Excitement

Ooh, Blue Peter are phoning me tomorrow! I'm going to absolutely insist on a badge as payment for whatever they want me to do. I drive a hard bargain, I know, but sometimes you have to stick to your guns. Perhaps I should try to watch an episode too, so as I have half a chance of remembering the presenters' names.

This reminds me of "Pink Peter", which was a comedy sketch some people, possibly including Robert Webb but I can't remember for sure, put on in one of our school productions. It was extremely funny, meaning that it almost certainly was Robert Webb, since his bits were always the only reason to watch those shows. I'll name-drop that to the Blue Peter people and they'll think I'm even cooler than I already am.

Ben Pridmore on Saturday Live

The rather uninspired title is a cunning plan to attract the attention of googlers wanting to look me up after this morning's radio show. Is it a 'show' if it's on the radio? Well, it is now if I say it is.

Anyway, this unseemly publicity-seeking is an attempt to atone for a fairly serious mistake I made during the show - I forgot to mention the thing that was the main reason I agreed to do it in the first place. I still had fun, though - you can hear it here if you're so inclined.

But the thing I was supposed to talk about is that myself and a group of other British memory competitors, all of them called James, are in the process of organising educational and entertaining visits to as many universities in the country who will let us into their hallowed halls. We'll put on a memory performance, hand out memory manuals teaching tricks and organise university memory competitions. It'll be a fascinating introduction to the world of amazing feats like the ones I performed with mixed results on the radio. And you know, I was just about to post this without including the link to the website. I really have a mental block about this, for some reason. CLICK HERE!

I'm going to get a badge!

Remember back in March when, in a misleadingly-titled blog post, I mentioned that I really love Blue Peter and have always wanted a Blue Peter badge? Well, I got an email today, and they want me on the show! Some time in December! Oooh, I wonder if they'll let me light the advent candle?

Seriously, this is big time stuff, isn't it? Blue Peter! Proper BBC1 nationwide TV, not some grotty satellite channel or Channel 5 or Irish or Brazilian TV, proper British television that lots of proper British impressionable young people will be watching! I don't know why I've suddenly started being famous again, but today I confirmed that I'll be on Radio 4 on Saturday morning (set your tape-recording devices for 9:00), agreed to do a bit more filming for the memory chimp documentary and gushed to a Blue Peter Forward Planning Producer that I'd really really love to be on the programme. And this after a good few weeks when nobody's wanted to talk to me at all.

And maybe I'll be so impressive as a guest on the show that they'll ask me to become the next Blue Peter presenter, and thus fulfil another of my life's ambitions! You can be a Blue Peter presenter when you're bald and bearded and 31, can't you?

Also got a job interview tomorrow, but who cares about being an accountant when you're going to be on Blue Peter?

Our radio, our radio, our radio rocks

Remember back in early July when Radio 4 wanted me to be on Saturday Live? Well, they just got back in touch today, as if it was only yesterday, and renewed the offer. So I might be on the wireless this coming Saturday morning, assuming they do call me back tomorrow and do still want me. And yes, I know that it's not usual to use the word 'rocks' in connection with Radio 4, unless possibly in the context of a thrilling programme about geology, but hey, if I'm on it, it really does rock.

I've even got something I can possibly plug while I'm there, and benefit the memory-competition world as a whole - it's one of those projects I wasn't supposed to talk about that I mentioned a while ago. Assuming the others think it's a good idea to talk all about it on the radio before we've finalised any real details, I'll spill the beans. I'm sure you're all excited and giddy with anticipation.

The footballer's wife tells her troubles and strife

I'll start with a confession - the song "Mr Rock & Roll" by Amy Macdonald makes me cry. It's also a good song, so when I saw that her album was reduced in Woolworth's, I decided to buy it. But while I was there, I made a shocking discovery - the speak-your-weight machine is gone! I suppose they've got rid of it for the Christmas season when there's less demand for weighing oneself and more for buying huge quantities of cheap tat. So now I'm not going to be able to weigh myself and see if my weight and body mass index have gone down to reasonable levels in the last month!

And then when I got home I noticed that they've stopped doing the 1250+ tournaments on Kurnik othello! Just when my rating has reached the dizzy heights of 1275 and I was planning to play in tomorrow's! Actually, they stopped doing them two months ago, I just haven't noticed till today because my rating's been a touch on the low side lately, but it's still terribly upsetting. There should be more elitism in modern society! It's really exciting when you're eligible to play in the 1250+ leagues! Now I don't get to look down my nose on people who have slightly lower ratings!

AND I found out today that I didn't get the job at Proquest. THREE earth-shatteringly traumatic disappointments in one morning, followed by repeatedly listening to a song that for some reason never fails to bring a tear to my eye. By the standards of some of those true-life-tragic-stories books out there, I could make a fortune writing about this. But I'd settle for a hug and a there-there if anyone's got one handy...

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

I've just seen an advert that uses that song. I've never heard it before anywhere except from the singing Christmas tree that used to be in the Eagle shopping centre every festive season. It wasn't there last year, as I think I lamented in my blog at the time, and I hoped it would be back this year now that the rebuilding work is all finished and the centre is much bigger and better than ever, but no, rotten old Santa's grotto is there again. Poor tree. I wonder what happened to it.

On the other hand, I went through a pack of cards in 22.67 seconds today. Didn't get the recall right, but that's the fastest I've ever managed. Passing the cards between my fingers works so much better than turning them over onto the table. So many wasted years, doing it the wrong way... sigh...

Working like a dog

Hmm, I'm feeling horribly unproductive. I think I'm going to set myself some hugely excessive targets to achieve tomorrow, so that I can get lots of stuff done and still feel like a failure. That'll do wonders for my psyche. I really need to get back into practicing the long memory disciplines, so that I can win the world championship next year. I think I'll really make an effort with it tomorrow, for want of anything better to do with my time, unplug the phone and see if I can fit in two three-hour sessions. I'll also scour the recruitment websites to see if there are any interesting jobs going, clean up the pigsty I live in and who knows, maybe even write that book I keep talking about.

And learn to do an amusing conjuring trick. I don't know enough amusing conjuring tricks.

Things that deserve a blog entry to themselves but haven't got one

Ace bought me a star for my birthday. A star that comes with a cuddly dragon!

My brother bought me a Baby-Face Finlayson comic library, and a knockoff Optimus Prime-like transforming robot whose left leg he then snapped off two minutes after I unwrapped and opened it.

I'm still having a Zumo smoothie every day, although I'm not 100% certain whether they're less fattening than my usual chocolate bar and cherry coke. I don't entirely trust "low-fat probiotic yoghurt", anyway. There's something seriously wrong with the idea.

Mark-Paul Gosselaar is still alive and well, although I'd been told he was dead. This is nice to know. Grace Slick out of Jefferson Airplane is also still alive - I didn't have any reason to assume she isn't, but I'm listening to Surrealistic Pillow at the moment, and thought I should check.

I also recently bought an ancient Black Bob book for £1 in a charity shop. It's great. I'd get a dog if they weren't so scary and prone to bite people.

The Heat is off

Heat magazine called me today - they're doing a feature about memory in between the celebrity gossip ('about remembering the night before and all that') and wondered if I could advise them, in return for plugging my book. Yes, funnily enough, the woman who called me knew that I'm writing a book, but thought I was still the world memory champion. Perhaps she comes from an alternate universe where I'm the world champion and have finished writing a magnificent book that just needs a few plugs in popular magazines to make the best-seller list.

I turned it down, anyway - I'm being quite resolute lately about not accepting offers to pretend I know about how to improve your memory outside the whole numbers/cards area. With hindsight, perhaps I should have turned down the plugging-my-book compensation and suggested a big plug for the memory championships. We're trying to improve awareness right now. That would have been a lot more sensible than turning them down flat. Ah well, next time a tacky magazine wants me to talk to them, maybe I will.

I've been less resolute about the whole weight-loss thing. I have been swimming several times this week, but in the supermarket tonight there were 250g bars of dairy milk, two for £2. Which is the kind of offer you can't possibly turn down, is it? Especially when they're sitting next to 400g bars for £2.14 each so you can see what a fantastic offer it is (strangely, the box of 400g bars was half empty, so perhaps a lot of people really can't see what a fantastic offer it is). Well, I also bought some oranges and apples, so I'm still healthy and slimming.

Pigmeat

I always giggle at the sound of the German footballer Bastian Schweinsteiger's name when I see him on telly. I expect I'm mistranslating and his surname doesn't really mean Pig-Climber, but that's what it sounds like to me, and it makes me laugh. I have a sophisticated sense of humour.

It also reminds me of the olden days when I worked for Adams and saw "hand raised pork pies" among our product list. That always made me think of happy little baby pork pies, gambolling in the fields and being hand-reared by loving farmers. Really, I have a strange mind.

My professional quest

Remember that interview at Proquest for Thursday? It seems that they wanted it to be Tuesday, but the guy at the agency responsible for passing the message on to me got mixed up. So they rescheduled it for today instead, meaning that I went down to Cambridge to see them. Since the only train getting me there got me into town an hour before the interview, I decided to walk from the station to the office, just on the outskirts of the city, which would have been a very good idea and wonderful for my half-hearted keep-fit drive, if not for the fact that I was wearing my work shoes, and I haven't had much reason to walk long distances in them before, and they basically cut my feet to ribbons. Oww, my poor backs-of-ankles, they might never be the same again. And that's despite wearing the super-thick woolly socks my grandma got me for my birthday.

