Times tables

I'm trying to decide whether or not to go to the Mental Calculation World Cup. It only happens every two years, and I couldn't go to the last one because I didn't have any money, so I haven't actually done any mental calculating since 2006. I'll be completely rubbish and come last, most likely.

On the other hand, it's rather groovy to be there anyway - it's much more elitist than the World Memory Championship, they only allow a maximum of 40 people to compete, and they reserve the right to choose which applications to accept ("they" is a guy called Ralf, by the way), and I'd get in by virtue of my amazing memory skills and my less amazing mental calculation skills, so I'd get to look down my nose at the people (if any) who wanted to compete but couldn't.

Still, I'm undecided. I'd have to do a whole lot of practice, and frankly I've still got that motivation problem with the memory stuff, so I don't need anything else to distract me. I've got another week-and-a-bit to make my mind up, I'll see how I feel...

What is the matter with Virgin TV?

"We're reorganising your channel line-up to make way for new exciting services."

So now E4 and E4+1, which used to be channels 143 and 144 (although a couple of years ago they were 144 and 145) have now moved to 144 and 146 respectively. I mean, what are they going to put on channel 145? E4+½? And ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4 have moved from 114, 116 and 117 to 115, 117 and 118. They're still leaving room for the inevitable ITV2.5.

A thought occurred to my conscious mind

About last night's blog. Every eighteen months, give or take, I feel inspired to write a story about three people called Cecil, Phillip and Samantha, who apparently all live together in some undefined relationship, in which Cecil attempts to assume a position of authority over the world's population, Phillip tries to stop him out of an apparent feeling that it just isn't right and Samantha half-heartedly assists Phillip, while constantly eating and caring for nothing but her own pleasure. I don't mind at all that nobody reads these things, but nonetheless I like to post them on my blog.

After writing yesterday's fourth episode of their interesting lives, I thought to myself that if anybody asked me what it was all about, I could maybe come up with some silly explanation that the three characters represent my ego, super-ego and id, and their adventures are metaphors for the darkest secrets of my own psyche. And then I thought about it some more and realised (based on my very limited knowledge of Freudian theory and skimming the article on wikipedia) that that interpretation completely and totally fits. Cecil's the ego, Phillip the super-ego and Samantha the id. I'm almost afraid to go back and read those blog posts again now, in case they really do shed light on the innermost workings of my mind. Maybe I'll just send them to a psychiatrist and see what they make of it.

The waters of life

“Phillip,” Cecil said, kicking Phillip in the small of the back to wake him up, “I need a favour.”

“Wha? Who? What? Who?” Phillip asked, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, why am I asleep in our treehouse?”

“It’s a long story,” Cecil answered. “But the only relevant bit of the story is that you couldn’t sleep last night because a bat was snoring in your bedroom, so you came up here this afternoon for a quick nap.”

“Oh yes, I remember,” Phillip sighed. “What’s the rest of the story?”

“The list of things medically wrong with the bat that caused it to be indoors, sleeping and snoring during the night,” said Cecil, taking a sheaf of handwritten papers from his pocket. “The vet was very thorough.”

“So you need a favour?” Phillip asked, tearing the papers to shreds and eating them, hoping to turn the conversation back to Cecil’s reasons for waking him up and maybe generating some kind of apology.

“Yes. I’m getting married in half an hour, and I need a witness. The men next door were going to do it, but then they remembered that they’re both the same person, and we need two different witnesses or it’s not a real wedding. I didn’t want to ask you, because you’d only say no, but I don’t know anyone else.”

“No,” said Phillip, lying back down and closing his eyes. However, at that exact moment, give or take half a second or so, Samantha had gone into Phillip’s bedroom, seen the bat eating her favourite expensive eyeliner and screamed “Yes!” in the way that her psychiatrist had advised her to do whenever she meant “No!”. The sound reverbrated around the house and echoed into the treehouse outside, where both Cecil and Phillip mistook it for Phillip agreeing to witness Cecil’s marriage.

On the way to the church, Phillip asked Cecil a few pertinent questions about the upcoming wedding, while Samantha grumbled ceaselessly about being forced to wear her second-favourite eyeliner, which she despised (she wasn’t terribly keen on her favourite eyeliner either, but at least it wasn’t quite as revolting to her as her second-favourite). “Who are you marrying, why are you marrying them and what’s a church?” Phillip asked.

“I’m not marrying anyone, I’m just getting married,” answered Cecil. “And I’m doing it because I want to be emperor of the world, and the people just won’t accept an unmarried emperor. There are a lot of old-fashioned people out there, and I just can’t afford to upset them. And it’s a building like that one over there, only bigger and not a fire station.”

“Oh, I see,” Phillip said. He then frowned and sat in silence for two hours, apparently thinking about something, before getting up from the pavement again, walking the remaining five yards to the church door and going inside.

“Dearly beloved,” the vicar began. “We are gathered here today – my God that’s a terrible eyeliner – to join Cecil in holy matrimony. If anyone knows why I shouldn’t, speak now or forever hold your peace, do you, Cecil...”

“Hang on a sec!” Phillip whined. “You’re supposed to pause after the ‘speak now’ bit! I was going to say something!”

“Shut it, fat-face,” said the vicar. “... take Cecil as your lawful wedded self?”

“I d...” Cecil began, but Phillip grabbed him by the knee and prevented him from finishing the word, while Samantha opened a packet of salt-n-shake crisps and ate them noisily and the men next door discussed their pet dog’s obsession with tennis racquets.

“Cecil, I’ve realised why you want to be emperor,” Phillip said. “It’s about your third cousin Brenda, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Cecil admitted. “In another fortnight, give or take, it’ll be twenty years since she vowed to destroy me once and for all in twenty years’ time. Only by becoming emperor of the world can I stop her.”

“You could just kill her with a knife,” Samantha suggested, eating fish and chips that she’d had noisily delivered to the church during Cecil’s heartfelt confession. “Or a bigger knife.”

“Killing people is against the law,” Cecil said. “If I was emperor, I could just make it so that she never existed in the first place. But that’s all out the window now that Phillip’s figured it out.”

“I now pronounce you Cecil,” the vicar said, having taken the ‘o’ in ‘another’ to be the completion of Cecil’s ‘I do’, “and also the emperor of the world. You may kiss anyone you see fit.”

“No no, it’s okay, I don’t need to be married any more,” Cecil said. “We’ve sorted it all out. Brenda can’t destroy me now that Phillip’s worked out why I wanted to be married. It’s a shame, really, I would have quite liked to be emperor of the world anyway.”

“Well, you are the emperor of the world...” the vicar protested.

“Shut it, vicar,” chorused Phillip, Samantha, Cecil and the organist, and they all went home for tea.

The Entertainer

It occurred to me today, after the grand prix (I really need to get into memory training again, if only to give me something to do on Sundays), that instead of learning to play some cool new instrument like I keep trying to do every now and then, I should just dig out my old recorder, which I can actually play quite well. I can still remember how to play a wide range of three or four tunes I used to play at school, and I could probably play a whole load of groovy modern tunes if I could dig up some sheet music for them.

I tried looking for free sheet music on the internet, but the only free stuff is the kind of boring old stuff I used to play at school and don't still remember because it's boring. Works by the likes of John Loeillet, whose name I will always remember because it inspired my recorder-playing schoolmate David Stevenson to giggle "It looks like 'toilet'!". He was about 15 at the time and that was by far the rudest thing he ever said.

Looking him up on the internet today (Loeillet, not David), incidentally, it turns out his name was actually Jean-Baptiste Loeillet, usually known as Jean-Baptiste Loeillet of London so as not to confuse him with his cousin, Jean-Baptiste of Ghent, who was also a composer. And Jean-Baptiste of London was also occasionally anglicised as John Lully, but shouldn't be confused with another composer called Jean-Baptiste Lully of France. And he in turn shouldn't be confused with his composer sons, Jean-Louis Lully and Louis Lully. It just seems to me that if these people really didn't want to be confused with each other, they should have just not all had the same name. Really, who calls their son "Louis Lully"? It's a tongue-twister. And who, having called their son "Louis Lully", calls another of their sons "Jean-Louis Lully"?

Which seems to have drifted away a little from my original point, which was that I wondered if anyone knew where I could find cool recorder music on the internet. Written by people without silly names.

The driver is essentially ballast

I haven't watched a grand prix for years, but I'm currently watching the "action" in Bahrain and it's nice to know that nothing has changed. The TV cameras still miss all the interesting bits, the commentators somehow fail to notice the things that they do see on screen ("Oh, Alonso's got ahead of Massa somewhere," two laps after the first corner where it happened) and don't know which car they're looking at, and it's still the car that starts first on the grid that wins, because it's still impossible for a faster car to overtake a much slower one.

I was inspired to watch it by an article saying that three of the four top teams this year have two good drivers racing for them, rather than the traditional one good driver and one less-good one under orders to finish behind his teammate, so we at least get to see which driver of the pair is able to get the faster time in qualifying and thus measure who's the best. And also to see how the Mercedes team sabotage Schumacher's teammate while conveying the impression that he didn't just let him win. But since it's still as boring as ever, I don't think I'll be watching the rest of the season.

Turned out nice again

After all my whining yesterday, the weather was actually quite nice today, and almost warm - certainly nice enough to cycle from Leicester to Oadby without dropping dead. The othello was fun, too, we had eight players, more clocks than we knew what to do with (we could have built them into a little tower, now I come to think of it, but that didn't occur to me at the time) and I won most of my games, drawing with Iain in the first round and just making a mess of things against Andrew to ensure that I ended up second instead of joint-first.

