Bonus drunken post about a giant spider

I'm at Crispy's house, after a barbecue and watching of Buck Rogers (1953 compilation of the 1930s series). Dialogue during setting up folding chairs in the garden:

Crispy: Here's the chairs, they're a bit cobwebby.
Me: Well, the spiders seem to like them if they've been sitting on them.
Crispy: But they're not sitting on them any more...
Me: That's true, maybe they AARGH! [as a spider roughly the size of a small cat crawled out from the folds and glared at me.]

I should go there more often

I went to Burton today to get a new bike, since that was as quick as walking to Halfords in Derby, and while I was waiting for it to be ready I had a wander around the shops. And found a really great haul of old cartoons on video in the charity shops and on the market - four of them, costing a total of £3.47!

They're from various video producers of the eighties, and all seem to be made up of basically whichever old cartoons they could lay their hands on when they wanted to make a bit of extra cash - the four tapes claim to be collections of Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and jointly Woody Woodpecker and Felix the Cat, but the first one, which I've just watched over dinner, has three Betty cartoons (Musical Mountaineers, Betty Boop and Grampy and Betty In Blunderland) from the 30s, the Porky Pig cartoon Notes To You from 1941, a Little Audrey cartoon, of all things, from 1950 (Tarts And Flowers), and a great Ub Iwerks toon from 1934, Jack Frost.

And having peeled off the sticker that the charity shop stuck on top of the list of cartoons on the Daffy Duck video to find a title I didn't recognise, it turns out that it's Reducing Creme, another Iwerks from 1934, this time starring Willie Whopper. It's also got Daffy The Commando. I love finds like this!

Good weather this Friday

What a lovely, sunny day! It was even quite warm if you were in the direct sunlight - too hot to go around in a leather jacket, if not quite hot enough to be entirely comfortable in a T-shirt. Which was a shame, because a T-shirt and jacket was all I had with me today. Well, there was probably something on the lower half of my body too, since nobody was running away screaming, but you know what I mean.

Went round to see my grandma today, and it occurred to me that I should write something about her on this blog, as I seem to have failed to do that ever since I started the thing, and she's really a great person. Although I haven't got the time or inclination right now for a big long post. Suffice to say she's just turned 86, is one of the world's great talkers and has a lot of life experience to talk about. And a really great mind - the good parts of my brain definitely owe a lot to her.

I've got a great job

My boss bought everyone in the department a Cadbury's creme egg! It's the little things that impress me, you see. I'd rather have a creme egg every now and then than a pay rise and more responsibility.

One thing that does bug me, though - our accounting system allocates a sequential number to each journal entry processed, and I really wanted to be the one to post batch number 300000, but I just missed it. Ah well, I'll aim for 333333 in however many months it will take to get up to that number...

In the world of memory, we've just got the dates confirmed for the German championship - July 14-15, in a place I've never heard of called Heilbronn. If memory serves, last year's championship was the first thing of note that I wrote about in this here blog, so maybe I can celebrate my first anniversary by winning it. Well, maybe I won't win it, since they don't do translations of the words and things, but I want to put in a good performance this time round - the last two years I've done very badly in Germany, and I'd hate it to become a tradition. And this is the major preparation for the world championship as a rule, although there might be a British championship this year in August if we're lucky. But the German championship is where I get to see how much the likes of Clemens and Gunther have improved since last year, and start to formulate strategies for how good I'll have to be to beat them.

They're both coming to Cambridge, of course, and they'll probably be in one of the regional German championships too, but those are too short and throwaway to really give a measure of the kind of form they're in. Besides, Cambridge is sure to be a complete disaster.

Rejoice and Celebrate!

It's a four-day weekend coming up! And I'm really, really looking forward to it. I feel like I could spend the whole of Easter in bed, to be honest.

So what I'm going to do, of course, is run around doing no end of things all weekend. Grandma's on Friday, Crispy and Sleepy's on Saturday, then I feel like shopping in London or Nottingham or somewhere exotic like that. I need to catch up with comics, and Forbidden Planet in Derby's always selling out of things if I skip a week like I did last weekend. Not that there were any really good comics out last week, they're all in this week's shipping list.

My printer's broken!

And the flaming thing's practically brand new, and I have a feeling it came with a guarantee, which I almost certainly threw away along with the packaging. It's just not taking paper into the works like it should, and I bet it's really easy to fix if you know anything about printers. Which I don't. And I need to print out some random numbers because I haven't got any left. Damn it. Maybe I'll sneakily print some out at work when nobody's looking.

