Kaerimashita!

Yep, I'm back home with no problems or delays - even getting from the aeroplane at Heathrow to my front door took no more than three hours! Still, I'm extremely tired, so you're not going to get a travelogue tonight, I'm afraid. Just suffice it to say that my trip to Tokyo was by far the most fun I've ever had being filmed for a documentary, and I wish I could stay there for another month at least!

Yes, I know that would mean missing the world championship. I had that much fun. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow!

Ho hum

Well, since my flight's been delayed by three hours (so far) and I've got nothing better to do than hang around Heathrow all night, here's a blog for you.

I'm not short of good books to read, at least, having gone on a shopping spree this morning and bought anything in the Oxfam bookshop that looked like it might be interesting. And also one brand-new book that I couldn't resist - "Return to the Hundred Acre Wood" by David Benedictus, all new Winnie-the-Pooh adventures in the style of A A Milne. I picked it up, thinking 'sacrilege!', but opened it to a random page, found a conversation between Christopher Robin, Pooh and Rabbit that was perfectly, 100%, in character and very funny too, and now I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Hopefully I've still got enough reading matter to keep me going until I eventually end up in Tokyo. This flight is the only one that's been delayed, you know. Apparently the plane's broken down or they forgot to put the wings on or something like that. Still, I get a free meal voucher.

ベン・プリドモーは東京へ行ます

Or words to that effect, anyway. My grasp of Japanese isn't anywhere near sufficient to have a conversation or to read a road sign, but at least I can entertain people by making an attempt.

Rather than planning what sights I'm going to see (I understand Tokyo has a lot of really cool department stores, and that's what I always gravitate towards when I'm in a foreign city - I can see the historical landmarks on telly, thank you very much), I'm wondering whether I'll be able to watch Liverpool play Man Utd in my hotel room. The match starts at 10pm, Japanese time, on Sunday night, and we're doing what they describe as 'the experiment' at the university on the following day, so staying up late at night on top of the jetlag probably isn't a good idea, but I'd quite like to be able to watch a big game like that with Japanese commentators, if possible.

Ooh, I'm excited! Probably won't be blogging while I'm there (haven't decided yet whether to take my laptop - it does mean buying some kind of plug adaptor, and I'm not sure I can cope with all that hassle), so I'll see you all in a week!

PS Nyah, I'm going to Tokyo and you're not.

I demand a recount

The memory-championship rundown won by two votes to one, so I promise I will eventually get round to that. I can't tonight, though, because I need to talk about my alarm clock.

I've been going through alarm clocks at a rate of knots since I moved to this new flat a year or so ago. My trusty old alarm clock (which was bought for me as a joke present by my work colleagues after I was repeatedly late in to work because my previous alarm clock had broken) stopped working shortly after I moved in here - or at least it kept working in the sense that it told the time and the date and temperature and no end of other nifty things, but it stopped making any noise, and I find sound to be an important part of an alarm clock's function.

So I dug out my old clock radio, which sort of works, but has a loose connection so it sometimes makes noise and sometimes doesn't. Which isn't ideal when you want to be woken up every morning, not just every other morning on average. So then I bought a cheap analogue alarm clock from Wilko's, which worked for a while but then stopped, possibly as a result of being crammed into my rucksack so tightly that the front cover broke off and the hands bent. And then I bought another of the same kind of cheap alarm clock (only in a more stylish black, rather than blue-green), which has now also developed a tendency for the second hand to get stuck until you hit it.

So at the weekend, I was in the gadget shop in Nottingham and decided to buy a new alarm clock from the range they sell there. I eventually went for a groovy lighting-up clock that glows a different colour for each hour of the day. It's extremely cool, but unfortunately the beeping of the alarm itself is much too quiet to wake me up. I'm going to need to buy another alarm clock, or possibly just hook this one up to an amplifier of some kind.

So, who IS going to win the thing?

That 'who will win the world championship' post last night got me a surprising volume of comments and emails, considering it was such an insubstantial thing. So, would people like me to do a full run-down of all the top competitors, analysing how I think they'll perform in the WMC next month? I'm not going to do it tonight, obviously, since it's late and I've been up all night learning how to ask for a Godzilla T-shirt in Japanese, but maybe tomorrow I could go into sports commentator mode.