There was also the traditional lunch in the excellent pub down the road (The Old Library, which is right next door to the current Oadby library, so I don't understand why they bothered to move it), where I impressed our newcomer Rob with my status of world memory champion, and then even more so when a stranger at the bar recognised me and said hello.

And, since it's so nearby, I got home nice and early and didn't have to get up early in the morning. All othello tournaments should be like this.

Winter sports

It's the Oadby regional tomorrow, and I traditionally (ie for the last two years) take my bike on the train to Leicester and cycle out to the Baptist church where the competition is traditionally (for the last four or five years at least) held. But it's still really cold out there, and it's been spring-like for the last couple of years by this time. It's disgraceful. Still, I'm sure the tournament will be fun. I'll also make an effort to break with tradition and remember to bring my clock.

Drat those Germans

England lost to Germany in the semi-final of the hockey world cup today. You'd think they would have been more considerate, knowing how I love to find bad omens in minority-interest sporting events and relate them to the world memory championships. I tell you, if I don't win this year it won't be because I haven't done any training, it'll be because of bad omens. Evil spirits, that kind of thing.

Weight a minute

I've been trying to lose weight for the last couple of weeks, in a half-hearted, still-eating-lots-of-sweets kind of way. But it just occurred to me today that the one time in recent memory when I did genuinely lose a lot of weight and become really quite slender was back in early 2003, when I was particularly devoted to memory training and developing my systems. It's apparently true that mental athletes' exertions make them lose weight, and obviously I just need to mentally exercise some more to get the pounds falling off...

I'm bored!

I haven't been on TV for ages. This must be what it's like to be a normal person, instead of a major celebrity. Unless that other Japanese company decides to go for it, there's nobody even considering making a documentary about memory competitions at the moment, is the point I'm seriously making here. It's about time somebody came along and wanted to film the 2010 world championships. Come on, TV producers, the public wants to see the exciting spectacle of a group of people sitting in a basement looking at numbers!

Unclean!

I got a computer-virus thing on my laptop today - one of those fake security tool things that takes over your machine and tries to persuade you to download bad things and/or give people money. Luckily, I'd heard of them before when someone I know got something similar last year, but less luckily the thing stopped me getting onto the internet and finding out how to get rid of it. But it all worked out happily in the end, because I could still get Yahoo Messenger to work and I got a helpful friend to look it up on Google, and now I've got a clean bill of silicon health again. But I've never had a virus/trojan/whatever before, and now I can't be scornful towards people who get them and say that only stupid people are at risk from computer viruses. Well, I can, and will, but I probably won't sound so convincing.

Also, congratulations to Ron White for winning the US Memory Championship, and Nelson Dellis for nearly winning it and achieving some really cool-by-the-standards-of-American-memory-competition things. I expect both of them to become even more cool, memory-wise, in the future. Let's have an American invasion of top-notch memorisers, to fight off the Chinese and Europeans!

Cambridge Memory Championship 2010

The fifth Cambridge Memory Championship (wow! five years!) takes place on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010, at Trinity College, Cambridge.

It's part of the tenth (double wow!) Cambridge Mind Sports Olympiad, so please do come along and play something else on the Saturday. I'm playing othello, as usual.

The MSO website above gives you all the relevant details of how to get there, when things happen and so on. It costs £5 to enter, or nothing at all if you're new to the world of memory sports (or if you really convince me that you're so poor that you can't afford a fiver), and the competition lasts for the whole day, from nine o'clock in the morning until six o'clock in the evening. The schedule looks like this:

9:00 Welcome and introduction
9:15 Random words 5 min 10 min
9:45 Binary numbers 5 min 15 min
10:15 Names and faces 5 min 10 min
10:45 Numbers 15 min 30 min
11:45 Lunch break
1:00 Cards 10 min 20 min
1:45 Speed Numbers 5 min 15 min
2:15 Abstract Images 15 min 30 min
3:15 Historic Dates 5 min 15 min
3:45 Spoken Numbers 100 sec 5 min
200 sec 10 min
4:45 Speed Cards 5 min 5 min
5 min 5 min
6:00 Finish

Times are subject to change, but we usually get things done pretty close to that. Spoken numbers are in English, words and dates can be provided in any language of your choice, as long as you ask for it at least a week before the competition.

For lunch we'll go to a nice pub nearby, and afterwards we'll go to another nice pub (or, if we really liked the lunch, the same nice pub) and talk about the wonders of memory competitions in general.

Any questions, please comment on this blog post, or send me an email. A preview will appear on www.memory-sports.com shortly.

And you're only smilin' when you play your violin

That's one of those blog titles I've wanted to use ever since I encountered that particularly awful rhyme in the strange Abba song "Dum Dum Diddle". I was thinking of jusifying it by writing about how I'm considering taking proper professional lessons in some musical instrument to get over my lifelong desire to actually play something well - it's true, I am, but not so seriously that it merits a blog to itself, and I'd only feel like I was just saying it so I could use that title. Still, it is something I'd like to do. I'm quite sure I've got the soul of a musician (the cool hippy kind) trapped in the body of an accountant-cum-memory-master.

Also, should I go out somewhere distant and exciting tomorrow, or just stay at home and try to memorise things? I can't decide.

America's memory

Tch, it's the US Memory Championship on Saturday, and I can't use it as an excuse to visit New York this year, because I've got no holiday days left until the new year starts in April. It's probably my own fault for going to Japan so many times, but I'm still looking for someone else to blame. But at least Florian's going, so there'll be a full and interesting report on memory-sports.com!

Incidentally, expect a lot of blogging about the Cambridge Memory Championship this weekend and for the two months thereafter. I've rather neglected it (in the sense that I've done absolutely nothing by way of organising it, telling people it's happening and other minor matters like that), so I'm going to make up for it now. Well, not now, but Saturday, definitely.

The Boy With The Amazing Brain

I got an email today offering to use my amazing memory skills to win a fortune at blackjack and make me and my generous correspondent millionaires. I haven't had one of those for a while, and it's nice to know that some people out there still think I'm Rain Man. It always gives me a giggle, if nothing else.

But still, since I'm casting around for something new to try my hand at, perhaps I should learn to count cards properly. It does sound like fun, if you can do it well. Perhaps I'll break the bank at Monte Carlo yet. I'll just have to start wearing disguises and deliberately losing whenever I go to Las Vegas, in case they ban me from my favourite holiday destination...

A Buffy a day keeps the vampires away

Having acquired a complete collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer videos recently, as I probably mentioned in my blog, I've been watching an episode a night for the last week or so. It really is an awesome series, and there's nothing on TV nowadays quite like it. Somebody come up with another cool, clever and funny action show, please. I need more reasons to not do any memory training.

Time marches on

I was really taken by surprise today to notice that it's March. High time I sprung into action and did something new. To start with, I've trimmed my beard down to a sensible kind of length. But I've left the ends of my moustache quite long, because I've got half a mind to turn it into a villainous curly moustache. I think it'd look good on me.

The Old Man of the Mountain

The coolest thing about the Cambridge International is generally the meals. Okay, there are people who go there wanting to win the othello tournament, but I personally never harbour any illusions about being good enough to consistently beat the best players in Europe. It's a tournament I'd recommend to anyone who likes good food in interesting places with very interesting people, though.

Friday evening, having got away from the office and made my way down to Cambridge, starts with The Salisbury Arms, just down the road from the train station and also just down another road from the hotel I ended up staying in because Cityroomz was full. But not having travelled that road before, I still got hopelessly lost on the way - the road the pub is on is in some kind of spacial topographical anomaly so that it's at right angles to each of two different roads I'm familiar with but which are at right angles to each other. Or that's how it seemed to me, anyway, even before I had anything to drink. Still, it's such a great pub that I thought I should throw in a link to its website. It's a bit excessively real-ale, and wildly expensive compared to pubs around my neck of the woods, but it's got a staggeringly groovy deco, and the best music you can possibly imagine. I'd go along with the website's claim that it "encompasses all that is great about English pubs", more or less, although I wouldn't recommend that you check out the poetry page.

On othello tournament eves, it also plays host to a whole lot of European othelloists crowded around a smallish table, playing othello and variants thereof (four-by-infinity) and suggesting a really quite cool idea for an extra competition we could have at the Cambridge Memory Championship in May (assuming I tell people it's happening - I'll do it next week, promise). Aubrey gets the credit for the othello variant and the memory idea, naturally. A couple of drinks later, I followed some very simple directions back to the main road, and luckily looked over my shoulder to find that I was pointed 180 degrees in the wrong direction now, eventually ending up back at my hotel.

This being a nice hotel, it came with a full English breakfast - self-service buffet with a waitress whose sole job it seems to be to open the metal box things (there's probably a word for them that everyone knows, but I can't think of it) that the bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs etc are in whenever a breakfaster comes towards them, and close them again when they're done. It was very nice. Definitely an improvement on the 'light breakfast' you get with your cheaper room at Cityroomz, which basically consists of a croissant.

Thus fortified, it was down to the Lubbock Room in Peterhouse, just round the corner, where the Cambridge International has been played since time immemorial if like me your memory only goes back to 2002. That's also a very cool place, a big spacious room with pencil sketches of Peterhouse-associated Nobel Prize winners on the walls and, this year at least, a great forest of laptops belonging to players. This is what happens when you advertise wireless internet availability. There was barely room for othello boards among all the laptops. Still, at least nobody had a secret othello computer down their trousers this year.

