On me!

The only thing I genuinely wanted to be when I was young was The Milkybar Kid. So this latest campaign of encouraging adults to audition for the part is quite disturbing to me in many ways. Perhaps it's still not too late for a change of career...

Who's cooler? Me or Daley Thompson?

It's a dead heat, according to the press release sent out today about the UK championship. I beg to differ, unless they're comparing me with Daley as he is nowadays, and if he's really let himself go since he retired from professional athletics. If I was him, I'd sue for libel.

Obscurity

Radio Nottingham are quite persistently asking me to talk to them, but apart from that, there hasn't been much media interest in me for quite a while now. Possibly my fifteen minutes have nearly run out, along with my run as World Memory Champion (because I'm most definitely not going to win in December, so my only hope for keeping the title is if the championship is postponed indefinitely).

I would really like to find something else to be famous for. Being a star of low-budget documentaries about one subject is easy, but being documentarized for two completely different and unrelated reasons takes a special kind of talent. I just need to stumble across something else that I turn out to be good at - it took me the first 23 years of my life to discover memory competitions, but surely there must be something else out there that I'm not completely incapable of doing. I just need to devote some time to going around and trying something new. I've never tried needlepoint tapestry. Maybe I can invent a new way of doing that and become the world champion?

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack

Rather than doing any memory training today, I decided what would be really cool would be to go for a very long bike ride, all the way to Derby and back. I'm motivated by the fact that I'm heavier than I've ever been, probably (I was really very fat back in 2002-ish, but I think I'm possibly even fatter now) and another of my friends has now lost well over ten stone after some dedicated dieting and exercising. I'm surrounded by strikingly slender ex-fatties!

I'm realistic about my prospects of losing ten stone plus, but the fact that I could do that and still be the average weight of an undersized greyhound is a bit worrying, and frankly, being two stone lighter would probably be good for me.

So off I pedalled. There is a network of cycle paths between here and Derby, but it's not very well signposted, so you really need to look at a map before you set off. I didn't, and predictably got completely lost very early on in the expedition. But by a pleasant coincidence, I found myself on Cleve Avenue, where Grandma and Granddad used to live when I was little, even though I had absolutely no idea that I was anywhere within five miles of the road! So I went up and down it a couple of times trying to work out which house they lived in (I couldn't remember the number, and although the house does feature on one of my memory journeys, none of the houses there now look even remotely like the one in my mind. They're all too small, for one thing. So that counts as memory training, albeit the completely unsuccessful kind, and I'll just phone Grandma and ask her to remind me.

Anyway, knowing where I was, I set out on my travels again, and before long ended up in a place that I at first thought was Long Eaton but turned out on closer inspection to be Stapleford. At that point I gave up on the idea of getting to Derby before midnight and decided just to try to find my way home, but luckily I immediately stumbled across those cycle paths I'd lost, and followed them through some delightfully scenic countryside back to Long Eaton (where they come to an abrupt end at the back of the big Asda, which I still call "the new Asda", although it's been there for decades and there's now a genuinely new and bigger Tesco looming over it), then went back home the normal way, along the un-scenic main roads.

So, lots of cycling, and then I had an unnecessarily huge dinner to completely counteract any weight benefits it might have had. I'll start dieting tomorrow. Actually, I feel like making this a new thing of mine - forget memory training, I'll get into competitive weight loss!

Package tour

I did promise a link to good cheap London accommodation, so here we go. I'm staying at Rosebery Hall, a very nice place I've stayed at before, although it does look like it's missing an R. Maybe it was just named after an illiterate. But anyway, £140 for five nights, including breakfast, can't be bad. That's the same as one night in the real hotel near to the UK Championship venue (and you might not be able to get that any more - I got an email this morning that made me giggle, describing this special offer and telling us that rooms will be held at this rate until July 30th).

Also, they're looking for arbiters to help out in London - please do come along if you're not doing anything on August 26th and 27th, it really is fun and we'd all be very grateful!

And also also, if you're booking your stay at an LSE hall of residence online, you get the following options from the 'Title' drop-down menu:

Mr
Mrs
Miss
Ms
Dr
Capt
Colonel
Conf
Maj
Mst
Prof
Rev
Sir

What's a Conf? And a Mst? And what, they don't cater to anyone below the rank of Captain or above the rank of Colonel? And where's 'Lord' or 'Dame' or 'His Eminence'?

And when they ask me how I got her, I'll say "I saved my money!"

In a comment to last night's blog, Boris reminded me of something I should have been telling everyone about ever since they announced the UK Memory Championship - book a room in a student hall of residence! I'm going to book mine this weekend, if I get round to it, and I'll post helpful links then if anyone's interested. Student accommodation is available to the public in the summer holidays, at much cheaper rates than real hotels, and I have many happy memories of staying in halls during the MSO. They usually offer a full English breakfast and everything, and some of them even have en-suite bathrooms nowadays (students are so pampered today, that's probably why they're all so stupid...)