Or I could write a story about an innkeeper and a motorised fishing-net instead. Whichever you prefer.

Who will win the World Championship?

There's a poll on www.brainboard.eu, and at the moment I'm winning it, ahead of Johannes Mallow. Personally, though, I voted for Simon - I couldn't vote for myself, obviously, because that would jinx it and ensure that I finish last with minus twelve million championship points. But I suspect he's going to be the one to beat this year, based on the German championship. Still, I expect it's going to be a really close and exciting competition, and I just hope it doesn't turn into a complete disaster for me...

Flying away

I don't remember actually saying here on my blog what dates I'll be in Japan. I'm flying out on Friday evening, arriving on Saturday, and then flying home again the following Thursday. I've got the day off work on Friday, and I've got all sorts of excessive plans for the day, like getting a haircut, acquiring a guide to things to see and do in Tokyo, doing lots of memory training, learning to speak Japanese, and so on. If I was a better-organised person, I would have remembered to do some of these things before then, but I'm not, so I didn't. And it's too late now, unless I also manage to invent a time machine on Friday.

Jacob's Kriek

Sorry I didn't post anything yesterday - there was no reason, I just didn't. But you can take comfort in the fact that I'm posting something today, even though I've been drinking kriek all afternoon with my brother, who's almost called Jacob.

However, it's something of a pyrrhic victory for my blog readers, because all I'm going to write about tonight is my suspicion that Declan Donnelly is being played by a different actor lately - I've just seen him on an advert, not having watched any of their programmes for a few years, and he looks distinctly different. Older, for one thing. Perhaps they ought to stop trying to look young and cool. Of course, I'm not really one to talk, since they don't look as old as me yet, and I'm a year younger than them.

Not my birthday any more

Boo. But on the other hand, it's another 364 days until I have to be 34. 34 is a terrible age to be. It symbolises being in the middle third of my first hundred years of life, and thus being middle-aged. And I'm not fat enough to be middle aged yet.

Happy birthday!

So very many people have said that to me today, either face-to-face or electronically, that I really have no choice but to obey and be happy. Thank you, everyone! Special mention to my number one fan, Mike, for this:

And to Steve of the Fact of the day blog, who has made me today's fact, albeit with the assertion that I was born in 1967 rather than 1976.

And, for that matter, that I was born in Derby rather than Boston - my wikipedia page used to say I was born in Derby until Tim the Enchanter deleted all my birth details earlier this year because they were unverifiable. Perhaps I should post my birth certificate online, a la Barack Obama, but I can't really be bothered.

Toothpasteadverts

One of the many things in this world that irritate and infuriate me beyond belief is adverts for toothpaste or toothbrushes where they cut out the little pauses in the professional-sounding person's speech so that they can cram just a tiny little bit more dialogue into it. It just sounds weird.

I was going to write a long speech about the concept of qualifying for the world memory championships, but I found that I couldn't be bothered. Hey, it's my birthday tomorrow, I can do what I want. It's the law.

I... remember... everything!

There really is no need to nag or persecute me about memory training, because I can safely report that this weekend I did a full practice run of abstract images, 30-minute binary, hour numbers and hour cards. First time in a long while that I've managed to do what I used to think of as a full weekend's training.

I really had to force myself to do it, though, and the results I got still weren't up to world-championship-winning standard. In the hour cards, which I did late last night, I seemed to spend the first few packs not fully concentrating on what I was seeing, and being more interested in keeping track of how much time it was taking me, so my recall was pretty poor. I didn't click into proper memorising mode until about a quarter of the way through, and even then I had a lot of gaps. I'm hoping I can click back into real form before the competition - it's just a month away!

And I've got a trip to Japan in between now and then, but that's probably a good thing - I'm going to do an hour cards on the Friday before I leave to catch my plane, and take a lot of numbers along with me to memorise in my hotel in spare moments (I've often taken numbers with me to foreign climes before and never yet found a spare moment in amongst all the sightseeing, but I live in hope...)

Sign up, sign up

Registration for the World Memory Championship is closing tomorrow, so make sure you go to the website and register, otherwise they might not let you in. They probably will, but it's best to be on the safe side. The list of 'registered competitors is nearly a hundred people now, so even if you apply the usual rule of somewhere around 50% of them actually competing, we might just still beat the all-time record!

Come on you reds!