After the morning's first three games, the leaders were Matthias Berg, Erwin van den Berg and David Beck - a really good morning for people whose surnames start with 'Be', although it was a very bad one for people with 'Be' first names. Before the next tournament, I'll change my name to 'Pan', which Corrie de Graaf thought was my name after mishearing an introduction. It was also a good morning for people with surnames derived from geographical features, and for prompting me to use the blog title above, which is a Betty Boop cartoon - the fact that her name also starts with 'Be' was the clincher in choosing it.

Lunch is traditionally in the university canteen next door. Great food, including a hot pudding with custard - it was treacle tart this year, and it was delicious. Expensive, naturally, despite being a university place. Cambridge is just plain expensive everywhere. It keeps the riff-raff away.

We had an afternoon's othelloing too, although I can't remember exactly what happened to me, let alone to anyone else. I certainly didn't win very many games all weekend, anyway. Still, in the evening it was drinks in the pub down the road, along with debate about whether or not rosé wine is made by mixing red and white wine together, and a really heated argument about the difference between raisins, currants and sultanas. Especially currants. Luckily, it's the 21st century, and everybody had iphones and laptops and access to the source of all knowledge, Wiki Answers. Then away to an Indian restaurant where the conversation (at our table at least) was unprintable in a family blog like this. The food was quite nice, though.

Day two of the competition ended up with me on five wins out of eleven, which could be worse, I suppose. Imre won the final against David Hand, so yay and congratulations to them and everyone else!

Drat!

Cityroomz was fully booked, after all my talk of tradition last night. I'm having to stay in a nicer, more expensive place instead. Tradition is ruined! Now I'll never achieve my usual mediocre results in the othello! I'll probably win it, or something useless and non-traditional like that.

Still, I'm cheered up by the news that David Taylor is entering the World Snooker Championship qualifying tomorrow, for the first time in millions of years. I always thought he was cool when I was very young, although I can't think why.

Z

It's that time of the year when I book a room in the Cityroomz hotel in Cambridge at the last minute, for the Cambridge International this weekend. And gah, it's £47.50 a night now! It's an awesome hotel, but it used to be a super-cheap one (in those days it was called "Sleeperz", which was a much more groovy name) as well, and now it's just a cheaper-than-average one. Still, it's traditional that I stay there, and I'm not going to break with tradition, even if I find a cheaper-but-still-nice place. Heck, maybe I'll even book a room for the MSO weekend, too, because I always leave it too late for that and find that the place is fully booked. May day weekend is somehow a more popular time to visit Cambridge than the last weekend in February, even though the othello tournament that weekend is smaller and less important.

Japan loves Zoomy

So, a Japanese TV company wants to fly me out to Japan and interview me and have me do some kind of interesting memory stunt in a studio and maybe scan my brain on an MRI machine or something unique like that.

Seriously. Fuji TV, "The Best House 123", mid-March or mid-April. Now, let's think about this. On the one hand, I have quite literally been there and done that, I only get 25 days of holiday a year and ideally I'd like to save quite a lot of them for China in August (if it doesn't get cancelled/rescheduled/moved to London) so I can go there a good few days early and beat the jetlag, and how many times can I fly to Tokyo and back before someone thinks I'm some kind of international millionaire playboy and kidnaps me to demand a hefty ransom that my impoverished family would be both unable and unwilling (because they don't like me all that much) to pay?

On the other hand, the more exposure I get on Japanese TV, the closer it brings me to fulfilling my secret lifelong ambition to play an evil scientist in a Godzilla movie. I'll seem to be a good guy at first, but then turn out to be secretly plotting to use the giant monsters to crush Tokyo and bring the world's economy under my control. It'll be great.

So I'll sleep on it and see what I think. I'll probably end up saying yes, if they really do want me to do it. I'd be great in a Godzilla movie. I could learn the lines in Japanese, no problem, on account of I'm a memory man.

I'd talk in a sort of deep, gruff, scientist voice and everything.

This is what I do when I'm bored

Seriously, I spend all day playing around with Excel spreadsheets at work, and sometimes I just want to come home and play with Excel spreadsheets in the comfort of my own living room. I'm a terrible sad case.

But I wanted to mess with unnecessarily complicated formulas to predict the Premier League table at the end of the season, based on who still has to play whom. The aim is to get to a point where my calculations are so weird and complex, yet still roughly justifiable by logic, that the end result is a pleasant surprise to me when I see it. Or an unpleasant surprise as it turns out. I really don't like Chelsea and I was hoping to come up with scientific proof that they weren't going to win it. But still, yay, it turns out that Aston Villa are going to get fourth place!

I won't bore everyone by explaining the calculations used (because I wouldn't know how to explain them comprehensibly, for a start), but I thought I'd put my predictions here for posterity and compare them with how the table looks after everything's done and dusted. I'll bet you a coke it's accurate, because it's generated by Science.

1 Chelsea 85
2 Man Utd 81
3 Arsenal 81
4 Aston Villa 72
5 Liverpool 69
6 Tottenham 68
7 Man City 68
8 Everton 53
9 Birmingham 52
10 Fulham 49
11 Stoke 46
12 Blackburn 43
13 West Ham 39
14 Wigan 39
15 Sunderland 38
16 Wolverhampton 38
17 Bolton 37
18 Burnley 37
19 Hull 37
20 Portsmouth [probably non-existent]

Right, that's enough time-wasting. Time to start doing something productive again.

Osero

Perhaps that thing I could do instead of memory is learn to play othello properly? I've been at the same unimpressive kind of level for many years now, and maybe it's high time I devoted some time and effort to improving? But then again, what if I did try to become a great othello player and ended up still being rubbish? I have a feeling that might well happen, so it's probably best to play it safe and never try to achieve anything, ever.

Comic Library Extra!

Okay, we get an extra bonus blog post tonight, because I've just noticed something weird about that Comic Library I bought today. It's something that will only be of interest to roughly three other comic fans in the world, none of whom read my blog and all of whom probably know about it already, but I thought I should share it with all of you anyway. I'm generous like that.

For the benefit of the 99% of my readers who don't know what a Comic Library is and wonder what the flip I'm talking about, they were mini-comics produced by D.C. Thomson and featuring characters from the Dandy and Beano (for the benefit of the 50% of my readers who don't know what the Dandy and Beano are, they're popular weekly British comics, featuring about a dozen regular comic strips, each of them one or two pages in length every week). Two Beano and two Dandy Comic Libraries were published every month, starting around 1981 or thereabouts, and they contained a 64-page adventure for just one of their regular characters. Some were brilliant, some were frankly rubbish, but they cost 20p and were a highlight of my month every time.

The inside front cover of each Comic Library would normally contain a full-page advertisement for the weekly Beano, the inside back cover had an advertisement for the two Beano Comic Libraries that would be out next month, and the outside back cover had an advertisement for the other one that was out this month. This was the days before the Beano ran ads from outside companies. It's sad, really, that not enough kids buy the things nowadays.

However, Comic Library no. 36, Baby-Face Finlayson in "Gold Robber" (which for some reason I never had in 1983, although I did have the hugely inferior "Count Whackula", starring Dennis the Menace, which came out in the same month), has this on the inside front cover:

And this on the inside back:


This is weird. No 'See Baby-Face Finlayson every week in the Beano!' and two 'next month' ads, promising different stories next month! The inside front cover is the correct one, except that the Bananaman story was actually called "It's A Knockabout" (and it was BRILLIANT, by the way, one of the best Comic Libraries ever, up there with the Baby-Faces), while "Castle Capers" didn't see print until the following year, in Comic Library no. 50 (it wasn't all that good, either). And the picture of Minnie the Minx on the inside back cover ad is by the artist who normally drew the Minnie Comic Libraries (I think it's lifted from "Min's Best Friend", but I haven't checked), while the picture on the inside front cover is by the different artist (I wish I knew their names, but the Beano never credited its creative talent in those days) who drew "Min's Pest Show".

Apparently they created the original ad, then rescheduled "Castle Capers" and drew up a replacement ad, but accidentally printed it on the inside front cover instead of the back, meaning that two contradictory ads went into the finished publication! I like finding things like this in my comics. I do wonder why the Lord Snooty story was held back for a whole year, too.

Anyway, since I had the scanner up and running again, let me show you why Ron Spencer's Baby-Face Finlayson Comic Libraries were the absolute high point of 1980s comics throughout the universe with just a couple of examples from "Gold Robber":

Baby-Face and friends have just stolen a shipment of butter, mistaking it for gold, but decide to make the best of it by having a feast. Ron Spencer loved his feast scenes.

Note the whole roast chicken in the background. Every Baby-Face story featured at least half a dozen whole roast chickens - it was Spencer's signature, in lieu of actually being allowed to write his name on his works.


It's the little things I love - Mayor Orless naturally has a framed picture of himself hanging on his wall.



And the complete non-sequitur of one of "Marsh" Mallow's horses thinking "Funny! I keep thinking it's Wednesday!" totally cracks me up.

Bloggin'

The charity shops around here seem to be full of great stuff all of a sudden. Just today, I found the Dennis the Menace book from 1960, a Beano Comic Library from 1983 starring Baby-Face Finlayson (full of quite brilliantly insane art by Ron Spencer, who I admire greatly but whose name for some reason I always have to look up before I mention him, because I always think he was called either Victor or Sid - I have no idea why), the second volume of Bang Bang It's Reeves And Mortimer on video, and a complete VHS collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And also a new pair of work trousers to replace my ones with the broken zip. Oh, and a Golden Picture Classics abridged edition of Treasure Island from 1956, to provide a belated illustration of the mystery pirate from my essay the other week. And all without any really significant cost to me, while still benefitting various more or less good causes! I don't know why anyone bothers to go into normal shops, I really don't.