Still, apart from that, the interview wasn't too bad, all in all. It started with an Excel test in which they gave me a huge pile of data and 25 minutes to produce a useful report incorporating as much of it as possible in a meaningful kind of way. This is exactly my kind of thing, so it's strange that I made a complete mess of things - starting off producing something huge and ambitious, realising that it was going to take way longer than I was allowed, and finishing up with the kind of shoddy little report that I could have knocked out in two minutes flat. But in the interview after that I did my best to give the impression that I knew what I was doing and could, with five minutes more, produce something a lot cooler, and I think they believed me.

And the rest of the interview went pretty well, all in all. If I wasn't already out of the running with the Excel test, I think I came across as the kind of person they'd want to employ. And there's a sporting chance that they'll go for expediency (they need someone to start very quickly, and there can't be many candidates who'll need less than a month's notice) rather than ability. So we'll see. And if they don't, well, having considered my options, the scarcity of good jobs who want to employ me and the not-my-kind-of-thing-ness of every possibility I can think of in which I try to make a living from memory stuff, I think I'll go back to temping. It'll keep me off the streets at least, and there's always work available.

But seriously, ow, my feet!

Gunther stole my hat!

Well, not that Gunther, and in all probability not actually my hat either, but there's a programme on channel 4 tonight featuring a Dr Gunther von Hagens, who apparently always wears a trademark black fedora. "For me, it's also a sign of individuality," he says. "As a former East German who spent two years in prison for political dissent, I believe in individualism and I cherish it." Well, I'm sorry, but that's no excuse for stealing my gimmick. If we ever met at some kind of party for celebrities who get to appear on telly every now and then (it's about time I got invited to one of those) it would be terribly awkward and embarrassing.

I'm annoyed now. I've never heard of the guy before, but he seems to be better known than me, and he's a real doctor and everything, and he wears the same black hat.

Boycott Oust!

Not only is its claim to 'eliminate odours without just masking' obviously a lie, I've just noticed that my can of outdoor scent odour eliminator says on the back "It's special formula neutralises bad odour molecules in the air." Gah! Honestly, that's a disgrace. I'm not going to buy anything produced by S C Johnson any more, until they can prove to me that the 'family company' is teaching its younger members to use apostrophes properly. I bet there's a lot of marriages between first cousins in the Johnson family, you know.

Moving on from other people's mistakes to the far less important issue of my own stupidity, you might have noticed that rather than going out to a fireworks display tonight, I've been sitting at home reading my Oust. Well, that was because I needed to get up early tomorrow to get the train down to Cambridge for my second interview with Proquest. However, when I got down to printing out the information I have about the company to read on the train, I read the email from the agency giving the details of the interview, and found that it's actually not till Thursday. Good thing I noticed that in time, really, although I'm sure they would have took my turning up two days early as a sign that I was really, really keen about the job.

So now I have to rearrange my schedule and find something else to do tomorrow. I suppose I'll continue with my newly-established routine of going swimming in the morning and having a smoothie from the juice bar instead of coke and chocolate for a mid-morning snack afterwards. If this doesn't reduce my weight by November 17th, I don't know what will. Except possibly eating less unhealthy food at mealtimes, or cutting out the mid-morning snack altogether, but I don't think I'm prepared to do that. I only want to lose a little bit of weight, let's not be silly here.

Whoops, I forgot

Sorry, I didn't mention that my brother was coming round this weekend so I fell victim to my usual strange phobia of writing my blog when there's somebody else in the house. So if you were hanging on the edge of your seat waiting for my daily ramblings, well, you'll probably have fallen off. Sorry about that. Especially if it's one of those seats attached high up on an outside wall of your house, like in that Oasis video.

Anyway, I did remember to take part in the second Online Memory Challenge on Saturday. Come on, everyone, join in the fun next time, it really is great! Unless you're in China like Emmanuel Mercado is right now - Simon's website seems to be one of the many that doesn't have the approval of the Chinese government, so it's not possible to access it from there. This is the kind of thing that's going to get in the way of the Chinese competitors becoming part of the regular memory crowd - maybe if the WMC is ever held in China, I'll take the opportunity to overthrow the communist rulers while I'm there and set up a peaceful socialist republic in which everybody has equal access to www.memorysports.info. If I can spare the time in between disciplines.

I won it again, anyway, despite my brother being in the next room reading quietly and occasionally bringing huge piles of books down on his head with a loud crash. I think I've managed to get used to the different feel of reading the numbers/cards/words off a screen instead of a piece of paper - I did a 360 in speed numbers, which was groovy. Next time I'll try for a fast time on the speed cards and see what happens. It's really great for training, this system.

Virtuous Dean

I'm not feeling too much like a lazy slob right now. After all, I've been doing well with the swimming - last Friday and then yesterday and today and have every intention of going back tomorrow, and I'm starting to feel less like collapsing after a couple of lengths. And I've got an interview with Proquest in Cambridge next Tuesday, which I'm feeling optimistic about - it will take the form of an Excel test (I'm all in favour of tests at interviews rather than just talking) and then a more standard talk, featuring 'competency-based questions' (you know the kind of thing, 'give an example of a situation where you...', arguably a less stupid interview technique than 'what are your strengths and weaknesses', although I'm still not a fan). I do quite like the sound of this job, so fingers crossed, eh?

And I've also embarked on this year's National Novel Writing Month project - for newcomers or oldcomers without flawless memories, this is the annual task of writing a 50,000-word novel from scratch during the month of November, the point being that you'll produce a load of rubbish but get your creative juices flowing. This year, instead of trying to do something different and stretch my boundaries, I'm going to write a silly but epic story that will be made up as I go along and not make any kind of sense. It's called "Virtuous Dean" and will consist of thirty chapters, each containing exactly 1,666 words, followed by a ten-word epilogue. So far, Virtuous Dean, Despicable Dean and the man whose dog Despicable Dean accidentally killed with an axe have decided to go to Paris to buy coffee beans. As the first stage of their plan to get there, they've acquired jobs as cabin crew on a plane going to Iceland, and I'm sure further adventures await them there.

Dream diary

Sorry I didn't post this last night, but my internet connection dropped dead. I actually wrote it yesterday morning as soon as I woke up, but decided not to post it till the evening for reasons of tradition, so it's now a whole day old. Sorry about that. Anyway, here goes:

My head is really full of dreams I’ve just had, so I thought I’d write them down. I don’t remember exactly what order these sequences occurred in, but the following things all happened:

I was driving a car (which is strange enough, since I never do) in Tumby Woodside. I turned right at the end of the road to head towards Boston, but there were several new sets of traffic lights, a few yards apart – permanent ones, not the temporary ones they put around roadworks. I negotiated them okay, but had a feeling I’d gone through a red one. I pulled in to the side of the road to let a tractor pass in the opposite direction (this is pretty mundane for a dream – driving along those roads, you get out of the way of tractors a lot), and it was lucky that I did, because then I was overtaken by a blue car moving sideways. It stopped, horizontally across the whole narrow road, and I stopped to wait for the driver (he was a yuppie type, but nobody I know) to get out of the way. He tried to do something, but only ended up going forward and down into the ditch along the side of the road. The front windscreen shattered and the guy fell out, but he wasn’t hurt. I got out of my car to see if I could help him.

We knocked on the door of a nearby farmhouse (not one of the real houses that line that road) – it had a friendly, cluttered interior and the owner was a friendly old man who I knew (not based on any real-life person again). He offered us a mobile phone with which we could call a magic fairy who granted wishes. This didn’t seem at all like an unusual kind of thing to do. The fairy came along and fixed the car with a wave of her hand, returning it to the road, chatting with me that it was a surprise to get the call from the yuppie, since that mobile phone is the only way of contacting her and she normally only speaks to the old guy. As an afterthought, she transformed the yuppie’s car into a magnificent vehicle – a sort of burgundy limousine, three doors along each side and decidedly antique, looking like it dated from the forties or fifties. I was delighted by it – it was a ‘Spyder’, and there was a manufacturer’s name too, but I can’t remember what it was.

The yuppie, on the other hand, was extremely annoyed by this – he hated the Spyder and preferred his original car, which had been an unexceptional modern vehicle, newer and shinier than mine. I suggested that we swap, and he cheerfully agreed and drove off in my shabby old car, while I took the cool one. Then there was a sort of brief narrated epilogue saying that I went wherever I’d been going in the first place, came back, and helped the old guy from the house transport some potatoes into town.

In an unrelated sequence of events, I was sitting in a classroom at the end of a lesson for some kind of course at a college. The lesson ended and people started leaving. The teacher was reading the comic 2000AD at his desk, and asked me in admiring tones how I’d managed to write something as great as a series he named (I can’t remember what it was called). I told him he’d got me confused with someone else, and the only thing I’d ever had published in 2000AD was a Future Shock short story. I had the feeling I was trying to make myself sound like a full-time comic writer whereas in fact that might have been the only thing I’d ever had published anywhere, but then I remembered that they’d printed another story of mine, a five-part superhero story, and I couldn’t remember the name. I racked my brain, trying to remember what it was called, who the artist was, and what had happened in it, but could only get the vaguest ideas. Meanwhile, the next class was coming into the room and urging me to get out in a hurry so they could start. I had no interest at all in whatever subject they were learning, but they seemed to think I was trying to hang around and join them, and didn’t want me to. I think the class might have been ‘Asian Studies’, and I noticed that the people attending it were unusually ethnically diverse, representing between them the full spectrum of race, age and gender (for this to be unusual suggests I was still in Lincolnshire in the 80s or 90s, rather than ethnically-mixed Derby). So I picked up my bag and wandered off down the corridor, which resembled one from my old school in Horncastle.

That probably led into this bit – I think I was still trying to remember my superhero story (it was something of a disappointment to wake up and recall that I’ve never had anything published in 2000AD) and thinking I’d find the file on my computer when I got home. But for the moment I was at my old school in Horncastle (of course, I didn’t have a computer at home when I was a pupil there), although I’m pretty sure I was still an adult, rather than a teenager again. It was the end of the day, I’d been held up by something after school and I went out to the buses, hoping mine wouldn’t have left yet. But unfortunately, I was just in time to see it leaving. It was pouring with rain and I was wearing nothing but the Brazilian Mystery Cloak – this didn’t strike me as unusual in any way.