Indeed, the first mental journey I ever created (and I still use it today, ten years later!) was the route from a hall of residence to Alexandra Palace, where the MSO 2000 was held. It's a pretty unprofessional kind of journey, with some locations right next to each other and some absolutely miles apart, but it's become so stylised and altered in my head over these ten years of constant use that it's now nice and evenly spaced and bears no resemblance to the actual places it's based on.

The trouble is, I can't remember which hall of residence it was. I know it was down the road and round the corner from a tube station, but I can't remember which tube station either. If I concentrate, I can picture the real building and roads (as opposed to the completely different-looking ones that appear in the mental journey) quite clearly in my head, but I can't identify where it was. I do remember, though, that there was an old Volkswagen camper van parked on the road with a sign in the window saying it was for sale for £300, and I really wanted it. I didn't know how to drive and I didn't have three hundred pounds (by 2000 I was earning just about enough money to afford a week's holiday in London, unlike previous years when I had to pay for it by not spending money on luxuries like food and rent for a couple of months, but I still didn't have much cash to spare) but I still seriously considered buying it.

Of course, now that I'm a wealthy international celebrity who actually has got £300 to spare, writing this has rekindled my desire for an old Volkswagen camper van. Next one I see, I'm having it. Even though I still don't know how to drive.

(Probably) all in the mind

The Mind Sports Olympiad still exists, and they've got a schedule up on the internet. And, once again, I'm going to be in London for a memory competition around that time. Maybe I'll drop by and play some games. Or maybe I won't, because it's expensive and the only people who still go to the MSO are the ones who really, really want to win everything and so take it very seriously, but on the other hand, it might be a good place to hide from the hordes of international press who will be pursuing me after the UK Memory Championship to ask me why I'm suddenly so rubbish.

Possibly I could go to the evening poker games after each day's memory competition has finished, just to make absolutely certain that my memory will fail me, or maybe I could just find games to play during the daytime after the memory is over - from the looks of it, I could play mastermind, abalone, azacru, creative thinking and then a full day of monopoly, plus a bit of evening poker. For only a hundred pounds or so, plus however much it costs to stay in London for a few extra days (I haven't booked a hotel yet for the memory - I'm certainly not staying in the horribly expensive official tournament hotel, I'll find somewhere cheap and nasty).

The only one of those that really appeals hugely is the creative thinking championship - I used to enjoy that, back in the olden days. In an event full of competitions with good and bad moves, or right and wrong answers, it was fantastic to have a completely subjective championship where the aim is to make Bill Hartston laugh. I even won the bronze medal one year, I can't remember which, but wait a minute, it's on the website... 2001. Wow, nine years ago. Anyway, I was extremely proud of that result, because there's a gang of people who always compete in it and who are more in tune with Bill Hartston's thought processes. So, I think I will go along to the MSO this year, I've talked myself into it. Creatively.

Besides, I'm only 31st in the all-time medals ranking, and I'd much rather be in the top twenty and appear on the first page.

Silence

Yes, sorry I haven't been blogging as assiduously as usual just lately, what with having a house-guest and all. But I'll tell you what, I'm going to do lots of memory training for the next couple of weeks, and I'll tell you all about it when I do!

The Road To Wigan Pier

I'm going to somewhere in the vicinity of Wigan tomorrow, to poke my nose into the goings-on at an actual shop, rather than just juggling numbers on spreadsheets. I don't think I've ever been anywhere vaguely near Wigan before, although with my memory being what it is, it's quite possible that I lived there for three or four years and just forgot about it. Still, they've got a football team called Athletic, which is probably the best football-suffix, implying that the team are really good at what they do. There's just something very American or Communist (or maybe both) about proclaiming that you're "United", and names like "Rovers" and "Wanderers" are just silly, because generally speaking they just stay on and around the one football pitch during the course of an average game. And the City Ground isn't even IN a forest!

It's like being married

My flat is full of unfamiliar things like deodorant and nail-clippers. I've never liked sharing my home with anyone or anything, even if it does make dinner for me when I come home from work. Still, it is extremely groovy to see my beloved brother again, it's been eight whole months, which is much longer than we've ever gone without seeing each other in the past. But I think we've got the excessive drinking and filming-selves-dressed-as-cartoon-characters that was a necessary part of the reunion out of our systems, so you needn't worry.

Of course, if only I'd remembered that a couple of people from work watch my Facebook page, I would have advised Joseph not to link that video to it, but it's too late now...

In the cold light of day

With hindsight, it might not have been such a great idea to post that film footage all over the internet last night, but it did seem like a really great idea at the time.

This is what is happening here tonight

If you were wondering

Attentive readers might have noticed that I've taken to only blogging every other day. This is because I keep finding myself without anything interesting to say, and then the following day thinking "Well, I can't go two whole days without blogging, I'd better say something!" I'm going to get out of this habit, one way or another. Anyway, tomorrow my brother's coming to stay, so I'll either have something to blog about or be too busy to blog, we'll just have to see.

Did you hear about the vegetarian cannibal?

He could only eat Swedes.