It's probably the one in the green shirt.

Teddy Boy

I'm sorry my blogging has been a bit sporadic just lately, but very little of interest has been happening around here. I did some really clever Visual Basic programming at work the other day, but I imagine my blog readers would be even less interested in that than my co-workers, so I won't go into detail.

I've been playing the classic Master System game "Teddy Boy" tonight, a fun platform game with a cute central character who shoots downright adorable monsters and collects beer and cigarettes, among other bonus items. It's a strange game, but very addictive.

Look, the blog will get more interesting than this soon. It's the first othello tournament of the season next weekend, that'll be something worth writing about!

I'll tell you what I'm tired of

Winter, that's what. When's it going to stop being all cold and nasty? If you're thinking that I haven't blogged enough just lately, it's because of the weather. If you want me to write more than this, get out there and stop it being winter.

Here come Johnny

There's an advert on telly, for tellies or something, with a sort of winter-olympics theme. I've never really paid much attention to it, because the first three notes of the jingle are the first three notes of "Walk of Life" by Dire Straits, and so every time that advert comes on, I think 'Hey, I should find "Walk of Life" on YouTube and listen to it.'

I've listened to that song so much in the last couple of weeks, I'm in danger of starting to dislike it. Not serious danger, though. It's an awesome song.

There's no denying it

I'm just not in the mood to memorise. I feel like I need some kind of new challenge. Basically, I feel exactly like I did five years ago - I'm world champion, I've been in the same job for a year and a half after a lengthy period as a drifter, I'm not really on board with the idea of putting in the effort to do the exact same things over again - with the added advantage now of feeling like my life is going around in five-year circles.

I don't know, maybe this would be a good time to drop the whole memory-competition scene (as a competitor, anyway - I couldn't stop going to competitions and hanging out with the people there) and find a new way to impress people with my cleverness. I just need to work out what that would be...

Oh, simple thing, where have you gone?

I'm thirty-three-and-a-third years old, either today or tomorrow, depending on how you look at it. Tomorrow if you pretend that the year is made up of twelve months of equal length, today if you consider that it's 122 days since my 33rd birthday today. Anyway, it's official - I'm a long-playing record. I'm the somewhat disappointing second sequel to "The Naked Gun". I'm a third of the way through my life, assuming I fulfil my lifetime ambition of dropping dead on my hundredth birthday, just before the arrival of the telegram from the Queen, prompting all my friends to write back by return of telegram condemning her rudeness in sending a telegram to the deceased and upsetting everyone like that, and in turn causing Her Majesty to be so grief-stricken and mortified that she realises the error of her ways, abdicates, abolishes the monarchy and the government and institutes a perfect socialist utopia.

I'm going to celebrate it tomorrow, anyway. And by 'celebrate', I mean that I'm going to spend the whole day wailing, lamenting and screaming curses at the gods for allowing me to get so old. It'll be fun!

Winterlympics?

Hey, is it the Winter Olympics? I hadn't really seen any build-up to it on TV or anywhere. Perhaps I should keep in touch with things more. But it's not like it's the real olympics, anyway. Those happen in London, in August.

The robots are mounting an attack on us! Our hero pulled the trigger on the gun.

My blog has recently been repeatedly attacked by evil robots posting lots of links to what I assume to be naughty websites (they're mostly made up of Chinese characters, with occasional words like "sex" and "18" thrown into the mix - and also, fascinatingly, "85cc", which makes me think that the websites might also involve a little motorbike like the one I used to ride. I'm almost tempted to click on it and find out).

This has happened four times now, and for some reason it posts these links to the same fifteen blog entries every time - most of them from March, April and May last year, two from November, one from January 2008 and one from November 2006. I'm not sure how it chooses which ones to target, and I'd be fascinated to find out. Still, it's boring to delete them all repeatedly, so now I've switched on the setting of comment moderation for all posts over 14 days old. So do feel free to comment on my old posts, unless you're a Chinese motorbike sex machine, but if you do, I'll have to approve the comment before it appears on the internet for the world to see.

Training

No, not the memory kind, a different kind. I was out on a Microsoft Access training course today - I'm great with Excel, but I've never really done anything with Access, and it's a bit like being the world memory champion in that if you're good with Excel, everyone assumes you know everything about every vaguely-related computer software. Still, now I know enough about Access to bluff my way through a conversation, so my reputation is assured.

Listing history

At the weekend, I bought for 20p from a market stall "Hunter Davies's Bigger Book Of British Lists", published in 1982. It's a book full of lists of trivia, most of it up-to-the-minute details of what was happening in British life in 1981, and there are some fascinating facts to be found.

Did you know that there were 27,870,000 telephones in Britain in 1981 (and a population of 54,129,000)? Or that there were 615.7 million calls to recorded information services in 1980-81 - 401.1 million of those being to the speaking clock? Second on the list was dial-a-disc, with 102.5 million calls, then cricket, with 30.5. I remember those - you dialled 16, and you got the latest cricket news if it was the cricket season, or a pop song (randomly selected) if it wasn't. No YouTube in those days, people had to entertain themselves somehow. Calls cost 10p, as I recall, although my recollection is based on a few years later, so it might have been 5p back in 1981. Still, to be amongst the top 10% of male wage earners in 1980, you had to earn at least £179 a week.

The top five television programmes for 1981 were Coronation Street, The Benny Hill Show, This Is Your Life, To The Manor Born, and Magnum. And even though there were only three channels to choose from in those days, the average individual watched 3.37 hours of TV a day.

Finally, and most interestingly, the top-selling toys of 1981 were...

1 - Rubik's Cube
2 - Star Wars figures
3 - Sindy Doll and accessories
4 - Lego
5 - Astro Wars
6 - Action Man
7 - Rubik Snake Puzzle
8 - Connect 4
9 - Britains Farm & Space figures
10 - Kensington

Kensington? Astro Wars? I don't recall what I got for Christmas that year (probably a kick up the bum and consider-yourself-lucky, but possibly some Star Wars toys too), but I've never heard of those two lines. Ah, poor people of 1981, still three years away from the glorious revolution that was Transformers, He-Man, Thundercats, MASK, Action Force, all those classic toys of the greatest toy-and-cartoon era of history.

Who wants to be a millionaire

I did the lottery last night, for the first time in a while (I buy a ticket every time I'm sitting at my computer on a Saturday and an advert for the lottery comes on telly - I'm easily swayed by advertising) and won £10. Of course, since it's on the computer, it doesn't really count as money - I really should buy a ticket from a shop some time, and get a real £10 note to put in my pocket, that would be a lot more satisfying. Still, it seemed rather miserly to transfer £10 back into my bank account, so I decided to spend it on the instant win games on the National Lottery website.

And I can tell you, it's easy to see why people develop gambling problems. I had no idea those virtual scratchcards were such fun! I was playing the monopoly-themed game (remember that strange obsession with monopoly I had recently?), and it's really extremely cleverly made. It really does feel like you're playing an exciting game, even though you're actually just essentially watching a video and then being told whether or not you've won. It could be very addictive, and I might just have to delete my account, just in case I get tempted to try it again. I hope the person who designed it got paid well, anyway.

You know, it's been much too long since I went to Las Vegas. I'll have to see if I can fit another holiday into my busy schedule...

The Evil Genius

If by 'evil', we're talking in terms of the sin of sloth, and by 'genius' we mean the kind of person who can remember things, then yes. I've spent the whole day reading "The Evil Genius", by Wilkie Collins, rather than doing anything I was intending to do.

In BATE, TO Runnymede, John with Charter goes

Remember this blog post last month, when I couldn't think of a plausible way to fill the missing line in that poem? The above line came to me out of the blue today, so I thought I should record it, just to give a sense of closure to the whole thing. 'Bate' as in 'bad temper'.

Also, it gives me an interesting title for today's blog entry. I like to have a title that is in some way clever and funny, and I don't always achieve it. Often I have a subject I want to write about, but can't think of a title, and equally often I think of a fun title and have to come up with something to write that would fit with it. And sometimes I think of a phrase that would make a perfect title, but know I'm never going to get a chance to use it.

For example, I would love to write a blog with the title "The Spiders Immediately Become Timid", and start it with this wonderful picture of a timid giant spider monster:

(I've recently been introduced to the awesome works of Fletcher Hanks)

But the only circumstances in which I could use this title and picture would be in a blog chronicling my attempts to rid my flat of spiders or insects - and I really quite like spiders, and I'm probably never going to get any kind of bug infestation problem. I never have any luck like that. So that blog title was just going to sit in my head, unused, if I hadn't brought it out tonight.

Right.

Weekend - memory. Lots of it. Until I've memorised so much that I can't remember anything ever again, up to and including my own name. I've got it written down somewhere, it really wouldn't be a problem. And no watching all those cheap cartoon DVDs I bought last weekend until I'm back in World Memory Champion form.

Also, research some way to get around jetlag, because if we do end up going to China for the WMC, that time difference is really going to kill me. Ideally, I'd like to go out there a week early to get properly synchronised, but I don't think I'm going to have the holiday time or the money to do that.