In lighter news, James Jorasch has updated his memory website with various videos of me. Scroll down the list and watch the last one, "Ben Pridmore on memory systems", especially. That was meant to be a couple of minutes of me running through a pack of cards and describing the images I associate with them, and it turned into a half-hour interview, completely unplanned! I think I come across unusually well, by my standards. It's funny to watch myself, though - I'm constantly looking around the room, or twiddling my fingers, adjusting my hat, or some other nervous twitch.

The footage on the other video clip of me memorising a pack of cards is fraudulent, by the way. I'd already looked through the pack a couple of times during our earlier conversation, so I was already familiar with it. It actually looks like I could have been cleverly cheating - I slide each card out from the pack before naming it and turning it over, in a way that suggests I might be looking at the reflection in the shiny table. I wasn't, but that would be a really cool way for a stage magician to simulate memorising cards in this kind of interview.

Hmm

My mind's a blank. I was going to write about something specific, too. Well, I'll write about it tomorrow.

If you're going to give yourself food poisoning...

...at least have the sense to do it on a work day. I've been suffering from half a tin of tuna today. I assume it was the tuna, anyway. I eat half a tin and keep the other half in the fridge with the lid sort of balanced on top in order to keep out germs and things. It obviously didn't work so well with last night's portion. What I could do with is a tupperware container of some kind, but I've only got one and it's about the size of a house. And anyway, my brother borrowed it at Christmas and he's still got it.

So that kind of put me off the activities I had planned for today, like visiting my grandma, buying a new bike and memory training. The bike I'll try to arrange during the week - walking to work is not fun, and last week has caused my work shoes to pretty much completely disintegrate (admittedly they weren't in perfect condition to start with, the soles were already more holey than righteous, as Grandma likes to say). There are bike shops in Burton, although the one I tried to call today wasn't answering the phone to tell me when they're open. I wish these places had websites, don't they know I hate talking on the phone?

Grandma I'm going to visit and play bingo with on Friday, seeing as it's the Good kind. Memory training I've been letting slide a little during the past couple of weeks, for obvious reasons, but I need to get back into it now. Still a lot of sorting-out needed for the Cambridge competition, and I need to get back to the woman from the BBC about that programme, and to Phil Chambers with comments on his new abstract image samples so he can unveil them before the competition. And check that he's still going to come and be arbiter, because I'm still short of volunteers. Although I haven't yet asked some of the people who are likely to say yes, so it's just a matter of getting my act together and doing it.

I'll be happy when the whole thing's over and the real memory season gets started. I'm itching to get back into competitions.

It went well

The service was exactly the right kind of thing - non-religious and simple. His preference would have been for us not to bother at all, of course, and just get on with our lives, but this was the best compromise to keep everyone happy. So we had a small gathering - me and my brother, my mum and her partner, uncles Syd (eighty-something) and Cyril (seventy-something) and a couple of cousins (his other six brothers, aged between 66 and 85 and all with the dodgy legs and other ailments that run in the Pridmore family, couldn't make it, but they're all of course shocked to have lost their baby brother like this), plus a couple of good friends and a group of his workmates.

The minister, or whatever you call them when they're a humanist, was excellent, summarising my dad's life very nicely, 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' on the organ and a Don McLean song to finish. Then to the pub over the road for food and drink and a lot of reminiscing. And I got on just fine with my mum all day. Great to see the relatives, too, since I practically never do. He wasn't that close to his army of older brothers, a couple of whom had married and left home before he was old enough to notice they existed, but my latest vague resolution is to catch up with all of them and work out exactly how many first, second and third cousins I've got out there. Talking to Syd and Cyril today was like hanging out with two carbon copies of my dad - exactly the same sense of humour and fun.

My Personal Vision

It's getting round to time for appraisals at work. We've all got a form to fill in and guidelines to the company's Performance Appraisal System. Apparently this is considered a good thing: "Purpose of the appraisal is to achieve a balance between your performance in your current role against your career aspirations and development needs."

I don't have career aspirations and development needs. All I want out of a job is something that gives me money to finance the things I like to do with my spare time. If it involves juggling numbers, so much the better, and since my current job does that, I'm fine. Perfectly happy. I don't want to develop. I'm sick and tired of being given promotions and pay rises, because whenever I am, I end up in management rather than number-crunching, which is what I'm good at and what I enjoy doing.

And the horrible jargon and psychobabble this thing uses gets on my wick no end. Not only do we need to focus on 'development objectives', but they need to be SMART:
 Specific
 Measurable
 Achievable
 Realistic
 Time-bound

With bullet points, for crying out loud. And it gets worse. The form itself has a whole freaking page about Personal Development and Mastery. It seems that 'The purpose of this exercise is to help you identify what personal goals you want to achieve that enable you to deliver your Personal Vision, and to understand how these overlap with the Company Vision and your departments goals.'