Bahrain could only manage to draw 0-0 with New Zealand in the first leg of their play-off today. So it all comes down to the game in Wellington on November 14th, with a place in the World Cup at stake. I might skive off the World Memory Championship to watch it - we'll probably have finished everything but the speed cards by the time they kick off, and I always mess that up at the WMC anyway.

Slave-driving

This weekend, I'm planning to do a huuuuuge amount of memory training, and also learn to speak and read fluent Japanese. And get my central heating fixed, and read some books and buy a new comb and cheese-grater (might make a good musical instrument, now I come to think of it). It's going to be a very busy weekend and I expect you people out there to give me no end of grief if it turns out that I don't do anything after all.

Someone needs to reinvent the Japanese alphabet

I'm a busy man, and it takes much too long to learn how to tell the difference between シ and ツ. Maybe I'll just be one of those tourists who go around shouting loudly in English instead.

Speaking of beards

I can't believe I didn't notice Aubrey was on telly yesterday, on a brand new BBC4 series, "It's Only A Theory". Luckily, it's available on BBCi, and if you hate and fear the internet, it's also on real TV again tonight at 10:30. Check it out, he's very convincing and also rather a lot more funny than the people on the show who are supposed to be making the jokes.

Also, you're very lucky I don't blog about politics, because I got the most infuriatingly hypocritical and dishonest 'newsletter' from my MP pushed through my letterbox today. Really, it annoys me so much that I'm inclined to send it back with a note threatening to put it in some painful part of his body if he's planning to send this kind of stuff to me constantly for the next seven months. Someone should do something about politicians. I'll write to my MP about it.

Has he a beard, Mr Godot?

There's no denying that my beard is more white than black these days, at the sides at least. I suppose I could disguise it by shaving the side bits and just having one of those annoying semi-beards that trendy people have, but I'm not going to do that. I've never understood people who grow beards but still shave certain parts of their face every morning. What's the point of having a beard if not to save you the hassle of shaving? It's not as if the silly little things look good. There's nothing more stylish and attractive than a full beard. Particularly on bald, chubby, short men. With big noses, and glasses. Really, I'm extremely handsome, if you come to think about it.

Do you think...?

... that I could learn Japanese in the course of the next couple of weeks? If I made a proper effort and didn't do anything else in the evenings? I think probably not, but it's probably worth giving it a go. I hate visiting another country and not being able to make some token attempt to speak the language.

Back from Blackwater

My presentation was quite fun, considering it was essentially written in the 45-minute period immediately before I had to go on stage. As it turned out, I didn't get to most of my carefully-prepared enlightenment on the subject of memory competitions, since the surprisingly large audience of Mensa members (I was on immediately after the discussion forum with the committee, and the only entertainment available at that time for those who didn't want to pay £20 for a trip out to see Concorde or £8 for a trip out to see Bath) bombarded me with questions after I'd recited the first thousand digits of pi almost flawlessly as a thrilling opener. Despite the fact that I forgot to bring my lucky hat, the whole thing seemed to be well-received (very few people walked out halfway through, although again this might be because there wasn't anything else to do and the seats were quite comfortable), although I don't think I really persuaded anyone to take up memory competitions. And since that was essentially my only purpose in doing this presentation, you might argue that the whole weekend was wasted, if you were really the pessimistic type. Luckily, I'm not.

The person solely responsible for my last-second preparation, my hat-forgetting and my general failure to do anything productive on Saturday morning is, of course, Wilkie Collins. The big-bearded, compelling-book-writing, Victorian scoundrel. I've been so completely wrapped up in The Woman In White this weekend that I've ignored everything else as much as possible. Still, it was well worth it, it's a fantastic piece of work and I can see why it was such a sensation back in 1860. Although I was hoping Walter would ditch Laura and just marry Marian. Still, having finished the book, I'll now refrain from buying any more cheap classics until after the WMC. That way I might actually get some training done.

Oh, and remember me mentioning that I ordered some books from Amazon that I thought had got lost in the post? I checked, and actually they were sent to my old address in Derby because I forgot to change it. The punchline to this should probably be that they were books on how to improve your memory, but of course I never read books like that. They were actually the awesomely-illustrated "Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready For Kindergarten" and a couple of its sensational sequels. It occurs to me that I have quite a wide range of tastes in literature.