Numbers, numbers, numbers

What am I going to do about my system for memorising decimal numbers? It's not a bad system, but it's not better than everybody else's. And "better than everybody else's" is the kind of thing I strive for. But however I play around with possibilities, I can't think up a clever way to move to a four-digit-image system. I may have to come up with a non-clever way, and just memorise ten thousand images by sheer brute force. It has to be done, if I'm going to break records...

Ooh Ecc

My ambition to not be fat really isn't helped by the fact that the little shop at the office has started selling eccles cakes. I can't resist eccles cakes, and whenever I notice that they're on sale, I just have to buy one. And then, obviously, eat it. It's not good for my waistline. I also got somewhat addicted to ecclefechan tarts over Christmas, ever since Sainsbury's listed them on their top Christmas lines list for my memory stunt, and I had to look up what they were, and think "Oh yeah, those things! I love those things!" What is it with pastries that start with 'ecc'? I must just be eccentric.

To illustrate this point, here's the picture of Wee Eck that I used in my Sainsbury's presentation to demonstrate associating characters with things like ecclefechan tarts:

Although nobody had heard of him, so the point didn't go across very well. This is probably why my memory talks are generally rubbish - I'm talking to the wrong audience. The entire Class 3 at the primary school where I do my reading volunteering call me "Ben 10", and they're enormously impressed by my miming of activating the Omnitrix and turning into Fourarms. Never work with adults.

Snooker or darts?

I harbour vague ambitions to become good at both snooker and darts. And what with the memory thing and everything else, I probably haven't got the time to get good at both of them before I'm forty years old and too fat to play either (have you noticed how the fat players never win at snooker or darts any more?). I might just invent a new game that's a combination of the two, and call it 'snarts' (because 'dooker' just sounds silly). It would be a great game, but spectators would frequently be injured by the very sharp balls when they hit a wire and bounced off the table.

Blackbeard

My beard's got to the kind of bushiness-level where I always agonize over whether to let it grow a bit longer or just chop it short. I sometimes think it looks quite good very full, but the moustache is definitely too long (it gets in the way when I drink) and trimming the moustache but leaving the rest intact sends me plummetting headlong into the territory of 'looking like I care what I look like', which really isn't somewhere I want to go.

I'll probably just leave it another few days before taking the scissors to it.

Horrors!

In the course of wandering around the internet tonight, I found out that Mr Peacock, the headmaster of my old school, has retired! And been replaced by a Mrs Heather Payne! This won't do. Admittedly I'm just jumping to conclusions based on the name, and I might be wrong, but I don't see how Mrs Payne is going to fulfil what I see as important prerequisites for a head teacher, like striking fear into students with an imposing well-over-six-foot frame, full beard and deep booming voice. I tell you, education isn't what it was. Mr Peacock was 'the new head' when I started there in 1987, so this is really quite a significant era for QEGS. It inspired me to have a look at the website, which has had a bit of a revamp since I last checked it out.

The coolest part, for former pupils, is probably the 'Departments' menu, which now has a page for each subject, most of which list the teachers who teach it, and so allow us to see who's still there, after all these years. Even more alarming than the new head, a couple of these pages list the teachers' first names! These modern education methods have gone too far! Apart from Mr "Call Me Steve" Harvey, who came along when I was in the sixth form, such things were unheard of and viewed with great suspicion in my schooldays. I'm sorry, but Mr Edwards is not a Bob. He's "Mr Edwards" to his face, "Taffy" behind his back if you're feeling brave, "R.W. Edwards" on report cards, "My dad" if you're Rachel Edwards in my class, but I'm fairly sure I could never call him "Bob", even if I met him nowadays.

Mr Hull and Mrs Scarborough are still teaching art - she started there when I was in the second year, I think, while he's been there since the year dot. Mr Roger Howard is still deputy head and still teaching English (and, presumably, hockey, unless he's got too old for that, but he was surprisingly passionate about the game). Mrs Boddy, Martin's mum (for some reason, my class had multiple teachers' kids in it) is still teaching maths, but apparently not biology any more. Mr Carr is still head of biology, Mrs Boucher is one of the five names listed under "our four specialist biology teachers".

The ICT department now has six teachers, apparently, one of them my old form teacher Mr Forster (he's just listed as "Mr G Forster", but he was always "Ged" behind his back, which is what you get for having a vaguely silly first name - see also Mr Lester Thompson the geography teacher). When I started at the school, Mr Forster taught "commerce", and IT lessons were taught by Mr Chatfield the elderly geography teacher. They mainly consisted of sitting in the room full of BBC micros and reading books about what could be done with super-computers that were far beyond the school's (and most small countries') budgets.

The PE teachers aren't listed, but it's probably safe to assume the ones who taught me aren't teaching it any more. People like Mr Leach, who kept on teaching PE well into his sixties but must have finally retired by now, are rare. He was extremely cool, though, in his ever-present faded blue tracksuit, occasionally flinging himself to the floor of the gym or changing rooms and doing press-ups just to show that he still could, then bouncing back to his feet again and suggesting that we all go for a ten-mile run through the rain and snow. Mr Sanderson's still teaching history, Ms Boocock still in the geography department. There are now three German teachers (in my day, it was one-and-a-half) and three Spanish teachers (none at all when I was a lad), but the entire foreign language team has been replaced since I left the school. "Bob Edwards" and "Tony Sanderson" are still teaching RE, but there's nobody I recognise in D&T or music.

Still, that's quite an impressive number, even without "Captain Peacock" (as my dad always called him) still at the helm. I just wonder if the chess club's still going without Dr Chambers's guidance. Apart from the fact that he didn't play chess, he was a really great school chess club organiser. Maybe the chess club doesn't even meet in the chemistry lab any more! Change is bad.

The anonymous pirate

I re-read Treasure Island during the long flight to Tokyo, and there's something about it that's always intrigued me. I'm sure people have written on the subject before, so if I'm treading on someone's literary-critical toes, I assure you it was unintentional. Except if you're John Sutherland, the writer of those really cool 'Literary Detective' essays, in which case yes, I'm unashamedly copying your style. Imitation, flattery, etc.

Throughout the book, narrator Jim Hawkins keeps an almost pedantic tally of how many of the twenty-seven men who set sail on the Hispaniola are still alive and whose side they're on. So when Jim returns to the island after his thrilling confrontation with Israel Hands on the schooner and stumbles into the hands of the pirates, the reader who's been paying attention knows even before narrator-Jim has told him so that there are now only six of them remaining. Drink and the devil have done for the rest.

This is the first time Jim has been in close contact with the mutineers, and so the first time we the readers get to really know them. The emphasis not just on plot, but also on character, revolutionized the writing of adventure stories, according to the badly-written foreword in my copy of the book, and it's certainly true that everyone in Treasure Island is a three-dimensional, rounded, believable human being, and that's what makes the story so fascinating to read. Compiling the little character details throughout the book, but especially in this chapter, we know that the six buccaneers are: Long John Silver, the arch-villain; Tom Morgan, the old, grey-haired, mahogany-faced sailor who, with Silver, was part of the infamous pirate Flint's crew in days gone by and who we first met back in Silver's pub in Bristol when he played along (helped by some heavy-handed prompting) with Long John's deceptions; George Merry, thirty-five years old, long and ill-looking with yellow eyes from the fever that many of the pirates contracted camping out in the swamps, who becomes the ringleader as the mutineers finally lose patience with Silver; Dick Johnson, the youngest of the crew, the one who Jim earlier overheard being talked into joining the mutiny by Long John, and who had a good upbringing before he fell in with a bad lot, carries a Bible with him and is deeply worried about the way things are going; John, whose surname we never learn (which is a pity, really, because he's one of at least four Johns on the Hispaniola, the narrative convention of avoiding duplicated Christian names not being something Robert Louis Stevenson had any time for - there are also three Toms with speaking parts), who was shot in the head during the first attack on the stockade but got up immediately and ran away, and by this point in the book is well on the way to a full recovery, though he's deadly pale and doesn't talk much; ... and one other man, about whom we know absolutely nothing.

This sixth pirate is a complete mystery. We're never told his name or any physical details about him, he just hangs around his colleagues like a ghost. In the earlier part of the book, the mutineers included among their number a lot of nameless characters who only got their brief moment in the spotlight when they were killed, but now we have this one anonymous man remaining with the five vividly-described villains (well, John is a bit of a shadowy figure, but his bandaged head gives him character). Pirate X intrigues me. Is he young like Dick, old like Morgan and Silver, or somewhere in between like George and (probably) John? Tall or short, brave or cowardly, healthy or sickly? He presumably joins in with the actions attributed to all five of Long John Silver's scurvy crew as they glare at him, huddle together in mutinous conference, get drunk and waste their limited food rations, spread out through the woods on the search for the treasure, and so on, but he never says or does anything individual that we can definitely identify.

Jim the narrator quite often describes things that 'one of them' has done, without naming names, so it's possible that Mr X has a line of dialogue here and there. The most likely point comes when the treasure hunters stumble on a skeleton, laid out straight with arms stretched above its head, which turns out to be pointed exactly in the compass direction described on the map:

"I thought so," cried the cook; "this here is a p'inter. Right up there is our line for the Pole Star and the jolly dollars. But, by thunder! if it don't make me cold inside to think of Flint. This is one of his jokes, and no mistake. Him and these six was alone here; he killed 'em, every man; and this one he hauled here and laid down by compass, shiver my timbers! They're long bones, and the hair's been yellow. Ay, that would be Allardyce. You mind Allardyce, Tom Morgan?"