Capital letters for Personal Vision and Company Vision, just to stress what big, important concepts these are. And no apostrophe in 'departments'. I've got this from my dad, I know, but people who can't use an apostrophe right irritate me. My boss's grammar and punctuation are just awful, and it makes it hard to respect her like I should (she's not responsible for this appraisal thing, I should make it clear - we pay someone in human resources ridiculous amounts of money to come up with rubbish like this).

And I'm sorry, but I just don't think in terms like that sentence does. Has the rest of the world just gone mad? Does everyone else go around thinking "What can I do to enable me to deliver my Personal Vision?" One of the questions on this form is '2. What do I do, as your manager, that gets in your way' (without a question mark, I notice). I'll tell you anyway, manager. You make me go through stupid appraisal processes like this rather than letting me get on with my work. For Pete's sake.

Sorry, enough ranting for the moment. It's the weekend! Granted, a weekend that's mainly going to be occupied by a funeral, but that's better than worrying about my DEVELOPMENT OBJECTIVES (including Functional Capabilities & Management Skills)...

Legal queries with Horace

Every week, Horace Fish, a man with various fraudulent legal credentials, answers your questions about the law.

Dear Horace

My neighbour recently broke into my house and stole my television set and antique sculpture of Cleopatra fighting Napoleon. I have also seen him shooting dolphins in his back garden, mowing the lawn and eating 'Birmingham confectionery'. Do I have any legal recourse against him?

Gavvvin Trelllllis

Gavvvin - due to a loophole in the law, a person is legally entitled to steal his next-door neighbour's television. And while the consumption of 'Birmingham confectionery' is of course illegal, the police are unlikely to do anything about it unless they've really got nothing better to do. Your best chance of getting your neighbour banged up is with the dolphins - although it is perfectly legal to shoot the things in your own garden, to do so outside the boundary of your home carries a minimum sixty-year prison sentence. I suggest that you go round to his house in the middle of the night and move the garden fence so that the dolphin pond lies on the other side of it.

Dear Horriss

My employer has recently given me the sack, claiming among other things that I 'treat sausages as if they were cuboid rather than cylindrical'. I don't even know what that would involve, and I fail to see how that could have any bearing on my job as a street sweeper. Do I have the right to take my boss to court and/or throw a brick through his window?

Gottfried Wheelbarrow

Gottfried - my name isn't spelt that way, you fat berk. What is wrong with you? Can't you read? What's the point me replying to your stupid letter if you can't even read? Get lost, and don't ever write to me again. In answer to your question, you do have the legal right to take court action, or smash up to three of your boss's windows, whichever would give you more satisfaction. I would recommend court proceedings, because although there is no chance of you being awarded any kind of compensation, your employer might be embarrassed into apologising for the comment about sausages.

It's at times like this that I consider getting Sky Sports

Admittedly that isn't a feeling I have very often - I've got more TV channels than anyone needs already, although I could always do with more cartoons. But there's a really good football match going on at the moment between Arsenal and Juventus, and I can't watch it without going out to the pub, and I can't be bothered to do that.

If I did splash out on Sky, I'd hardly watch the sports. A football match here and there, and maybe a bit of wrestling (I've become quite a WWE fan lately, thanks to Paul O'Brien's previews of every PPV. Paul is one of those people who can write about anything and make it compelling and entertaining. But reading those and then the WWE website to see what happens is as far as my fanhood goes at the moment. It might be good to actually watch a show some time and see what it's like.

And yay, Arsenal are through to the semis! And also yay, a court has thrown out Time Warner's attempts to claim that Smallville doesn't infringe Superboy's copyrights and therefore they don't have to pay Jerry Siegel's estate any money. I know I try to avoid just commenting on news stories here, but I'm very happy with both of those.

Alas, poor bike

A few months ago, the bit that holds the rear wheel in place went missing off my bike. I don't know if someone was trying to steal it but gave up halfway, or if it just fell to pieces the way my bikes generally do, but rather than doing anything about it I kept riding it around in faith that my weight on the saddle would hold the wheel where it should be. And it worked fine up till tonight, when the stress on the axle finally bent it to such an extent that the wheel won't turn round any more. At this point even I have to admit defeat and concede that the bike isn't rideable.