I went back inside and into the sixth form common room, where I dug through my bag to find some clothes, since the cloak was soaked through. The bag contained my corduroy trousers, which I rejected since there’s a small hole in them and I didn’t have any underpants, and a skimpy pair of shorts, plus a very tight, pale pink, knitted tank top. There may have been shoes as well, I can’t quite remember. I was conscious that this outfit would make me look extremely silly, but decided to wear it anyway for a laugh. I invited a woman nearby, who might have been Jenny, to walk into town with me, and maybe go to the library. I have a feeling she had to think about it, since I was dressed extremely strangely, but I don’t remember anything else after that point.

So, any Freudians out there want to analyse my brain and tell me exactly the extent to which I'm a loony?

November rain

I might have mentioned in my blog before that November is traditionally when I start a new thing in my life, generally a new job. It's happened every year since 2002, without me really planning it, and I seem to be a bit behind schedule this time. Or maybe something new and exciting will come along in the next couple of days - I do have a second interview coming up for that Cambridge job, and I could always ask the agencies for temp work again and trust to fate or the time of year to drop me in a good one this time round.

Or maybe I'll be abducted by aliens? That'd be cool.

Online Memory!

Okay, a bit of advance hype this time, for the second Online Memory Challenge! It's this coming Saturday, 1pm my time, it'll last about an hour, and I think everybody should come along and check it out, whether as a competitor or spectator. All you need to do is click here, and drop Simon a line to tell him you're coming, then he'll give you the link to the website.

If you've never tried memorising things before but have always been vaguely curious about what I do, this is a perfect time to find out for yourself without leaving your home. I'd urge you to compete rather than spectate, for the full experience, but there's no denying that spectating is a lot of fun with the way this ingenious program is set up. Come along and have some fun!

Par-tay

Well, the whole house party thing was a bit of a bust, but I still got to hang out in Manchester with David and Kitty and Jack, and what more could anyone want? I'm also still too tired and/or hungover to write at length about it, so, well, sorry about that.

Facecloths?

Bought a new towel today, so I can go swimming without looking like some kind of ragged pauper, and the woman on the till in the textiles shop asked me "Do you want any facecloths to go with that?" I find that quite offensive, actually. It's like saying "You obviously don't wash your face on any kind of regular basis", and not too far removed from spitting on a hanky and wiping my face for me in full view of the public. I suppose that might be a normal thing to say in textiles shops, actually, since I haven't bought towels for many years, but that was my reaction, anyway. I didn't buy any facecloths.

I didn't go swimming, either, but fate was just conspiring against me there, it wasn't my fault. I woke up at 4am for no readily apparent reason, and wondered if it was my subconscious mind prodding me to talk to my friend on the west coast of the USA who'd been wanting to chat with me for a while, and who would most probably be sitting at his computer in the early evening over there right then. So I got out of bed and found that not only was he online, he'd just sent me a message five minutes before, so naturally we had to have a quick chat. Two and a half hours later, he went to bed and I figured there wasn't much point in me going back to sleep. By nine o'clock I'd changed my mind, since I was feeling like I might fall asleep on the floor at any moment, so I went back to bed and slept till one in the afternoon.

I REALLY need to get a job. This can't be a good way to carry on. My body clock's all out of whack now. Although that might be a good thing - I'm going to Manchester this weekend for my late birthday party, we're all renting a house for the weekend and going to bed at unusual hours is very much the norm at these things.

Might not blog again till Sunday, we'll see - I might bring my laptop with me and share some enlightening drunken ramblings with my loyal readers in a quiet moment.

My bank has become a trendy wine bar

The HSBC in Derby is closing down and moving to a much smaller building down the road, some time next year. It's a real shame, because it's a really impressive big stone bank building of the kind that you practically never see still being banks any more. But apparently it's about ten times bigger than modern banks need, with all this work-of-the-devil internettery and cashpoint machines, so they're selling it.

Maybe the new owners will turn it into a swimming pool. That'll be convenient for me, seeing as I'm the kind of fitness fanatic who goes swimming every day, starting tomorrow. Remember that resolution I made last week to lose a small amount of weight in the next month? Well, swimming is the answer. I would have started today, only I haven't got a decent towel that isn't falling to pieces, and it looked like rain, and it was a bit chilly, and I'd got a new book to read. But tomorrow, definitely.

And I'm also going to write my book tomorrow, too.

Doncaster, synaesthesia and kitty-cats

There can't be many blogs that offer you all three of those in one night.

You may remember that a month or so ago, I wrote about how I'd decided to go to Doncaster, on the grounds that it's quite nearby and I've never been there before. Well, it occurred to me today that I HAVE been to Doncaster, at least once, for an othello championship. It was the nationals, back in 2003, I think, and I played extremely badly. There was also probably a regional in the same place that I went to, as well. It's a good thing that I didn't end up going to Doncaster and expecting it to all be new to me, or I would have been deeply disappointed.

Or maybe not. You never know, since my mind works in strange ways. It's the Champions League football tonight, and I recently found myself thinking that it's unfortunate that Manchester United and Arsenal are playing one night this year, and Chelsea and Liverpool the next, since Man U and Arsenal are very similar teams to each other, as are Chelsea and Liverpool, so viewers who prefer one or the other type of team don't get to watch both their games. I contemplated writing this in my blog, and started trying to put into words exactly why these pairs of teams are alike, and the best I could come up with was that Man U and Arsenal are sort of like a big red cube, whereas Chelsea and Liverpool are more like some kind of wavy line. It makes sense in my brain. Chelsea and Liverpool are very much like the letter C in that respect, whereas the others are more like B or D. I suppose this is the synaesthesia in my family that I've always said I haven't got. Ah well, I'll have to stop denying it in future.

Doncaster is an anagram of 'on red cats'. If you want to read up on red cats, and other kinds, you could certainly do worse than check out http://www.kittiesandcats.com/, a site that's just been set up by a friend of mine. This is an unpaid advertisement, there has been no bribery involved whatsoever, so as a personal favour to me, please go over there and click a google ad or two, even if you loathe and detest cats.

If you loathe and detest cats, by the way, what are you doing being friends with me? I love cats. How dare you say such nasty things about them?

I'm number two!

The very worst, most unoriginal thing you can do with a blog is link to an interesting story on the BBC News website, so in the spirit of that, here is an article all about the talent English sportspeople and teams have for coming second in major international events. I'm proud to be part of that tradition. Who knows, if we work really hard at publicising the world memory championship, I might end up mentioned in the same breath as Lewis Hamilton and Jimmy White.

Which reminds me that the BBC Sports Review Of The Year is coming up soonish (or at least they're already running ads to encourage people to vote for the Personality Of The Year), and I've always thought it would be nice to get a passing mention for mind sports somewhere in the course of that long, dreary, annual celebration of the year's sporting events (or at least those of the year's sporting events that the BBC has the rights to video footage of). I'm not saying I should win the Sports Personality Of The Year award (although I should), just that it would be cool if they'd do a bit about the likes of chess and bridge and things, by way of contrast to the usual stuff on there. There's plenty of interesting stuff to talk about in the world of British mind sports.

And anyway, I'd be a better winner than Zara bleeding Phillips.

Otara Millionaires Club

Yes, today saw the inaugural Online Memory Challenge, and a lot of fun it was too! Two Englishmen, an Australian, a Norwegian, an Indian and a Latvian brought together by the wonders of the internet to compete against each other in a mini-memory championship without having to leave their homes.

Simon Orton (the Australian) has designed a flabbergastingly magnificent website for the purpose - we had three disciplines, five-minute words, five-minute numbers and speed cards, and all we competitors had to do was log in at the right time, chat while we watched the timer counting down the time to the start, and then start memorising when it told us to. The words/numbers/cards appeared on the screen for five minutes (all in the right format and size for easy competition-standard memorisation), then disappeared to be replaced by the recall page. We typed in the answers, and if you finished early you could click a button, the machine instantly calculated your score, and returned you to the spectator lounge, where you could watch everyone else's recall pages being filled in. And laugh at my inability to remember the word 'fauna' - I reeled off the rest of the words with no problem, and then spent the rest of the recall time staring at the blank space and thinking "I know it was some kind of animal, but what kind?" At the last second I took a wild guess at 'goldfish'. Well, it was close.

And you know what? I think this is the future of memory competitions. Not so much the doing it over the internet part (I like to trust my fellow competitors to play fair, but I don't think I'd be entirely comfortable with having the world championship rely on people not sneakily writing down what had appeared on screen), but the computerised aspect. I've always been sceptical when people have suggested doing it all on computers before, but the OMC has converted me. Simon's program worked so smoothly and perfectly, completely without human intervention once the competition had started, that I now believe it would be possible to do this at a real memory championship without it all going horribly wrong.

I'm looking forward to the next OMC - hopefully it will be bigger and better! (And yes, I won this one).

Hey, it's Tegs!

Only he's a gay American now! For want of anything better to do before the rugby tonight, I watched the new American sitcom "The Class" on E4, which the Radio Times had half-heartedly recommended. Although their suggestion to "Keep an eye on this - it could be a grower" is a bit silly - a cursory internet search tells me it's already been cancelled in the US. But it does star Sean Maguire, doing an impressive American accent, and claiming to have gone to school with the other central characters, when we all know he really went to Grange Hill, as Terence "Tegs" Ratcliffe, in my year, before showing up on EastEnders as an Irish football player. The show itself had some funny moments, but not enough to justify watching the rest of the series.