"Ay, ay," returned Morgan, "I mind him; he owed me money, he did, and took my knife ashore with him."

"Speaking of knives," said another, "why don't we find his'n lying round? Flint warn't the man to pick a seaman's pocket; and the birds, I guess, would leave it be."

"By the powers, and that's true!" cried Silver.

"There ain't a thing left here," said Merry, still feeling round, among the bones, "not a copper doit nor a baccy box. It don't look nat'ral to me."

"No, by gum, it don't," agreed Silver; "not nat'ral, nor not nice, says you. Great guns! messmates, but if Flint was living, this would be a hot spot for you and me. Six they were, and six are we; and bones is what they are now."

"I saw him dead with these here deadlights," said Morgan. "Billy took me in. There he laid, with penny-pieces on his eyes."

"Dead — ay, sure enough he's dead and gone below," said the fellow with the bandage; "but if ever sperrit walked, it would be Flint's. Dear heart, but he died bad, did Flint!"

"Ay, that he did," observed another; "now he raged, and now he hollered for the rum, and now he sang. 'Fifteen Men' were his only song, mates; and I tell you true, I never rightly liked to hear it since. It was main hot, and the windy was open, and I hear that old song comin' out as clear as clear — and the deathhaul on the man already."

"Come, come," said Silver, "stow this talk. He's dead, and he don't walk, that I know; leastways, he won't walk by day, and you may lay to that. Care killed a cat. Fetch ahead for the doubloons."

'The cook' is Silver, 'the fellow with the bandage' is John, Morgan and Merry are identified by name and Dick wasn't around to witness Flint's death. The 'another' who gives the gripping description of Flint's last moments must be our mystery man. He's presumably also the 'another' who wonders about Allardyce's knife, which shows both that he knows Flint's personality and that he's got quite a sharp mind - this might be the only time in the whole book that anyone thinks of something before Long John Silver gets it. Admittedly he plays second-fiddle to George Merry, who's a pretty unimpressive specimen, but perhaps Mr X is just sensibly keeping his head down. He might just be the brains of the operation.

He certainly has a talent for survival, anyway. Events come to a head a little later, when the disenchanted pirates finally rise up in rebellion against Silver and Jim, whose lives are only saved by a volley of musket fire from the trees - Dr Livesey, Abraham Gray and Ben Gunn have come to the rescue in the nick of time. The luckless John is shot again, this time fatally, and Silver with great satisfaction takes the opportunity to rid himself of the annoying Merry. The remaining three - Morgan, Dick and Mr X - run for it, and don't trouble the heroes again. We get one more little suggestion of Mr X's history when Jim notes that there are three men on the island ('Silver, and old Morgan, and Ben Gunn') who had aided Captain Flint in his many crimes, which would suggest that our mystery man wasn't one of the pirates in Flint's glory days, and only fell in with them more recently. But none of the three surviving mutineers gets any more character development from this point on. They are marooned on the island, rather heartlessly it seems to me, and I think it's safe to say that their chances of survival rest entirely on the shoulders of Pirate X - Morgan is old and not too bright, Dick is generally hopeless and seriously ill with malaria - so it would be nice to know whether or not he's the kind of man who could rise to the challenge.

So, why is this man such an enigma, in a book populated with so many great and memorable characters? I think a clue to the answer lies in his shipmate, George Merry. Merry goes unmentioned in the book until Jim finds himself in the enemy's camp. Unlike Morgan, Dick and bandaged John, who all had their moments earlier on, he has risen from anonymity and come to sudden prominence now that the plot needs a pirate to lead the opposition to Silver. A little history is inserted into the story when Silver berates Merry for having insisted on a more direct course of action than Silver would have preferred, right from the time they first landed on the island: "But who done it? Why, it was Anderson, and Hands, and you, George Merry! And you're the last above board of that same meddling crew; and you have the Davy Jones' insolence to up and stand for cap'n over me — you, that sank the lot of us!"

It's old news to the pirates, but it's new information to the reader that Job Anderson and Israel Hands, the two most senior pirates in the first three-quarters of the narrative, formed a triumvirate with George Merry all along. Anderson was boatswain on the Hispaniola and Hands the coxswain, but what was Merry? Just an ordinary seaman? We never find out, because we're not introduced to him until long after they've fled the ship. Clearly, he was a late addition to the plot - Stevenson, like most great Victorian writers, made things up as he went along without a clear idea how his story was going to develop. Perhaps he didn't anticipate the mutineers mutineering against Silver in the end, or perhaps he did, but envisaged Israel Hands being their ringleader before he came up with the wonderful scene with Hands and Jim tussling on the Hispaniola? Possibly he regretted killing Anderson off so comparatively early on and leaving himself without a figurehead for the rebellion. Luckily, one of the remaining two anonymous pirates was available to be elevated to a higher purpose.

Clearly, Mr X was held in reserve, just in case a new plot twist occurred to the writer that needed a new character previously unthought-of. He's the substitute player on the Buccaneers' team, who never got the chance to show what he was made of. You have to feel sorry for him, but I think there's enough ambiguity for us to choose to believe he was man enough to come into his own, retrieve the remaining treasure and get off the island to a happy ending.

Do you think I will relax my discipline just because I have won? No! I will still train hard...

The director took me out for dinner after my unimpressive TV filming, and we had nabe. On a related note, I do need to keep training my memory. I've had much too much time off since last year's world championship, and now it's time to get serious about it again. This weekend, lots of training. Promise.

Also, if you're ever in Tokyo, buy some "Meltykiss" chocolates. They're absolutely delicious, except for the green tea flavour.

I Wonder (Departure)

Yes, I'm back home again. I did get back last night, but I was too tired to blog about it. I'm still more than half asleep now, but never mind, it was worth it for a fun trip to Tokyo.

I don't know that my performance on the TV show, which was called "Wonder", was really worth the cost to the TV company of flying me out there, but they seemed happy with it, anyway. It's hard to describe exactly what the show is about, it's sort of a Juke Box Jury, only with things like memory champions and record-breaking scuba-divers instead of pop songs, and the panellists guess at answers to trivia questions on the subject of the week rather than rating it. So really, now I come to think of it, it's not much like Juke Box Jury at all. I've never even seen Juke Box Jury, it was before my time, so I don't know why I made that comparison in the first place.

Anyway, we got to see snippets of the upcoming Japanese documentary, which looks really awesome, and have some entertaining banter in the studio, as well as a memory challenge in which I memorised the order of forty sushi dishes, and the panel memorised ten each. They got them all perfectly, and I had two mistakes, which wasn't the result the TV people were expecting, but never mind. One of the guests was the famous actor Hideki Takahashi, who's a really big deal in Japan, but I can't remember who the other people were. I was a bit lost with all the goings-on, since I was relying on a translator sitting perched behind me and whispering a running translation of what everyone else was saying (usually with up to five people talking at once), so my spoken contributions were minimal and usually not really an answer to the questions I was asked. Still, perhaps it looked better to Japanese viewers.

The translator, incidentally, did a really great job, and it wasn't at all her fault if I didn't know what was going on - she'd even had a crash course in the basics of memory techniques and competitions, and understood it all very well. She had a notebook full of Japanese writing with occasional English phrases like "Ben System" and "Queen Elizabeth's Glammar School, Horncastle", so the TV company had clearly done their homework extensively. The director, for one, knows more about the world of memory competitions than some of the people who compete in them, and was able to explain in details the principles of person-action-object, journeys, the difference between the Major and Ben Systems, personal details of all the competitors, anything you might care to ask. I'm confident that the finished documentary is going to be the best ever, so hopefully it will somehow end up being translated into English.

There's more to say about the trip, but it can wait until I wake up.

These people know me too well

In a last-minute email from the Japanese director, she asked if I could bring my Brazilian Mystery Cloak to the filming. "Aww, do I have to?" I thought, "It's too big for my little rucksack, so that means I'd have to bring the big one!" And I would have replied something to that effect, if the next line of the email hadn't been 'I am afraid it is a little bit heavy, and you have to change your bag’s size…
However, we appreciate if you bring it.'

And so how can I refuse to bring it along, when the director of this project has done her homework to such an extent that she knows I prefer to only bring a small rucksack on foreign jaunts? Best film crew ever, I tell you. So the big rucksack it is, I'm afraid. Still, it turns out my plane isn't until 12:35 tomorrow, so I can get the morning train and comfortably get to Heathrow in time.

Also, there's a sticky label on the back of my new passport with a barcode and the words 'Please remove this label'. If I don't remove it, do you think they'll refuse to let me leave the country?

Last-minute, dot com

People always ask me 'have you packed yet?' whenever I'm imminently going somewhere. Probably because I've never packed, until at the very earliest half an hour before I leave the house. I haven't even really thought about packing for my trip to Japan yet - I'm going down to London tomorrow night, probably, so as to catch my plane on Saturday morning. Or if the plane is a bit later than I'm thinking it is (I haven't checked), I'll get the early train on Saturday morning and save the fuss of finding a hotel for tomorrow night. But so far I haven't even written my list of things to take with me (passport, plane tickets, hat, all the essentials like that). I'll write the list tomorrow morning, and pack my clothes tomorrow evening.

The Japanese TV people want me to bring my world championship medals. Not all of them, presumably, because they give out hundreds every year, but I'm still going to have to trawl through all the piles of junk in my spare room to try to find some. I have no idea where I put my latest batch of medals - when I get home after a WMC, I'm generally tired enough that I just empty my rucksack onto the floor, go to bed and never see any of my various travelling accessories ever again.