This is a great inconvenience, because it means walking to work from the train station, which means having to get the earlier train so as to arrive on time, which means getting up half an hour earlier. And I don't know when I'm going to have the time to get a new bike, either, what with the funeral on Saturday and everything. It's a real drag, all round, and not just in the literal sense of the only way to move my bike from A to B with a non-working wheel...

Thinking

I'm going about my everyday life, but I still find myself thinking about my dad all the time. Kind of makes it difficult to think of a subject for tonight's blog, so I'll just leave it at that.

Okay, I've been googling myself again

And yes, there are many more useful and productive things I should be doing with my Sunday afternoon. But I was deeply fascinated by this page.

Notice the 'Prime Numbers' section halfway down the page:

Prime numbers

3 – Number of plague-infected mice that a New Jersey biomedical research center says cannot be accounted for

32.13 – Number of seconds required by Ben Pridmore to memorize a shuffled sequence of 52 playing cards without error, a world record

14 – Number of new nuclear power stations China plans to build in the next 28 years

104 – Number of commercial nuclear power plants in United States, the last licensed in 1996

0 – Number of applications pending for new American nuclear plants

So... is there a reason why the writer felt that I fit in with the rest of these statistics? Am I the kind of person you naturally associate with plague-infected mice and nuclear power?

Sheffield Regional

I'm not sure why they still call the othello tournaments 'regionals'. They don't really represent any particular region, except in as much as they're all in different towns randomly scattered around the country. Anyway, I went to the Sheffield one today.

Missed the train I was intending to get because my bike had a flat tyre and I spent too long dithering over whether to go back upstairs, find my pump and fix it, or walk to the station. I walked in the end, but not quickly enough. I still got there before a couple of the other players, though, which was lucky because it gave us a moment to clear up a potentially awkward situation - Rob Stanton, the organiser, had been under the impression that I still live in Boston, and had told the owners of the building we were using to send an invoice to my old address.

The tournament took place in a strange little church-hall-style building called the Heeley Institute, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Sheffield. There were nine of us in all, when Aidan had managed to find the place halfway through the first round. I won my first couple of games against Rob and Aidan, which gave me great aspirations of winning the whole tournament and becoming a worldwide celebrity, but then lost three in a row against Geoff, Phil and Steve Rowe (whose surname wasn't meant to be a pun there), which rather squished those dreams. Phil had meanwhile been kicking every available ass and was winning in a very impressive kind of way.

We went for lunch after the third round, finding on the third attempt a pub that was both open and serving food. The people of Heeley obviously aren't keen on pub lunches. But it was a lovely day - summer's on the way! Apart from the occasional torrential downpour, of course, but they only lasted a few seconds before the sunshine took over again.

Anyway, back at the Institute, my impressive losing streak was enough to get me a bye in round six. Rob beat Phil, which put Phil level with Geoff on five wins, and after the final round they ended up sharing first place. Joel Blackmur (who, in a longstanding othello tradition, I avoided being drawn against) came third, and I survived an extremely complicated endgame to beat Roy 33-31 and end up joint 4th with Steve. So it could have been a lot worse.

If you gave it half a chance, what potato would not DANCE?

Latest thing that I like: Edward Monkton. Actually, it turns out to be one of those things that I discover and then find out that Jenny knows about already (see earlier posts on George Papavgeris and Lady Godiva (who, she informs me, is an ancestor of Boy Howdy, but it's just never come up in our conversations)). She sent me a card ages ago with the hair that wants to be a dragon on it. But my actual 'discovery' comes from the cafe/bookshop in the Eagle Centre, which has a range of brilliant cards in the window.

I'm particularly impressed by the way someone can make money by selling crude sketches of potatoes. There's hope for my artistic career yet!

Skiving

I didn't notice my alarm clock going off at all this morning, and woke up at 8:25, which is the exact moment I need to leave the house in order to catch my train. So rather than get the next one and arrive half an hour late, I took the day off. I'm contractually entitled to five days' bereavement leave after all, although my mum is doing all the work involved with funeral arrangements and things, so I honestly don't need to be off work. And sitting moping around the house is really not a good idea either.

Nonetheless, that's what I've been doing all day. I'm all moped out.

In the living years

My dad was one of those rare people who literally nobody had a bad word to say about. Except his immediate family, and that was only in an affectionate kind of way. But everyone really did like him, and with good reason. He never thought of himself, and spent his whole life helping other people out, just because that was the way he was.