Anyway, tomorrow I'm competing in the first Online Memory Challenge, organised by Simon Orton, which should be fun. Basically a mini-memory championship, all done over the internet with participants promising not to cheat. It'll be a useful bit of practice, an enjoyable experience and hopefully the start of a lot of things like that to come!

Hey, I know him!

Look, Ed Byrne's a guest on Have I Got News For You! I wonder if he mentioned having this memory guy as a guest on The Panel and suggested that I'd make a perfect HIGNFY host?

Actually, it's quite cool how many famous people I've met now. You can hardly turn on the TV without seeing someone I've crossed paths with. As long as you exclusively watch the kind of programmes that Phillip Schofield presents. And yes, I kind of miss all the excitement of being on TV now that the buzz of the world memory championship has died down and I'm a nobody again until next year. Can we have another WMC next week? I'd do badly in it, because I haven't been practicing, but I don't think any of the people who interviewed me this year really knew or cared whether I'd won or not...

Vital statistics

There's the 21st-century equivalent of a speak-your-weight machine in Woolworth's, and I had a go on it yesterday. You tell it how old and male you are and it scans you and does the rest. It gave me a little print-out that says
---------------------------------------------------------
YOUR MEASUREMENTS

Weight.......................12st4.6lb/78.3 kg
Height.......................5ft8.5in/174 cm
Body Fat Estimation:
Fat Index.................21.7%
Fat Mass..................2st9.2lb/16.9 kg
Free F.Mass...............9st9.3lb/61.4 kg
Age and Gender...............31 ♂

REFERENCES

Your Normal Weight is between:
60.6 kg-75.4 kg
9st7.6lb-11st12.2lb
Your current Body Mass Index
is 25.9 kg/m². The Normal B.M.I.
value is between 20 and 24.9

Normal Fat Index............17-23 %
Normal Fat Mass: 12.6-18.3 kg or
1st13.7lb-2st12.3lb

17/10/07,Wednesday...........11:54:59

This in not a medical act.

· Do not self medicate.
· Control your weight.
· Consult your doctor regularly
or pharmacist.
---------------------------------------------------------

Well, I thought I should share it. You all want to know everything about me, right? In my defence, I had just had a Drifter and a can of cherry coke (yes, I eat sweets before lunchtime and ruin my appetite), and I was wearing my shoes and clothes and hat, that has to add a bit of extra weight.

I'm not sure I should take advice on losing weight from any machine that says "this in not a medical act", but you know, maybe I should make an effort to get back into my Normal Weight range. It wouldn't take too much effort, would it? Half a stone? Any old fool can lose that much. You just have to go to the world memory championship for a day. I think I might make this a project. November 17th, I'll go back to the machine and see if it tells me I'm Normal!

Note for Americans - 14 pounds to a stone. Do the math, if you really want to.

Reader mail

Thanks to Boris, Gregory and Mike for responding to my request for subjects to write about! This is going to be a long (and hopefully interesting) blog entry...

I´d like to read, how your telephone interview went like.

Really? Because last night, sitting down and intending to write about my telephone interview was what made me think 'this blog of mine is getting really boring nowadays'. But hey, if you really want to know about my half-hearted job-hunting... It went quite well, really. I was talking to the financial director and an HR person - this job reports directly to the FD, which is a bit unusual, there's normally another level separating the big boss from the management accountant - and I think I mostly gave the impression of knowing what I'm talking about. I did have one embarrassing blank spot though - they asked me the routine question of what I know about their company, and I suddenly realised I couldn't think of anything. It's the telephone's fault (curse you, Alexander Graham Bell!), because normally while I'm travelling to an interview, I take a printout of interesting pages from the company website with me and read through them, memorising useful snippets of information. In this case, I hadn't done that and couldn't even remember which of the various companies I've been looking at lately I was talking to at that moment. I stumbled through it in the end, and I do have the Excel skills they want (and very few people do have that level of ability), so we'll see if I get a second interview. If I do, that one will be face-to-face, at least.

Do you have any ideas on how to make memory sports more popular especially for new competitors with and without taking into account limits on people and money to do the necessary tasks?

Yes, I do. I think a large part of any plan to increase the popularity of 'memory sports' would have to be to make the general public aware of its existence, and to give them the impression that it's something anyone can do, and have fun doing! I would like to see a televised memory championship along the lines of the US Championship, only with more emphasis on the numbers and cards, so as to show off the more impressive skills of the European competitors. This TV competition (which would be made in a swish TV studio with groovy graphics and things) would be in addition to, not replacing, the normal memory competitions, and would mainly be to highlight to the general public what's possible with memory skills. I think it'd get a good audience on Channel 4.

Apart from that, what we need is more publicity, and a lot more teaching of memory skills at a basic level to people who've never heard of it before. This is something that's been done in Germany but has been completely neglected in Britain in the past. There are plans in the works right now for a couple of different projects to go into schools and universities and organise competitions - one of them is being organised by the WMSC, and so probably won't happen (they're good at planning things but not at actually doing anything about their plans), the other is by someone else and really is likely to make a difference and bring in more competitors.

One more thing we need, naturally, is more championships, with accessible locations, lots of advance publicity and maybe even some prize money. Most championships in the past have managed one or two of the three - if someone manages to hold a competition that brings all of those together, it really will excite interest on a much wider scale.

Discuss the developments in England between 1815-1832. Explain why Parliament eventually chose to pass the reform bill of 1832.

Something that I think is often neglected in discussion of the buildup to the Great Reform Bill (which wasn't really all that great, if you ask me, although at least it laid the groundwork for later electoral reforms that really achieved something) is the role of the monarchy. People answering this kind of essay question like to say how the industrial revolution and the defeat of Napoleon had given the average Briton more time on their hands to complain about iniquities, without looking at the way Parliament had gradually assumed a much more important role in recent years, due to the diminishment of the traditional role of the King.

Until after the end of the 18th century, there was still a general feeling that Parliament existed to fulfil its traditional role of gathering together important people to advise the King on how to rule his country. George III had always taken a very active part in politics, but by 1815 he was incurably insane and his fat, lazy, useless son was technically in charge of Britain. George IV wasn't interested in politics at all, unless it directly affected his plans to stuff his face and have fun, and reduced his role in the great events of the day to agreeing with whatever politician had spoken to him last. Parliament for the first time in many years was free to do what it wanted, without the monarch butting in. Naturally, the likes of Earl Grey took the opportunity to make the Commons into a fairer representation of the average working man.

I'm in college and this is a question our professor gave us in advance for Donnerstag. can you give some advice on how one can utilize memory techniques in essay writing?

No. No, I really can't. I've never used memory techniques for essay writing or anything vaguely like it. I use memory techniques for the sole purpose of trying and failing to win the world memory championship, not in any everyday-life application.

Is there a way to make a journey follow the ideas of an essay? I suppose you could use the same strategy that you employ for poems, but I think the richness of imagery in poetry lends itself to mnemonics much more easily. What mnemonic techniques could I use for this essay for example?

Well, I suppose you could use a journey to sort concepts or ideas into the sequence that you're intending to use them. I think that's what the books on the subject advise you to do, anyway, although I have no idea whether it would work or not. Or you could use the kind of technique we use in the 'historic dates' discipline to associate images with the year and the events that happened in it - 1832 for me is the obscure 1940s superhero the Fin (he wore a suit with a big shark fin on his head); I'd imagine him lecturing parliament or maybe rampaging through a rotten borough, denouncing it loudly, and probably drinking Earl Grey tea as he did so. That's quite fun, actually. 1833, abolition of slavery - the characters from badly-written preschool children's TV show the Fimbles, slaving away in chains being whipped by that frog they hang out with, until they're liberated. 1834, Tolpuddle Martyrs - a muscleman ('virile man' is the phrase, for anyone who's following the Ben-system logic) being loaded onto a ship, singing trade union songs in a manly kind of way. I could work through a whole history book like this. Maybe I should...

write about your teenage years =D

Well, my teenage years were in the early nineties, so I'm not sure it would mean anything to a current teenager like you. If memory serves, I mainly spent my time waiting for the internet to be invented. Well, that and playing chess. A gang of us at school used to spend every spare moment playing chess. Which is what the cool kids did in those days. All the handsome, athletic types were deeply envious of us. Really.

Apart from that, I don't think I ever really did anything worth writing about. I was living in the middle of nowhere with my dad and brother, going to Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Horncastle, as previously mentioned, and generally not working as hard as I should, if at all. Then I left school and briefly went to Kingston University before giving it up as a bad idea, then went to a training centre to do an NVQ in accountancy, then got a job, then stopped being a teenager.

Outside my own life, things of vague interest were happening. I remember being excited when Margaret Thatcher resigned when I was 14 - she'd been PM since I was two and a half, so deep down I still think she's really cool, despite all rational thought on the subject. I also remember hearing that John Smith had died - I was in the sixth form common room and someone had been listening to the radio on a walkman. When he heard the headline, he got up and turned on the radio to play it to the whole room. That's one of those rare moments where I really do remember where I was when it happened.

Being Boring

You know, I get the feeling that I haven't written anything interesting in this blog lately. I think it's mainly because I haven't done anything interesting lately, but I still feel guilty about depriving my readers of interesting babblings every evening. So I'd like to ask for suggestions - what should I write about? I mean, I generally write this thing to entertain myself, but it would be nice to know what my various weird readers enjoy reading about and what they don't. Someone tell me what to write, and I'll do it tomorrow. That way I don't have to think of something myself, and I preserve my brain cells, in case I need them later.