Morning has broken

I'm having great difficulty dragging myself out of bed just lately. I've been wanting to get to the office early this week, but I'm physiologically incapable of properly waking up until eight o'clock. Perhaps I could save time and still get my lie-in by going to work in my pyjamas, but it's still a bit cold to be cycling dressed like that. I'll wait till the summer.

Anyway, have I mentioned that I'm going to Tokyo on Saturday? I probably have, once or twice, but it's still extremely groovy. I'm going to be memorising sushi.

Thinking out of the inbox

I hate it when I've got lots of emails that I need to reply to. There's at least half a dozen of them waiting for me, but I'm just not in an emailing kind of mood. So I thought I'd make a sort of general apology on my blog, and vaguely promise to reply to everyone who's expecting a reply at some point in the next couple of days. I promise!

Now, since I did also promise to write more lengthy bloggings, let's talk about football. I don't really do that enough, and it's really a quite exciting season this year. In the three-way fight for the league title, my head says Chelsea will win it comfortably, but I'm trying to ignore it and root for Arsenal. It'd be nice to have a (sort of) change at the top after however many years of Man Utd and Chelsea, and besides, Arsenal's games have been more fun to watch this season, so they deserve a bonus point for that.

As for the league cup, which I'm watching at the moment, it looks like Aston Villa v Man U in the final, and it would be great if Villa could win it - they've been really uncharacteristically good just lately, and also a win would get them one of those precious Europa League places, which feeds into the rather more mean-spirited side of following the football this year...

Yes, like all vaguely neutral football fans, I've enjoyed watching Liverpool's continuing saga of (by their standards) disastrous results, and I'm rather hoping that they'll manage to fail to qualify for Europe at all next year, never mind the Champions League. Just because it would be funny to see them do a low-budget version of 2005, and have to whine that surely the Europa League winner should be allowed to defend the title. So I think it would be good if they finish in seventh or eighth and everyone points and laughs at them.

Video killed the DVD star

On the one hand, I feel like I should buy all the cheap video tapes I see in charity shops, because the day is fast approaching when there won't be any more videos to find anywhere. But on the other hand, if I take them all out of the shops, that day will come immediately, and it will be the Future, and that will be bad for everyone. It's a difficult balancing-act. I did buy an REM video the other day, which is cool. Shiny happy people holding hands...

Remember Cambridge?

I really have to start arranging things for the Cambridge Memory Championship. It is going to happen, fans of cantabrigian cognitive competitions, I just haven't told anyone yet. Sunday May 2nd, I think, although don't book your tickets yet, because I might be wrong about that. I will publish full details, via the medium of memory-sports.com, very soon. Look forward to it!

Morality play

Scene: Barbara's living room. Rotherham Roland is lying under a settee, with just his protruding legs visible. Garstin enters.

Rotherham Roland: Garstin, is that you?
Garstin: Who else would it be?
Rotherham Roland: Five minutes ago, it was a man to read the gas meter, and five minutes before that, it was a burglar who stole the gas meter.
Garstin: How did they get in? You and I are the only ones with keys to Barbara's house.
Rotherham Roland: Burglars, or at least the more successful burglars, can generally enter houses without using keys. And the burglar left the door open, so the gas meter man didn't need one either. However, he considerately closed it behind him after I explained that the gas meter had been stolen.
Garstin: That still doesn't explain why you're under that settee.
Rotherham Roland: You didn't ask me why I'm under the settee.
Garstin: I didn't say that I had asked you why you're under the settee.
Rotherham Roland: Shut the bloody hell up and just get this settee off me, Garstin. It's crushing my head, ribs and nose.
Garstin: All right. Just let me put this Cadbury's Creme Egg on the kitchen counter. I'll be wanting to eat it later, and if I leave it in my pocket or my hand for too long, it'll start to melt, and the two component parts of the chocolate 'shell' will become separated when I bite into it. And frankly, that thought doesn't appeal to me at all.
Rotherham Roland: Any time you're ready.
Garstin: Don't rush me. This operation takes time. Where's my spirit level?
Rotherham Roland: It's probably at your house. Were you expecting it to be in Barbara's kitchen?
Garstin: Because I need to know whether the kitchen counter slopes downwards towards the floor before I put my Cadbury's Creme Egg on it.
Rotherham Roland: Are you even listening to me? You just replied as if I'd asked you why you need your spirit level, but I didn't.
Garstin: Hardly my fault if you don't understand the basic principles of conversation, Phil.
Rotherham Roland: Phil? I'm Rotherham Roland!
Garstin: Oh, sorry, I can only see your legs, I assumed you were Phil.
Rotherham Roland: Phil who? And if you thought I was this Phil person, why did you claim earlier that only you and I have the keys to Barbara's house?
Garstin: It's extremely rude to ask a second question before a fellow has had time to reply to the first. Now I'm confused.
Rotherham Roland: Just get this bloody hell settee off me.
Garstin: I don't know how to get settees off people.
Rotherham Roland: Fine. Then just eat your Cadbury's Creme Egg.
Garstin: I never had a Cadbury's Creme Egg. I don't even like them. I don't know why I claimed to have one earlier, I suppose I just wanted you to think I'm cool.
Rotherham Roland: I do think you're cool, Garstin. And the reason I think you're cool is because you yourself are cool. You don't need to pretend to be someone you're not.
Garstin: That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me, Phil. I'm touched.

Garstin absent-mindedly sits on the settee, crushing Rotherham Roland.

The end.

How misty men like Cromwell ought to live

I'm reliably informed by my mother that "Wolf Hall", by Hilary Mantel, is a great book. It's about Thomas Cromwell, and contains a really groovy description of a memory system used by either him or someone else (I've only got a photocopy of one page that doesn't say who it's talking about). I urge everyone to buy the book, and read not just page 216, but the whole thing.

Anyway, this immediately reminded me of the line in the title, up there, written about Thomas's great-great-great-nephew Oliver [family relationship lazily looked up on wikipedia and so probably incorrect] in 1849, by the Rev. T. Brayshaw (according to this website, which is almost certainly more reliable than wikipedia because it belongs to Russian memory man, othello player and circus strongman Oleg Stepanov and is a transcription of a 19th-century book about memory - and all 19th-century books were entirely accurate and free from factual error). It's part of a mnemonic poem you can use to learn the sequence and dates of English monarchs, and it includes the couplet "Fair MODEL [1625] did first Charles, when martyred, give, / How MISTY [1649] men like Cromwell ought to live."

When I first read this poem, I thought "What a stupid line. In what way could Cromwell be described as 'misty'? It makes no sense at all, and so doesn't work as a mnemonic!" Of course, this meant that the only phrase from this poem that stuck in my head was "misty men like Cromwell", and ensured that any time I've seen a patch of mist since then, I've always thought of Oliver Cromwell [and presumably also his son, who doesn't get a line to himself in the poem]. Three cheers for the power of mnemonics and the golden rule that silly nonsensical images are the most memorable!

The one thing I didn't remember, of course, is what year the word "misty" was supposed to represent, because the Reverend Brayshaw used a system of his own devising that nobody else has ever used since. Still, his book of Metrical Mnemonics sounds downright awesome, and I must try to find a copy. Not least because either his book, the 1885 book that quoted it, or Oleg's transcription of the latter, misses out a line of the poem.

It's the line about King John - 1199, which in this system is [B or C], [T or V], [T or V] ("battle" sounds obvious but seems to be disallowed because all the other mnemonic words in the poem use only the three consonants, no extra ones on the end), and rhyming with the following line "His FACE, IN Parliament, weak third Henry shows." I'd suspect "covet" for the mnemonic, and "goes" for the rhyme, but I can't think of a good way to make a nice metric out of them...

In the long run

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to write big long blog posts every night for at least a week. All this brevity lately, I'm turning into Twitter. And I really don't want to become Stephen Fry.

Drat it

It's hard to find the time to learn Japanese and practice memory when there's constantly football on the telly. The TV people should be more considerate, and show nothing but Coronation Street all night, on every channel. Then I might actually accomplish something.

Up Close And Personal

If you're interested in a lengthy interview with me about memory competitions, with sensible and interesting questions unlike the kind you normally see in interviews with me, click here! If you're not, then click somewhere else. Or switch off your computer and go out and do something less boring instead!

Lateral Thinking

The Israeli journalist I was talking to on Sunday came out with the old chestnut "Do you ever walk into a room and find you can't remember what you were meaning to do there?" I cheerfully replied that yes, I do, all the time. "What do you do then?", she asked. "I do something else,' I replied. "If I can't remember, it can't have been anything important."

She found this quite funny, especially since she'd asked Tony Buzan the same question a couple of days earlier, and he'd spelled out extensive techniques and strategies for remembering what you were meaning to do.

Accomplished

I feel like I've really got things done this weekend. It's more of a state of mind than anything you could objectively point to and say that I've actually done, but even so. A productive weekend, rather than a lazy one. This is the kind of thing that puts me in memory-training mood, which is great. Hopefully I'll do some serious practice over the coming weeks. It's not too long until the memory season starts up again, after all...

Can I also just throw in a recommendation to read Order of the Stick? I've just finished reading the latest compilation book, and there are so many awesome and clever and hilarious moments, it's worth reading even if like me you've only got a passing knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons.

Oh, and also, the weather's better. It's just cold, wet and miserable out there now, with just a few stray lumps of ice in the road. Perfect!