I think that's a completely groovy joke, because it's exclusively English - as far as I know, there's no equivalent in other languages, and you can't even tell it to Americans, because they think swedes are called 'rutabagas' and Swedes are called 'foreigners'. It's actually easy to tell swedes from Swedes, even if you're English, because swedes are nasty-tasting vegetables that nobody likes, while Swedes are awesome people who everyone likes, and who organise memory competitions!

So, please everybody come to the Swedish Memory Open on September 25th and 26th - see the bilingual website here for more details. I will... probably be there. I hope so, anyway, because I've not been able to go to Sweden for one reason or another the two times I've been invited there in the past, and I'd hate to miss this one too. And I'm sure it's going to be a whole lot of fun for everyone! Twenty non-Swedish competitors is the limit, apparently, first-come-first-served, so sign up fast! (Well, I'm not sure that there will be too many more than twenty non-Swedish people who want to join in, but you never know. It couldn't hurt to sign up fast anyway...)

I would wear my lucky Swedish socks, but they've got holes in. I wear through socks fast, because of my extremely long toes and funny-shaped ankles.

It's a real dilemma

Do I move my desk from the spare room into my bedroom? See, my brother's coming to stay for a while on Friday and I have a hare-brained scheme that I can employ him as a live-in slave-driver and make him force me to spend an hour or so every evening doing memory training. But if I have to go into his bedroom to do that, it probably wouldn't work, and it'd certainly smell funny. So I think the only alternative is to move the desk and turn my bedroom into a bedroom-cum-study like a poor student would live in. But moving the desk is tricky, because I put it together myself and skimped on nails and screws, so it's basically just a few pieces of wood balanced on top of each other, and I would almost certainly drop one of the pieces on my foot and fracture one or more of my toes. My toes are extraordinarily long, you see, and so they're basically everywhere, so if anything falls on the floor, anywhere in the world, it lands on my toes.

Of course, my brother, who's an artist, would probably also like to have a desk in his bedroom while he's staying here, but hey, he'll just have to put up with it. I mean, I'm giving him free room and board just because he lives in China and has to come back home to sort his visa and things out, how dare he demand desks from me too? The big ingrate. He can just use the kitchen table. Or, since I've only got one chair and I'm taking that into the bedroom too, on second thoughts he can just sit on the floor and draw. That'll teach him. Just as long as he doesn't drop his felt tip pens on my toes while I'm busy memorising in the next room.

Dreams

I woke up early this morning because I needed to inscribe two magic words on the floor of my living room before the sunlight reached them. Then I realised that that was a dream, so I went back to sleep. Or rather, I tried to go back to sleep, but I was too preoccupied with trying to remember exactly what these magic words were meant to achieve and what was going to happen if I didn't inscribe them. Sadly, I still have no idea.

Whitley Baywatch

It's the last othello regional of the season in Whitley Bay tomorrow, but sadly I can't go - it takes so long to get there and back that it's a hotel-on-Friday-night kind of affair, and I've got too much stuff to do here at home. Stuff like memory training and spare-room-tidying, which we all know aren't going to happen, but which I would feel guilty about neglecting if I went to an othello competition instead. Still, I hope everyone who does go, has fun!

Quels transports il doit exciter

Bastille Day is a particularly notable day for me (much more so than for those foreigners over the other side of the Channel, I'm sure), because it marks the anniversary of me starting my new job at Boots. Wow, two years. Am I really the kind of person who stays in a job for two years, now? That's rather disturbing, isn't it? It's the first time I've done that for a long time. It's certainly the first time I've had occasion to write about doing that in the five years I've been blogging, for one thing. Wow, five years. Am I really the kind of person who keeps a blog going for five years, now? Well, I will be next Wednesday, anyway. That's also rather disturbing, isn't it?

I need to find something new and temporary to do, quick. In another month it'll be ten years since I started taking part in memory competitions, and that'll be the most disturbing realisation of all.

Names

I don't blog about the news, or about politics, but if I did I would have something to say about the people who elected an MP called Mark Reckless, and then didn't expect him to get into the newspapers for getting drunk. Still, it reminds me of the reason why Boots the Chemists was successful despite sounding like a place where you buy shoes - apparently the arch rival of John Boot's original 'British and American Botanic Establishment' was Dr Coffin's Botanico-Medical Dispensary.

'Boots' is a silly name for a chemist's shop, but can you imagine saying "I'm just going to Coffins to pick up my prescription"? It just wouldn't have caught on, would it?

I love this advert, anyway. "J. Boot takes the opportunity of thanking his numerous friends and the public for their liberal support during the last five years, in which period he has successfully treated almost every kind of disease, and can confidently assert that the vegetable kingdom affords a remedy for all." Catchy slogan. But funnily enough, Boots didn't become a successful business until John's son Jesse started selling real medicine as well as vegetable remedies. I can't imagine why.

What's hot and not what's not

Here are a few things I currently think are really groovy:

The Antikythera Mechanism
X-Men Forever
Paul the psychic octopus
Real tennis
Timmy Time
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Laurel and Hardy
Air