Everyone wants a piece of me

One advantage (possibly the only advantage) to being imminently featured on a Channel 5 documentary is that it makes it easier to decline offers to be the subject of other documentaries. Another producer called me today, thinking of making a documentary about me (she'd looked me up in the electoral roll, she said - I never cease to be amazed by the ways people go to get in contact with me. Just put my name into google, you'll even find my phone number quoted without my permission in a press release...), but was easily deterred when I pointed out that a documentary about me is in the final stages of editing at the moment. Nick says I'll like it - I very much doubt that I will, but we'll see.

I was less successful in saying no to the one accountancy recruitment agency who I neglected to tell that I don't want any more temp jobs, when they called a bit later on to offer me an interview-followed-by-immediate-start kind of thing at Bombardier the train people down the road, lasting till Christmas doing project work of some kind. It's on Thursday, unless I find a way to get out of it.

Before that, though, there's a telephone interview tomorrow for a real job, with Proquest in Cambridge, which sounds like it might be fun. It's a very Excel-heavy job, that sounds like it might be right up my street, although they might want some more VBA programming experience than I've got. I got a crash-course book to refresh my knowledge of it, and I'm pleased to see that I do mostly know what I'm doing after all. Might be a cool job, if it works out. But telephone interviews are a terrible thing. I hate phone calls in general, and especially phone calls when they're important. What's wrong with dressing up in smart clothes and shiny shoes and talking to people face to face? Yes, I dislike that too, but not as much as telephone interviews.

I want a star!

Roger Moore got a star on the walk of fame for his birthday, and I want one too! I could be an actor. The evil English genius, as someone suggested recently. Still hoping someone plays me that way in the movie of "Moonwalking With Einstein". Or I think I'd make a good evil scientist in a Japanese monster movie, the kind who starts out seeming like one of the good guys, but turns out to in fact want the monster to destroy Tokyo.

Anyway, happy birthday to me, and Roger, and Cliff Richard, the late E E Cummings and the very late Battle of Hastings, and Jason (someone on the rugby coverage was just holding up a sign saying "happy birthday Jason"). Also, happy birthday yesterday to the other Ben Pridmore on Facebook (the one who formerly had dreadlocks) - had I been born five minutes earlier, we'd have shared a birthday as well as a name and a fondness for silly hairstyles. We should have had a double party, open only to people called Ben Pridmore who are celebrating a birthday this weekend. It would have been great.

Also, you should watch Pillow's Pillow's Story, made years ago but I've only just discovered it's on YouTube. The voice of the pillow is my brother.

Try, try again

The commentator on the rugby tonight described Sébastien Chabal as 'the 21st century Asterix', because he's really large. Honestly, what do they teach them at school nowadays?

Watching the game right now, after the football this afternoon, not to mention a bit of golf before that. It's not my fault if I haven't achieved anything productive today, it's the TV people.

Also, yes, Boris, got your emails, I'll reply as soon as I get a chance. Likewise James, and no doubt lots of other people too. I'm just lazy. As you can see from the short blog entry tonight.

Nimble fingers!

Woo! I memorised a pack of cards in 23.05 seconds today! I should have switched to that shuffling-the-cards-between-my-fingers method years ago! It really is a lot quicker than turning them over two at a time, and it didn't take long to get used to it at all. I've hardly done any practice since the world championship, and I'm well over two seconds better than my previous best. I might just beat 25 seconds in a competition next year!

I also did a perfect 200 in spoken numbers today, for the first time ever. So all in all, I'm extremely happy with myself and in the mood to boast to everybody else in the world that I'm better than them. On the other hand, what I actually need to work on if I'm going to win the blasted WMC next year is the long events - it wasn't really the speed cards that lost me the world championship this year, it was the mess I made of the hour cards, and that was all down to me not having practiced the long disciplines enough, and built up the stamina you need to memorise for hours and hours over a three-day period. I would vow to spend all this weekend doing hour cards, hour numbers and half-hour binary, but a) you all know I wouldn't do it anyway and b) it's my birthday and I don't want you to think I'm a complete saddo.

Although I'm not having a party for another fortnight, and I don't actually have any plans for Sunday. Maybe I am a complete saddo...

Should've wispaed a bit louder

I was quite surprised to read on Sam's blog that Wispas are being re-launched. I'd genuinely never noticed that they'd stopped selling them. Four years ago. How could that, and the subsequent internet campaigns and petitions, have passed me by so completely? It's not like I'm one of those health-food-eating, chocolate-hating weirdos you hear about - whenever I'm passing a newsagent or corner shop, I'll have a choc bar of some description. I quite like Wispas. Has it really been four years since I had one?

What other confectioneries might have been scrapped without my noticing? I'll have to take a thorough inventory of all the sweetie shelves in Derby. Trying to think what chocolate bars I haven't seen lately... Do they still make Topics? Never liked them, but haven't seen one for a while. I'm pretty sure they stopped making Fuse bars, which is a shame, because they were great. I think I heard something about Ripples recently, too - have they stopped, or restarted, those? I remember when they first came out. Wispas too. It's disgraceful that they should stop selling these things without asking me first.

Gizza job

So, I promised you a funny story about jobs, didn't I? Well, I had an email from D E Shaw & Co, an American investment company that has a tradition of employing people with impressive mental abilities - chess champions, international maths olympiad medallists, that kind of thing, and they suggested I might want to apply for a job with them, seeing as I won the decamentathlon in 2001.

That's right, the decamentathlon - the little four-hour MSO competition involving solving puzzles in ten different 'mind sports'. Not the memory stuff, they'd never even heard of that, nor the mental calculation competitions, or the World Intelligence Championship I also won in 2001, or even my amazing skill as an othello player, but they were really impressed by the decamentathlon. I've always kind of thought it would be cool if some company wanted to employ me solely for the purpose of boasting that they employed a memory champion, but I never expected something like this.

Of course, if it was the kind of company that hired people solely on the strength of their decamentathlon performances, it really wouldn't be the kind of company I'd want to work for (it would also be the kind of company that goes out of business very very quickly), and once they'd seen my CV, they let me know that as expected, your background and accomplishments are impressive, and it is clear that you have much to offer. While we have not been able to identify an immediate opportunity that would be a good match for you, we will keep your resume in our files on the chance that a suitable position should become available at a later date. In the meantime, we wish you much success in all your endeavors.

Still, it would have been groovy to work in New York. Perhaps I should think more about applying for jobs in America - there are, I'm reliably informed by non-American comedians, lots of really stupid and wealthy people over there, and perhaps there really is a company out there that would want me as a sort of trophy employee, paying me a small fortune and not expecting me to actually do any work. And then I'd be able to compete in the US Memory Championship too! And attempt to qualify for the US othello team (although that's generally just as difficult, if not more so, as qualifying for the British team, so it's probably not worth emigrating just for that).

On the other hand, I have got an interview lined up (sort of - haven't fixed the date yet) with a company in Cambridge. Emigrating to Cambridge would be quite cool, too.

Sequel

Bumped into I'm-almost-certain-her-name's-Sarah-now again today. It's like buses - you don't see a bus for two years after you and the bus were both made redundant from the same company, then you see the bus in town twice on consecutive days. But she had her daughter with her this time, so that resolves that minor mystery that was puzzling me yesterday. And as a follow-up to what I was going on about the day before yesterday, the new shopping centre in Derby was officially opened today! I'm disappointed that they didn't ask me to cut the ribbon, but never mind. Anyway, it's really big and shiny and new and full of exciting things. I'm all in favour of it! It really makes a difference to have a real shopping centre in the city - all this time I've been living in Derby I could just hear Nottingham sneering at us, mocking the size of our mall. "I've got two gigantic ones," it said, "and all you've got to offer is this tiny little one-storey thing." Well, nyah nyah, Nottingham, now Derby's got a cool place to go and look at shops too!

Wow, I'm almost feeling a sense of civic pride here. I must have been brainwashed by the local media.

Sonic 2

Wow, but Sonic 2 is a great game! I haven't played it for years, and it was wonderful to remember all the little bits and pieces of it. I can't believe it's 15 years since it came out. If they'd make video games like that nowadays, I might still play them.

But that isn't quite all I've done today, don't worry. I've also done a bit of memory practice and applied for a couple of jobs - one which would be extremely groovy but is very unlikely to happen (won't go into detail yet in case I jinx it, I'll tell you a funny story about it when they tell me I haven't got it), and another which would also be rather cool, to a slightly lesser extent, but which I think there's a better chance of success with. Then there's other memory-related things that might happen and be groovy, but I'm not supposed to write about them either until everything's set up, so never mind. This is a terribly uninformative blog post, isn't it?

I also bumped into probably-Sarah who I worked with at almost-definitely-Parkhouse today, and spent the ensuing friendly conversation (carefully structured to avoid revealing that I'm only 70% certain of her name) resolving to make a real effort to memorise people's names and personal details in future, in case I need to talk to them a couple of years down the road. It'll reduce the need to exchange pleasantries like 'how's the daughter or possibly son that I'm fairly sure you had?'

Sonic 3

The big shopping centre in Derby has been a building site for just about as long as I can remember (so at least a week, then), but the new-look, much-bigger-than-before, all-different Westfield Centre is opening on Tuesday. It's terribly exciting. Makes me wonder what will happen to the army of builders who've been hanging around the city centre having tea-breaks for twelve hours a day, every day for the last couple of years. But to explain the title of this blog post, you can see into the new section from the back of W H Smith, with its shiny new empty shops and gleaming new escalators, but you can't get into it yet. It reminds me of the classic video game, Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

Not that Sonic 3 was set in a shopping centre (although that would have been cool), but it was released in a hurry, before they'd finished programming it. It's a cool game,

(I must just interrupt myself here to record the fact that an absolutely gigantic spider has just nonchalently strolled across my living room floor. Don't know where he came from, but that maybe explains why I haven't been bothered with flies so much this year. The thing's the size of a house!)

but it's really obviously not finished, because there are parts when you can see into big sections of the game that you can't get into. If you do the cheat that lets you pass through walls, you can see these big sections generally have bits missing, or stop dead at unexpected points. A bit later they released 'Sonic and Knuckles', which you could plug Sonic 3 into and get the full game as it should have been if they'd been able to take their time making it in the first place. That shopping centre has really put me in the mood to get my old mega drive out and play through all the Sonic games. I can see that's what I'm going to spend tomorrow doing, rather than anything halfway useful. Somebody tell me off, will you? I need discipline.