Snowed in

Actually, there's no more than an inch of snow around here, because Nottingham never gets the really bad weather, but it's on top of all the ice and nastiness from last week, so I'm not going anywhere this weekend. I'm staying in the house and hoping everything will have melted by Monday. I even cleaned up my spare room and refreshed my knowledge of basic conversational Japanese!

I've been to Frimley Green

Why does Martin Adams keep winning at darts when he can't hit doubles? Or is it just that whenever I turn the telly on, he gets nervous and starts missing? Because he seems to do a lot better whenever I'm not watching him. Perhaps I'm just intimidating to darts players in general.

Also, whatever happened to those groovy displays they used to have of giant dartboards with lights that would be turned on in a position roughly corresponding to where the dart hit the board? They were extremely cool, but it's all TV screens nowadays. Did they all end up on a tip somewhere? I'll have to go and look.

Tokyo-2

Yep, it's definitely confirmed, I'm going back to Tokyo for a flying visit - flying out on Saturday 23rd, arriving Sunday morning, then back home on Tuesday morning, and back into work on the Wednesday, thus only using up my last two remaining holiday days of the financial year. I think it's fair to say that jetlag will be a problem, but I'm sure I'll be up to whatever memory stunts they're wanting me to perform in the studio.

The weather is apparently really quite nice in Tokyo at the moment, so hopefully it'll be a nice change from the ice and snow and nastiness over here. And even if it's not, yay! Japan! Again! For free! Being the World Memory Champion is great!

Synchronicity

I don't plan my life in advance, generally speaking, so when everything works out nicely like it did at lunchtime today, I feel quite pleased with myself. The meeting at work didn't overrun at all (since someone important had a conference call scheduled for twelve), I was able to honestly say "I'll have to look into it and ask someone else" when someone came up to me afterwards with a mysterious piece of paper and leave at exactly the time I was meaning to. And then I got back home at the exact moment when a postman arrived to deliver my new passport (which has to be signed for and would have gone back to some depot somewhere if I hadn't been around), made myself a sandwich and finished eating it at the exact moment when Radio Gloucestershire phoned for the interview, talked to them for a concise five-minute chat and had ten minutes left to browse through the latest othello newsletter before having to go back to the office. It was quite the most productive and well-organised lunch hour I've ever had, and perfectly timed throughout! I'm very nearly a yuppie!

It's like being Princess Diana

Tune in to Radio Gloucestershire tomorrow for a live, in-depth, five-minute interview with the World Memory Champion during his lunch hour. Work permitting - I've got a meeting at work scheduled to finish at twelve, but it's the kind of thing that's likely to overrun, and I do rather have to give priority to my real job, even in favour of Radio Gloucestershire.

And then on Sunday I'm being interviewed over the phone by the second-biggest newspaper in Israel! This one has come about because a journalist in Tel Aviv has just seen "The Mentalists", which I think is extremely groovy. I'm glad to hear that it's still being watched by people, because it really was an excellent documentary about memory competitions, and it's exactly the kind of thing there needs to be more of if we're going to get new people interested in taking part.

And I tell you, this constant pursuit by the media of the world really takes its toll on a celebrity like me. I'll probably go mad and turn to drugs and shoplifting and cutting all my hair off and things, and it'll all be the fault of the press.

New cooker smell

I've got a new oven. Don't you love it when you turn them on for the first time and they melt the protective covering stuff on the elements and fill the house with poisonous toxic gases? It really takes me back to my short-lived student days when we also got a new cooker and were similarly gassed.

Smells are really good at triggering distant memories, as people always tell me. Seriously, people tell me that quite often. It's the kind of person who comes up to me and says "You're the memory man, aren't you?" and then follows it up with "I've always had a good memory myself..." and then tells me everything they know about the process of memory. I think they're expecting me to say "Yes, that's right, my goodness, you certainly are clever!" But the smell thing is always one of the first things they say. It's true, anyway, and I'm currently trying to formulate a way of cheating in memory competitions by smuggling scratch-and-sniff books into the room, disguised as rough notepaper.

Actually, now I come to think of it, I do say something like "Yes, that's right, my goodness, you certainly are clever!" in that kind of situation. So I've only got myself to blame if people keep doing this to me. Maybe I should just sneer contemptuously at them instead, but then I'm afraid that they might punch me in the nose and destroy my sense of smell, and with it my memory.

Back, back, back to school again

Well, after an enjoyably and completely squandered week off, it's back to the office again tomorrow. Possibly this will motivate me to do some more memory training and the like, although it probably won't. Anyway, I'll do some more heavy-duty blogging soon, I assure you. It might involve giant spiders or something equally exciting, although it probably won't.

Just keep your bottle and use your heads

For want of anything better to do today, I went to see Nottingham Forest play Birmingham in the cup. Freezing temperature and no goals, but it was still a fun experience. Forest were mostly the best team, but they didn't really look like winning. The penalty miss was worth seeing, though - Robert Earnshaw basically minced up to the ball and daintily chipped it over the crossbar.

Maybe I'll become a Forest fan in 2010. It's about time I started supporting a local team, and perhaps it'd put an end to all those people thinking I still live in Derby. It's the internet's fault. Or possibly my fault for not having my own website that tells people where I live nowadays. I've only got myself to blame.

It's not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me...

Someone sent a text message to my landline yesterday, read out by that robot voice, which went along the lines of "Happy New Year, everyone! Just to let you know, I'm moving into my own place, at the following address in Liverpool. Bye!"

I don't think this is from anyone I know, it's probably a wrong number, but just in case, and you're the person who's moved into a new home in Liverpool, send me an email? Because I deleted the message and I don't remember where it was.

Isn't that an exciting way to start a new decade of Zoomybloggery?

Hootenanny!

Note: The following has been slightly edited, much as this goes against my stream-of-consciousness principles, in case I get sued by the person I originally named in Resolution 4. He has been replaced by Wilson, the Space Aubergine, a character I just invented who bears no resemblance to any human or aubergine living or dead.

Happy New Year, everyone! My resolutions:

1) To develop a new kind of trousers that are somewhere between the full-length kind and those weird three-quarter-length ones that cool people wear nowadays, and become a millionaire by selling them. The secret to this will be to buy lots of normal trousers in bulk and sell them to people who are one-eighth of a leg taller than the people the trousers were designed for.

2) To encourage people to wear skirts on top of their seven-eighths-length trousers, thus doubling the profits of my clothing company and making me a millionaire.

3) To start up a clothing company of some kind in order to facilitate resolutions one and two, and encourage gullible people to invest hugely in "Memory Clothes plc - the only clothing company endorsed by a World Memory Champion as far as is known", thus making me a millionaire before I even sell any trousers or skirts.

4) Consult someone like Wilson, the space aubergine for advice on how to encourage gullible people to invest in manifestly unprofitable schemes like the above, but present the request for help in such an exciting way that instead of me paying him for the consultation, he gives me lots of money as well as the advice, thus making me a millionaire before I even act on the advice received.

5) Set some lateral-thinking expert like Edward de Bono the challenge of re-ordering my resolution list in such a way that I don't have to do the resolutions in sort-of-reverse-order-except-for-the-first-two, because that would just be confusing. Also require him to pay me an entry fee sufficient to make me a millionaire, for the privilege. And also, while he's at it, to rewrite resolution number four so that it doesn't look like some kind of scathing Private-Eye-style satire of Wilson, the space aubergine's business dealings (about which I know nothing), because that wasn't my intention at all, but now when I come to look at it... well, I'm too lazy to change it, anyway.

6) Having become a millionaire, five times over, give the money away to someone else, picked at random from the world's population, because being a millionaire would be no fun at all. And besides, what would I resolve next year?

The 2000s

You know, this decade has been generally memory-themed for me, starting with my first competition (and simultaneously my first introduction to the basic principles of memory techniques) in 2000. I sort of feel like the 2010s should also involve some entirely new challenge for me. I should make an effort to enter as many new and unusual competitions next year as I possibly can, in the hope that one or more of them will click for me in the same way as memory has. That way, in December 2019, I can sit back and say 'Yep, now I'm the undisputed world champion snail-shell-rotator [or whatever my new hobby turns out to be], I can move on to the challenges of the 2020s without feeling at all like I've already achieved everything I'm going to be remembered for in this life...'

Rain is rubbish

I'm fed up of living in the part of the country that never gets the snow. I realise that I hate snow when I have to go out in it, but I don't really need to go out for the next few days, so I'd like to be able to look at it from the window. So yes, I'm going to have to move somewhere arctic. Or just anywhere else in Britain.

Barton in Fabis?

Hey, I've just noticed there's a village called 'Barton in Fabis' really quite close to here, over on the unfashionable side of the River Trent. That's probably what the street I live on is named after. And I always assumed it was just somebody called Barton. Maybe I'll go there and see what it's like, but I probably won't.

Happy That-Bit-Between-Christmas-And-The-New-Year!

I don't know why I never blog on Christmas Day, even if I'm at home in the evening, nor why I didn't blog last night either. Perhaps my latest new year resolution will be to actually blog something every night, like I always intend to. Anyway, yesterday I was helping out in the big Boots store in Nottingham, and today I've been devoting my time to doing absolutely nothing at all. And now I've got seven more entirely work-free days before I have to go back to the office in the far-distant future world of 2010.

I've got plans for this next week. I'm going to learn to speak both Japanese and Chinese, get back into the routine of memory training again and also clean up my flat and do all kinds of productive things. At least, those are the plans. We'll see what happens in reality.