World Twister Champion 2006

Title suggested by Vicky, although in fact I didn't win at Twister. I shouldn't really have been playing at all, with my knees being what they are, but you know what it's like at these parties. Crispy and Sleepy couldn't come at the last moment because Crisp's not well (possibly infected with lethal bacteria from her new job, so I think we should all send get-well-soon-type happy thoughts to her and hope she's okay), so I had to go to the scary almost-strangers' barbecue by myself. But it turned out to be fun after all. I'd write more about it, only I've had too much to drink considering I need to be practicing memorising cards tomorrow, and it's late, and I've just cycled home in the pouring rain so I'll probably get hypothermia if I don't go to bed rather than sitting around in my undies typing incoherently.

I've got sixpence, jolly jolly sixpence

Remember that thing I wanted to talk about but couldn't in case talking about it jinxed the whole thing? Well, now the official secrets act has been repealed and I can go ahead. I'm wealthy! I've just had £16,631.04 paid into my bank account, courtesy of my dad's pension scheme. Which certainly came as a surprise to me - my mum and brother have the same amount each too. Add that to the money in my bank account, and it comes to just over £20,000. Does that sound familiar? I got the letter telling me about it last Saturday, exactly a month after writing this about what I'd do if I had £20,000 or so.

So should I do it? Hand in my notice at work, take a year off, write those books, do those college courses, join that hypothetical gym? I'm inclining towards yes, I should. The universe quite clearly wants me to. I can't quite delude myself into thinking it's what my dad would have wanted me to do with the money (he really wouldn't have). I've given myself the weekend to think about it - I'd want to give two months' notice at work (rather than the one that I'm obliged to give) so as not to leave anyone in the lurch, and if I did it on Monday it would neatly round off my career at Nord Anglia the day before my birthday. I could be a wage slave until the age of 29 years and 364 days, and embark on a whole new phase of my life in my thirties. I won't be able to splash out on anything extravagant, but I can just about live for a year with those kind of expenses for twenty grand.

The only thing that worries me is whether I would be able to motivate myself to do cool things if I didn't have to get up in the morning every day. I'm thinking if I structure things around college courses and routines I'd be okay - from past experience I really do need something like that so that I can fit the fun things around it - if I don't have a day job, I don't do extracurricular things either and just spend my time lounging around doing nothing.

This kind of earth-shattering decision isn't the kind of thing I should be doing on the last weekend before the world memory championship. Crispy and Sleepy are coming round on Saturday night, so I can drunkenly discuss the pros and cons with them and see how much I can remember of the conversation the next morning. The plan is to do a 30-minute binary practice tomorrow morning, hour numbers after lunch, then we'll go round to Vicky's barbecue and have a good time, then on Sunday night when I've recovered a bit, do an hour cards. Hope I can stick to it.

Another thing that worries me - everyone is going to say "Yes, you should quit your job and become a gentleman of leisure! That sounds cool!", because it does sound cool. But I'm quite aware that it's not the right thing for me to do on any kind of long-term or intellectual level. On the other hand, though, my decision is pretty much a foregone conclusion. When have I ever chosen the option marked "leave things the way they are and do the sensible thing"?

And feeling guilty about spending it all on myself when the world is full of people suffering? I think I can get used to it. I've never claimed to be a saint. I squandered my redundancy money from Parkhouse on good causes, after all, and if I write a bestseller or become a professional snooker player, I can pay the money back to my conscience.

I don't break rules, I just bend them... a lot

I normally have a rule about not commenting on news items in this blog (mainly because that's what everyone else does on their blogs, and besides, who wants to hear my opinions about current events when they could read me rambling on about cartoon characters for pages? That reminds me, I never did get round to writing that promised essay about Sniffles, did I? And I'm also in the mood to try and get Bimbo, the unusually-named male dog cartoon character from the 30s, the public attention he's been deprived of for so long. But not tonight. I was going somewhere before I got into this parenthetical profusion of purple prose, wasn't I?), but I seriously hope this latest mess involving planes isn't going to stop people getting to the WMC next weekend. Last year the strike at Heathrow stopped some competitors from attending, and the timing of this thing is majorly annoying.

There's been a decided lack of publicity about the WMC this time round. Last year we got quite a bit of press coverage by playing up the England v Germany angle, but this time the people who run the event seem to have decided on a policy of doing nothing at all and hoping someone notices it. I also have no idea how many people are going to be there. Word has it that the German contingent will be smaller than last year, although it will include Clemens, Gunther, Boris, Alisa(?), the usual gang, so I'll have someone to make a contest of it. From Austria there's definitely Joachim and hopefully Astrid, I'm sure Andi won't be able to stay away despite what he says even if he doesn't properly compete, so I can't moan about a shortage of top-level competition.