Hey, wait a minute, I've stopped being famous!

Apart from the Channel 5 photo shoot, I've got nothing lined up or likely to be lined up in terms of memory publicity. Does this mean I'm settling back into comfortable obscurity again? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Tell you what, let's call it a bit of breathing space to write my book and then decide if I want to try to publicise it.

Anyway, it's my birthday next Sunday! Thirty-one years old! Who'da thunk it? I'm going to think of some more new-year-of-my-life resolutions and see if I can achieve them this time. I'm not having the party till a fortnight afterwards, so perhaps I'll spend the day in quiet reflection wailing and lamenting my old age, screaming curses at the gods and attempting to hypnotise myself into believing I'm still a young vigorous twenty-something. Or maybe I'll go out drinking. We'll have to see.

Losing track of time

What with going to London yesterday, I spent the whole day thinking it was Saturday. On the train ride home I repeatedly caught myself wondering what had happened in the football and looking forward to watching the highlights. Which is particularly silly, since most of this weekend's games are on Sunday anyway. But it's carried over into today, and I'm still feeling like it's Sunday night right now.

Of course, my life is a succession of Saturdays and Sundays at the moment, so it doesn't make much difference, but it's still nice to know that there's another weekend starting tomorrow, right after this one. I really need to get a job, though - a couple of interesting prospects in the pipeline, we'll have to see what develops.

Humans 1, Chimps 0

Yes, I succeeded in performing a memory test similar but not identical to the one that the Japanese chimps do. Which is good, because they'd also tried it on the average man on the street in Hammersmith, and apparently the general public struggled with it. So I defended the intellectual honour of the human race there. And a bit earlier on in Soho I recited pi to a thousand places for Tiger Aspect productions, which was fun. I'd insisted on doing that, just because I wanted a change from the inevitable pack of cards I always do for these people (I also did a pack of cards for Blink, the TV company with the monkeys*). And I think I got it right, too, after a bit of revision on the train journey from Derby.

And speaking of memory, if you send a company an email about a job, mention the memory stuff in it, and forget to attach your CV, that's probably not a good move, is it?

Also, check out Gaby Kappus's website for a very cool picture of me!


*Monkeys aren't chimps, and vice versa, I'm well aware of that. But I think 'monkeys' sounds funnier in a blog post.

Pin-up

So, down to London tomorrow for two different TV thingies, one of which involves monkeys. It was nearly three things - Channel 5 emailed today to say they want to do a photo shoot promoting the famous documentary, and I suggested tomorrow since I'll be in London anyway. But apparently that's too short notice. Presumably it takes a lot of planning, working out how to make me look attractive, intelligent or stupid, depending what slant the documentary is trying to take. Also, I forgot to ask if they're still going to call it "Brain Men". If they do, I'm going to decry it loudly in public and attempt to drag them through every court in the land, because that's a really rubbish title. For one thing, there's already a documentary about memory-related stuff called "Brain Man" - it's the American title of that one about Daniel Tammett that's called "The Boy With The Incredible Brain" or something equally silly in Britain. For another thing, "Brain Men" just sucks. It's okay making a reference to "Rain Man" in a documentary about a guy who goes around proclaiming that he's a savant, but it doesn't work for something that's rather further removed from the whole freaks-of-nature kind of angle. Hopefully. Unless they cut out all the bits where we demonstrate that memory techniques are something that any old idiot can do.

Still, it's probably a good thing that we're not doing photo shoots tomorrow, because I haven't got any trousers. I was basically down to my last good pair of trousers, the black ones, but the zip's gone and I need to get it fixed in order to go out and not get arrested. So I've been wearing my cords for the last couple of days, because they're almost acceptable except for a smallish hole that people can't see unless they limbo-dance underneath my spread legs. And I doubt that's likely to happen to me any time soon. But you never know what angles the Channel 5 people might want to photograph me from.

Maybe I'll get some new trousers tomorrow. They have clothes shops in London, right?

Yawn

I'm watching a particularly dull football game tonight, and it seems to have drained my brain of anything fun or exciting to talk about. I have had a sort of job offer that made me giggle, but I don't really want to write about it now in case it's genuine and they're reading my blog (see, I'm paranoid about that kind of thing now). So this is just going to be one of those blog posts where I apologise for not saying anything in my blog post and leave it at that. Sorry!

Áth Cliath

In Dublin's fair city, and so on. The TV people flew me out there with Ryanair, which is the first time I've done that. It's actually a perfectly okay airline, and I'll have to fly on the cheap with them again. The plane was delayed, but only by an hour or so, and I had plenty of time to hang out with Charlie and watch Ireland be comprehensively outclassed by Argentina in the rugby, before being driven out to Blanchardstown and the Draoicht Theatre, to film The Panel.

I found out talking to the various staff of the Panel that it was originally an Australian show, and their Irish counterparts bought the format from them. Since the show consists of five people sitting around a desk and making jokes about the news, I don't see that they needed to spend money on it, but then I don't work in TV. I also got to sit around the green room with the very cool James Cromwell. Having read the website's blurb about him, I'd concluded that I'd never heard of him before, and it was only this morning that I re-read it, even the sentence I'd skipped previously, and realised I'd been hanging out with Zefram Cochrane! For crying out loud! How did I not realise that at the time?

Anyway, the show was quite groovy, and the makeup artist recognised me and thought she'd made me up before, only for it to turn out that she'd seen me on This Morning, and actually remembered me! But it wasn't one of my greatest performances. I've never done TV in front of a live audience before, unless you count Caldeirão do Huck in Brazil. But the audience there, consisting of scantily-clad young women, were there to jump up and down excitedly regardless of what was happening in front of them. I've never played to an audience who react to the people on stage before. And when I said something that was supposed to be funny (I can't remember what it was, and I'm sure it wasn't funny at all, but that's not the point) and got just a couple of scattered chuckles, it made me a bit over-conscious of their presence, and I spent the rest of the interview glancing at the crowd of shadowy watchers and trying to make them laugh at me properly.

But I did memorise a pack of cards and generally give the impression of being good at memorising a pack of cards, so what more could I want? Well, actually, I'll answer that - both on the show and talking before, nobody wanted to ask me anything not related to memory. Whereas with James Cromwell, everyone immediately started asking him about his political views and opinions on the state of the world. I'd like to be asked that kind of thing from time to time. Not so much because I want to convert people to my political viewpoint, or even because I want the world to know it - it would just be nice if people wanted to know that I've got one. So my new ambition is to do a TV show where someone asks me a non-memory question! That way I will be able to proudly say that I'm not just a bit of two-minute filler, but a Real Celebrity Guest!

(Probably not going to happen, is it?)

Bons mots

Have you ever spontaneously said something really funny and clever, but in a context that takes so long to explain that you can never repeat it to anyone without making it a long, boring anecdote? Well, to heck with it. Even though the line itself isn't funny unless you were there at the time, here's an abridged-as-humanly-possible summary of the online conversation.

Me: Yes, I forgot to take my hat when I got off the train. Twice.
Friend: Tut, didn't you read the manual? Rule one: Never take the hat off.
Me: (reading manual) Hey, also, you're not supposed to keep chickens in one.
Friend: Yep, I had a problem with that once. So many eggs...
Me: That's only a problem if you forget to check it's empty before you put it on. And even if you do, you can always quip "Boy, do I have egg on my face!"

Anyway, Dublin beckons! It's a flying visit, in more ways than one, I'll only be on Irish soil for about 24 hours, but in that time I'll get to hang out and watch the rugby with Charlie Garavan (who conveniently lives very close to my hotel) as well as talk with The Panel about memory and hats. I even get a write-up on their website!

Where the hell is the thunderstorm coming from?

In honour of Blogger's continuing corruption by the German language, and the fact that I found an old Fix & Foxi comic in my flat today, I'd like to share with you the one-page English-language comic strip it contains. Fix and Foxi are popular German comic and cartoon stars, and they help to teach young Germans to speak English, too. It's very impressive, and the kind of thing that really should happen in British comics too - if I'd grown up reading Dennis the Menace occasionally having adventures in German, maybe I'd be able to hold a conversation with all those fluent-English-speaking German and Austrian memorisers.

Still, much as I admire the good intention of the uncredited writer of this story, I do have to giggle at the quality of the translation - the grammar is just plain wrong in a couple of cases, but my favourite line has to be the one I've titled this blog post with. Teaching small children to say "Where the hell" could get them in trouble if they go to America, where that kind of talk can shock and horrify people.

So sit back and enjoy Foxi burning Lupo's house to the ground (it's okay, because it's educational).

I'm pretty sure nobody ever taught me the German for 'tranquilizer' (even if they didn't spell it right) in all my years of education. So it's not my fault I can't speak the language.

Woo! I did it!

No, not achieved anything noteworthy like writing my book, but I did manage to say no to someone on the phone today. Regular readers will know this is something I find impossible, but this afternoon when I got an email from a guy at Radio Solent followed immediately by a phone call from the same guy asking me to be on the breakfast show early tomorrow morning, giving tips on how to remember answers to quiz questions, I politely declined. Even when he continued to try to persuade me to do it, even after I'd explained that I'm rubbish at remembering facts, or anything halfway useful. I felt quite pleased with myself.

