I just need to type it up. I could have used the internet access at the hotel, but I like to be completely incommunicado when I go away like this. And nobody's emailed me to say that some disaster happened while I was out of touch, so it's fine. Unless the house has burned down or something.