He was a very recognisable kind of guy - short even by my standards (whenever he had to give his height, he always put 5'6", which he readily admitted was a rough guess, because he'd never measured himself. I'd say he was a good couple of inches less than that), always somewhat on the chubby side, bald on top from a very early age, with wild curly hair, big sideburns and a moustache. Which he'd had since he was twenty and never considered changing. His taste in clothing was similarly unchanging through the years - brown suede boots, brown trousers and a white long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up, open at the neck. Yes, even in the middle of winter, outside in a blizzard. He didn't feel the cold, but whenever the temperature got a few degrees above freezing he was horribly uncomfortable. And on those rare occasions when he had to wear a tie (he owned two or three of them, all square, knitted wool ones that might have looked more or less passable in the early 1970s) he always looked like he was on the point of collapse. During his teaching days, he had a photo taken every year (18 of them in all), and they're all exactly the same - the hair a little more sparse every time, turning from jet black to grey to pure white by the time he was fifty, but exactly the same pose, with toothy grin and twinkle in his eyes.

I think I've mentioned his chronic earliness on here before - he'd always arrive somewhere two hours before the time he'd agreed, he didn't like to stay up much past seven o'clock at night and was always up and about by three in the morning. He lived his life in fast-forward, so I suppose it's not all that surprising that he's died (heart disease) at the age of 59.

As a teacher, everyone agrees, he was something truly exceptional. He taught at Clinton Park primary school from 1971 till 1990, teaching and inspiring nine and ten-year-olds for generations. He would walk through town and have dozens of people of all ages say 'hello, Mr Pridmore!' One of his real passions in life was teaching people to spell and punctuate properly - NOBODY left his class without learning how to use an apostrophe. He always said he could teach anyone how to do it right in twenty minutes, and despaired of the way so few people made the effort to teach it. Once a week in the afternoon, he'd get his guitar out and sing to the class - he had a large and eclectic range of songs, from Ilkley Moor Baht 'at to Ellen Vannin to Football Crazy. He was always trying to learn the piano, but never got very far. He used to take me and my brother to the park in Horncastle and spin us around on the roundabout which (by accident or design, I'm not sure) also bounced up and down wildly, and sing "Sons of the sea, bobbing up and down like this"

He was a Sheffield Wednesday fan, having grown up just down the road from Hillsborough, but cricket was his sport of choice. Just a couple of years ago, he finally splashed out on Sky Sports, so he could watch all the Test Matches. It's nice to know that the last one he watched was an England win. He didn't play any sports actively, having the genetic Pridmore dodgy legs, although he was surprisingly agile in short bursts - he still played badminton well enough to teach it to his classes, and he'd occasionally play backstop in rounders games and amaze everyone with his ability to catch the wildest bowl and throw it with pinpoint accuracy. He played snooker in his youth, very well or so he always told me, but gave it up when his eyesight got too bad. He still played pool occasionally, but found it wasn't enough of a challenge.

Steam trains were a major passion of his life. I'll never quite understand what the appeal was, although his own father worked on the railways for his entire life, so it's obviously a lifelong thing. Every Father's Day we went to the steam railway museum at Butterley for a Sunday dinner on the train (booked eight months in advance at least, so we always got the best seats and were the first to be served). A meal and three rides up and down the little line pulled by a steam train - what more could anyone want, he asked without the slightest trace of irony. He was a keen birdwatcher too, used to run the Young Ornithologists Club at the school (I came along on one or two outings and found it horribly boring). He went to various night school classes over the years, learning sculpture, heraldry, calligraphy, all kinds of strange things, and became very gifted at all of them. When he put his mind to it (which wasn't very often, sadly), he could write little funny stories that had everyone in hysterics.

He was a really, really great cook. You hadn't lived until you'd had his rabbit stew and dumplings (seriously, nobody in the world could make suet dumplings like his), or steak and kidney pud, or Sunday roast, or spaghetti bolognese, or chocolate cake. He never ate sweets or desserts himself, but he made a great cake - everyone was always asking for the recipe, but nobody could get it to turn out quite like his. I think it was the ancient oven he cooked in. The secret's died with him, anyway. And everything in huge servings - he had an enormous appetite and assumed everyone else did too.

Above all, he was a decent man who got things done and never once in his life had a thought that was selfish or mean. He raised me and my brother practically singlehandedly without a complaint (and we were really horrible teenagers, I'll tell you), and I think we both turned out okay. I owe a huge amount to him, and it just won't be the same without him around. The world really is poorer for his loss.

Oh, and I can't post a blog entry tonight without recording that Jenny sent me a card and a milk chocolate Happy Duck Lolly to make me feel better. It did, a whole lot.

RIP George Pridmore

My dad's died. I went round to my brother's last night and we spent the evening getting drunk and reminiscing about him. In four or five hours of talk, we barely scratched the surface of all the good memories. I'll write more later, when I'm more in the mood.