I did agree to another TV thing, but just a quick bit of filming for a taster sequence for some kind of ITV show currently in development about impressive mental and physical abilities. I'm going to do that next Thursday, since I'm already in London that day being shown up by a chimp. It's funny how the requests keep rolling in lately - I didn't get asked to do anywhere near this much when I actually won the world championship. And I don't even think Tony's publicity people are pestering the press about me any more either.

In other news, while I may not have achieved anything noteworthy today, I did give blood, and that's the kind of thing that makes up for being otherwise a lazy slob who cares about nothing but his next television appearance. The blood people who do the health check form had never heard of Bahrain and had to look it up in the book to see if you can donate after visiting there. You can. It must be a healthy place.

Oo, Blogger's gone German again! Tastaturkürzel: drücken Sie Strg zusammen mit: B = Bold. I thought it had fixed itself...

History

Of all the creatures in the world, except for gazelles, the one most loathed by Winston Churchill was the pelican. He had developed a deep-seated prejudice against them during the Crimean War, when he had read a book that mentioned pelicans the day before getting his legs blown off by an exploding gazelle. During his lifetime he would regularly take a break from his prime ministerial duties and go to London Zoo to complain about the number of pelicans housed there, and after his death his ghost could occasionally be observed wandering the streets and muttering unpleasant slurs against pelicans and those who support them.

The irony is that Churchill spent his entire life and afterlife under the mistaken impression that pelicans were a kind of insect. The book he had been reading, "Weevils!" by Charles Dickens, only mentioned the birds in passing without giving a detailed description, and his copy of the only other book then published that mentions pelicans, "Weevils!" by George Eliot, had been eaten by a gazelle before Churchill had a chance to open it.

In speeches in Parliament, Churchill would frequently compare his political enemies to pelicans, referencing their scuttling movements, many legs and habit of causing damage to crops. 'Pelican crossings' were so named by special order of Anthony Eden, just to get on Churchill's nerves. A plan to replace the statue of Nelson in Trafalgar square with a giant bronze pelican, approved by the Commons and Lords in 1972 in what became known as the Teaching Winston Churchill A Lesson For Being So Fat And Stupid Act, was abandoned when it was realised that Churchill had died several years previously and wouldn't have recognised the statue as being a pelican anyway, because of the aforementioned confusion.

On the other hand, pelicans generally liked Winston Churchill. His approval rating among pelicans and simliar species polled at London Zoo varied from 89% during the war years to 69.7% in the late fifties. Giraffes, staunch socialists all, were much less supportive of his policies, while the gazelles refused even to answer questions on the subject for fear of Russian reprisals.

A follow-up to last Tuesday's post

No, actually, I mean the Tuesday before last. The one where I talked about Batman and Doris Day. You know, the 1960s Batman series is rubbish! This isn't one of those cases where fond childhood memories make for entertaining viewing as a cynical thirty-something. I must have grown into a bitter old man accidentally. And the "Legends" documentary tonight was Alma Cogan, who's definitely dead, so there were no shocking revelations there either.

But on the other hand, Ripping Yarns is on right now and it's Across The Andes By Frog. Yay!

I really need to do stuff with my life...

I hate unsolved mysteries

This morning I had a tune in my head. It was a catchy tune, but I had no idea where it came from or what the words to it were, if any. Since I was in town, I whistled it to myself to keep it flowing through my brain so that I could hum it to someone later and find out what it was, because it was bugging me. But then I walked through the market and on a tailor's stall there was a sign advertising "SHORTNING TROUSERS £6.99", which of course immediately started my brain singing that mama's little babies love short'ning trousers and wiped out the previous tune, whatever it was. So now I'll never know.

I can't imagine a stall in Derby's indoor market does much business in shortening people's trousers for £6.99, anyway.

Anyway, the day wasn't a complete loss. I did some practice with cards and found that I can still do a pack comfortably under 30 seconds and get it right two times out of three. That was turning it over in the old way, following which I tried a couple of packs shuffling them between my hands in the way that I think could be faster if I work on it, but it's going to take me a while before I can do that as impressively. Need to train my fingers to move in different ways.

Tomorrow I'm going to a recruitment agency in Birmingham for a registration interview arranged last week, despite the whole publicly-announcing-that-I-maybe-don't-want-to-be-an-accountant thing that several of my readers have pointed out might have been a bad idea. Although I said I'd pad out my CV a bit more (even though the CV they have is the one prepared by the Nottingham branch of the same agency on my behalf) and I haven't done it yet. Feels like I haven't done my homework and the teacher's going to tell me off.

Is there a job where the ideal qualifications are fatness and laziness?

Well, I didn't do any memory training today. In fact, I've done nothing at all all day, unless you count doing a couple of extra-difficult hanjie puzzles and watching a heck of a lot of sport, sitcoms and cartoons on telly. I haven't written my book either, and you promised to pester me about it, so it's your fault, readers. There are times when I'm frankly disgusted with myself. What I need is a slavedriver, to force me to do things that I really want to do but am too idle to actually sit down to. Where does one hire a slavedriver these days?

I have been thinking, though. Did I tell you I've left my job at NCN now? No, that's right, I deliberately refrained from mentioning it because I felt vaguely ashamed of being voluntarily unemployed again. But frankly, that's silly. It wasn't much of a job, and if I can't get a good permanent job that I really like (which, judging by the last few months, is surprisingly hard to do), I don't need to spend my time doing temp jobs (even temp-with-the-possibility-of-making-it-perm-later jobs like that one) that I don't particularly enjoy.

In fact, to take things one step further, I think I might have issues with the whole accountancy thing. Perhaps it's time to stop saying that I don't want to try to make a living from the memory stuff, and really try it to see if it actually is possible. You never know, I might like it. And now's the time to try, while I still have money sitting around in the bank. If I'm honest about things, a main reason I've been reluctant to try it before is that I didn't want people to think I can't hold a proper job like a normal person. Well, I think I can get round that mental block if I really try - after all, I'm nearly 31, I've been an accountant for well over ten years now, my mother's going to be disappointed in me whatever I choose to do for a living and everybody else actually would think I was quite cool if I was a professional memory man.

So I'll give it a go, while still looking for a good office job at the same time. I'll sit down and work on the book, and also look into performances and TV appearances and writing other things and so on. Yay! This is the dawn of a bright new era, or else the dawn of a lot more sitting around doing hanjie puzzles and watching telly. We'll see.

Practice makes 90% accurate

I need to do some memory training. Haven't done any since the world championships, demonstrations for journalists and TV people aside, and I need to stay in shape all year if I'm going to actually win the blasted world memory championship next time round. I also need to work on memorising cards by shuffling them between my hands (like I was doing on This Morning), rather than turning them over like I normally do. I'm pretty sure I could go faster if I do it that way, but it'll take me a while to get used to it. But there's just not so much motivation to practice when there isn't a competition for so long. Anyone out there want to organise one for me?

Someone pimp me!

Ever have one of those days when it feels like you've done nothing but talk to TV people? Well, I might be exaggerating things here, but I did talk to two different TV people today in a matter of minutes, and that's two more than I talk to in an average day. So I'm going to Ireland for September 30th, to be gently derided by comedians, and London on October 4th to test my memory against the best the non-human world can offer. Also, you can see my This Morning performance here. Enjoy! (It's not very exciting.)

Maybe I should get an agent. An agent could talk to these people for me and just give me the edited highlights. And an agent might be able to persuade some of these TV people to pay me actual money for these TV appearances. That'd be cool.

On the panel

I've heard on the grapevine that Irish TV show "The Panel" want me on. I don't know the show, but I can only assume they have a sort of guess-the-nonentity kind of sequence, a la Never Mind The Buzzcocks. You can watch an episode on the website, in which the panellists discuss the Irish elections in an entertaining way. I have secretly always wanted to be on Have I Got News For You, this could be a step in the right direction...

Incidentally, everyone who watched This Morning (a list which seems to consist of Grandma and Ian) says it was great. I'm a star!

This Morning, this afternoon and my pants

This Morning was great fun. They cut my bit shorter than planned to make way for some 'breaking news' about Madeleine McCann (I tell you, it's hard to be a minor celebrity right now), but I still got to chat with Phillip Schofield and Fern Britton, memorise a pack of cards and impress an audience of millions. Well, thousands, at least, I'm not sure what kind of viewing figures they get. I also got Phillip to give me an autograph for my grandma ("To Dorothy, lots of love"), which will make her day - she fancies him. Meeting him was rather groovy for me too, I grew up watching him presenting children's BBC and it's strange to realise that he's actually a real person.

This afternoon, I had to hurry back to Derby for my interview with DHL. However, I got a bus that I thought would take me there only to find that it had dropped me at a different DHL place miles away, with no way to get to the right place. So no new job there, but never mind. If I can't get there by public transport, it's not the job for me anyway.

Also, I'm confused about my pants. I have two pairs of green tartan boxer shorts that are seriously falling to pieces ('more holey than righteous', as Grandma says), so I don't wear them much. At least I think I don't, but I've noticed that every time I take a load of washing out of the machine, those old green pants are in there, without me remembering wearing them. It's very strange. Is someone breaking into my flat on a regular basis, wearing my pants and putting them in the wash?

It's in the bag

I've just packed my trusty rucksack to go down to London tonight. I'm worried that it might be reaching the end of its lifespan, though - at the othello at the weekend, the remaining zipper came off and I can't get it back on, so it's going to remain closed for all eternity now. This isn't an insurmountable problem, because of the big hole through which I normally put things in and take them out of the bag, but it makes it more difficult to fit oversized things inside.

It's a Reebok rucksack, black and what used to be a very garish pink before it faded over the decades to a gentle pastel hue, with still just about legible the motto "Pump It Up!" on the front. It's given me many years' service now, and before that it served my brother well as the bag he took his PE kit to school in. He hated PE, and probably transferred some of his dislike for the subject to his PE kit bag, so I think I did the bag a favour when I borrowed it in 1994 and never returned it. It's had a life of continued variety since then - it went to university with me, it's helped me move into my own rented room, followed by my first flat on my own, it's been to MSOs and othello tournaments, it's gone with me to the USA, Germany, Austria, Brazil, Malaysia, Bahrain and elsewhere, and it's still more or less in one piece. I think it's still good for a few years yet, before it becomes actually impossible to carry things around in it. Then maybe I'll have it framed and hang it up on the wall.

Zoomy Doubles For Darwin

Now this is the kind of thing that makes me really, really glad I'm a memory champion! Forwarded from the WMSC, an email from another TV producer:

Dear Secretary,

I am producing a series entitled Extraordinary Animals for Channel 5/BBC World, exploring animal behaviour and intelligence. Each 30 minute film will focus on an animal who has shown exceptional abilities and has furthered scientific understanding not only of its' species but also of our own.

One of our films features AI, a remarkable female chimp living at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University. Working with Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa and his team, she has mastered the ability to count to ten, memorise symbols for numbers (including Arabic), and words for colours. Both she, and her son Ayumu have shown remarkable ability in a memory test where numbers 1 to 9 appear on a screen randomly, are then covered up and the chimps remember their positions. They can do this at speed.

We have completed our filming in Japan with the professor and the chimps and it really is truly amazing to see them doing the test. However, to see just how skilled they are, I feel we need to see humans take the same test. It would be fascinating to see the result. As the chimps are extraordinary, I think it only fair to use extraordinary humans. It would be fantastic to find British memory champions/experts to take part – both adult and junior. Do you think you might be able to help or refer me elsewhere?

We plan to shoot the test in London in early October. Should you require any further information, please contact me.


Can the British memory champion out-memorise a chimpanzee? Wouldn't it be cool if the answer was no?

Was?

Why when I posted that blog entry did I get a screen saying

"Your blog post published successfully!
Blog anzeigen (in einem neuen Fenster)
Need to change it? Edit post | Create a new post"

I'm sure I haven't told Blogger to give me part of their status reports in German.

Nats

Not the annoying flying insects, the not at all annoying national othello championship. Sorry I didn't post anything yesterday, but Geoff and Michael were staying over and I still don't like blogging when someone's watching me. I don't know why, seeing as I'm aware that people are going read what I'm writing anyway. Still, I'm not sure I was a perfect host, as shown by the following conversation when Michael asked for black coffee:

Me: Oh, there isn't any. I normally keep some in the house for guests, but I took it down to the community centre so we'd have something to drink at the tournament, and it's still there. Ditto milk, sugar and tea.
Michael: What is there to drink, then?
Me: Water.
Michael: Fine. (going to the sink)
Me: Oh, also, the cold tap doesn't work.

Well, I never claimed this was the Ritz. Anyway, the competition all went fine - I had been worried that the venue, a cheap and somewhat shabby but extremely nice community centre not too far from the city centre, would have cancelled my booking, even though I called on Friday to confirm that it was still happening, or would otherwise take exception to us, but no, it was all okay. I must be a great organiser after all. We had the AGM before the championship started, which was as exciting as usual. Graham filled in as chairman while Aubrey's busy in America promoting his new book (just for a change - I think this is the fifth year in a row that we've called on Graham's services as official Acting Something-Or-Other).

By the time the competition was ready to start, we had a whopping 18 competitors. This forced me to cycle home and get another board, but we didn't start too late - luckily, really, since we only had the room till six before we had to make way for a live 'guitar vocalist'. Among the 18, just for maximum confusion value, were two Davids, two Jeremys, two Roberts and two Ians (well, one Ian and one Iain, but that's not a big help when you're reading out names). I think some othello players need to splash out on a name change to something more exotic and unique, like Imre or Aubrey.

I lost to Imre in round one, disappointingly enough - three wins in a row against him would have been something to really boast about - but made up for it with a really cool win against Michael in the third round. I've never done that before. Now I just need to work out how to beat Graham some time. Geoff's got the knack of that - he beat Graham in round two, while Iain beat Imre. That pretty much set the standard for the tournament as a whole - it really wasn't one of those championships where the highest-rated players beat everyone below them on the rating list, there were upsets and surprises all over the place. Iain drew with David Hand in round three, so at the end of the first day David Beck was on his own at the top of the table with three wins.

We went to a Thai restaurant in the evening, it being the first place we could find that wasn't full up. Actually, it was nearly empty when we all piled in. The food was good, though, but the service wasn't what you would call exceptional. A surprisingly extensive discussion about coca-cola led to Jeremy Dyer learning that they do in fact still make cans of cherry coke, and my revelation that in Bahrain, the coke cans still have old-fashioned ringpulls.

Today, I didn't manage to follow up that win over Michael with any more impressive results, unless you count winning on time against Ian when I was well and truly dead on the board. Graham also beat me 63-1, just to teach me not to get too cocky. Elsewhere, David Hand rather impressively made it two draws in a row with his first game of the day against David Beck, who then beat Graham but lost to Iain, who took the lead after five rounds but then lost to Imre and Graham, Geoff and Jeremy Das. Geoff was in contention for the lead all the way through, as were both Davids and Michael. It was anyone's guess who would end up in the final, but normality reasserted itself at the last, and it ended up being Graham versus Imre, for about the 73rd time. Imre won for the (genuinely) ninth time. Congratulations to him!

We had lunch in the Dunkirk Tavern down the road from the venue. Their food selection turned out to be rather less extensive than I'd assumed it would be from the sign outside promising inexpensive Sunday roasts - it didn't add "and no other kinds of food" - but it was very nice. All in all, the whole thing went really well, and a fun time was had by all! So I needn't have worried about it all going wrong and me getting the blame.

I'm gonna live forever

Okay, next Wednesday you all have to skive off work and/or come to Britain to see me on This Morning. They're even putting me up in a hotel in London on Tuesday night! And, in a shining example of effective time management, I've arranged a job interview at DHL at East Midlands Airport for late Wednesday afternoon. Although to be honest I'm not over-enthusiastic about the job.

But that's all for next Wednesday, and as the old saying goes, next Wednesday never comes. Tomorrow, on the other hand, we have the othello nationals! I would really like to do well in it, although as I've hardly played the game for months now, it's unlikely that I will. Still, it's my dream that one day my page on the othello wiki will mention something about my othello-playing ability.

TMWRNJ!

Okay, this is cool - This Morning want me on the show! I get to hang out on national TV with whoever hosts This Morning these days, possibly Phillip Schofield! Don't know what day yet, but I'll keep you informed. Also, I've just been talking to someone over the internet who didn't know my real name, and when I told him he said "You're Ben Pridmore? Wow!" I never meet people who've actually heard of me without being told! I'm really turning into a global celebrity! I'll have paparazzi going through my bins before you know it!

I also did that interview with the Rheinische Post today, so if you're a devoted reader, stay tuned. Alexei the UK correspondent says that he might be able to write the article some time soon if the paper stop insisting he write about Madeleine McCann and nothing else. So don't hold your breath.

It's that time of year again

It seems I'm probably going to have a big birthday party again this year. I always thought of myself as the type not to have a big bash, what with it being so depressing being as old and ancient as I am (I CAN'T be 31 next month, can I?), but after the last two years of having a get-together with all the gang, it's become one of those annual traditions. The plan is to try to find an apartment to rent for the weekend somewhere nice, like Manchester.

But 31? I don't know how that happened.

Holy Pillow Talk, Batman!

Ahh, bliss! BBC4 are repeating the sixties Batman series. Which, although I wasn't around in the sixties to watch, I have fond memories of thanks to the repeats on early-morning ITV in the eighties. Those were the days. And being on that channel and not bothering to turn the telly off led me to another interesting discovery - did you know Doris Day was still alive? It's news to me. I don't know why, but I'd just automatically assumed that she was dead. I'm going to have to look up all the other people I've been assuming were no longer with us now, just to make sure they're not going to be turning up unexpectedly on my doorstep. I'll start with Julius Caesar.

The documentary, which I turned off after five minutes despite being vaguely interested in Doris Day and her continued existence, was one of those horribly badly made ones with sort of semi-dramatisations of what the narrator is saying in the background, so that when it recounts how she was hit by a train at the age of thirteen we hear train sounds, clanging bells and a scream. Yuck. If the documentary about me contains anything even vaguely like that, I'm going to sue somebody. Or at least decry it in public as loudly as possible. The filming's finished now, I don't know if I mentioned that - Nick is now busy editing it into some kind of coherent whole (I don't envy him), and it'll be out either late this year or early next, I forget which. So mark your diaries.

It took me years to write, will you take a look?

Okay, I've decided I need to get on with writing this book of mine. I don't even care about getting it published, I'm just sick of "How To Be Clever" sitting there in absentia and mocking me with its non-written-ness. Enough of this talking to people about it, composing chapters in my head, vaguely assuming it'll get done one of these days. It's been a good four years now since I started "writing" it, it's just silly now. So from now on, I'm really, properly going to work at it. And everybody reading this has to constantly pester me about it and complain that it's not on the shelves of Waterstone's yet. Okay?

Hanjie!

I seem to have got addicted to hanjie puzzles - those Japanese ones with the grid where you colour in squares according to the numbers at the sides. I've been doing them for years, since they first started appearing in Tough Puzzles magazine (called 'Tsunami' in those days, until they changed the name after the big real tsunami), but to pass the time on the way to Bahrain I bought a book of puzzles that had lots of hanjies in, and now I can't get enough of the things. I suppose there are worse things I could be addicted to. Like sudoku. That would just be weird.