And then there'll be a reasonably large British contingent. Me, Ed and at least three Jameses would break all recent records for sheer numbers, even if nobody else comes along. It seems we won't be getting a Brazilian team after all, Globo having decided to spend their money on a Brazilian championship next year instead, which is a shame. And there'll only be the one Norwegian, it seems. I have no idea about Malaysians, or Indians, or Jan (the one and only Dane who's ever competed in these things). There'll be Josh from the USA and Tansel from Australia and Pierre from France and HaiZhan from China who hasn't competed before but has been exchanging emails with me lately. It should be fun, anyway.

I'm more interested at the moment in researching Irish history. Talking with my assistant Patrick at work today I realised that I don't actually know anything about the country - it's only just next door, after all, and I know we have a proud history of going over there and subjugating and killing people, so I think I should know a bit more. I want to get a book out of the library or something - I'm suspicious of most websites.

Scheduled outage at 4:00PM PDT

According to the little toolbar thing on the top of this create-new-post thing. It's three minutes to ten here, and I have no idea what PDT is, so I'm hoping it's not six hours behind real time.

Anyway, I'm feeling a sense of achievement tonight, because I've replied to a bunch of emails (I'm kind of a recluse, but I still manage to get into no end of correspondence and if I let it build up for a couple of days it becomes quite a task to reply to everyone), done a load of memory practice (got 385 in speed numbers, which would have been 425 if I hadn't transposed two images - 468 is definitely possible on a good day, now I just have to decide whether to attempt it first time at the WMC, or go for something safer and then go for the big score on the second trial), watched Liverpool play football badly but still win (they're still playing but they've just gone 2-1 up with a minute or two left), and watched some Battle of the Planets and Betty Boop cartoons all in the four hours since getting home.

It's The Mind

I've finally got round to sending off my entry form for the Mind Sports Olympiad. Longtime fans will remember that I didn't go to last year's, for the first time since it started in 1997, and I did feel guilty about it. But this year I'm going for the classic MSO experience - staying in a student hall of residence like I used to in the early years when I didn't have any money, competing in lots of games that I don't even particularly like just so as to have something to do, late night poker, no TV for a week (got to dig out my little clock radio so I can have the pleasure of listening to slightly out-of-tune London radio stations all night), lots of unhealthy food, it'll be great.

I'm also almost certainly going to skip the last couple of days in order to go to the othello nationals in Crawley. Now that the WMC has been moved and I only have two major mind sports competitions clashing that weekend, it's only fair to go along to the othello after a week's MSOing. Especially since I'll have to do the treasurer's report at the AGM before the competition starts. Besides, there's still the outside possibility of qualifying for the British team at the Worlds in Japan in October, which I would really love to do. And although 'outside possibility' here means 'no chance whatsoever because I'm not nearly a good enough player even when I've been practicing rather than barely playing at all for months now', it's still enough to give me a gleam of hope in the eyes.

So come along to the Mind Sports Olympiad if you want to play me at azacru, stratego, pacru, acquire, othello, twixt, mental calculations, decamentathlon, entropy, abalone, boku and lots of poker, and to the British Othello Championship if you're British and want to play me at othello more than you can do at the MSO.

Incidentally, I still haven't written the memory tips that the Alzheimer's people asked me for. It should just be a matter of churning out a few bullet points of the usual waffle that everybody says in this kind of situation, but I want it to be actually profound and useful and meaningful. Which, as you might have noticed, isn't something I'm very good at.

(I do have something important and earth-shatteringly significant to write about, but I'm not going to just yet until it's all sorted out for fear of jinxing it. Updates shortly, hopefully. Now that's a cliffhanger worthy of Doctor Who, isn't it!)

War of the worlds

Vole-like aliens invaded Earth in the year 1937. They arrived en masse in about thirty-seven flying saucers equipped with death-ray devices and small gerbils and set about slaughtering humans with the intention of subjugating the human race and forcing them to design new card games for the vole-like aliens' entertainment.

However, since the people of Earth at that time were also rather vole-like, nobody believed that the aliens were in fact alien invaders at all, and just assumed it was some kind of practical joke organised by the new television service. Even when the aliens barged into Downing Street, cut off the Prime Minister's head with pinking shears and declared that Earth was now under their rule, nobody took them seriously and just laughed about it. The aliens got back into their spaceships and left, disappointed with the reception they'd had.

Having assumed that his horrible demise was a practical joke, Neville Chamberlain was none the worse for wear and carried on with his business. But the incident had made him consider the possibility of contact with extraterrestrial lifeforms, and one night at a party he wrote the snappily-titled "What is to be done should real aliens ever invade and assassinate the Prime Minister with pinking shears or some such device" essay, which was published (due to a misunderstanding) in the Dandy the following week.

The essay detailed the process by which aliens would be repelled, and hinged around three people who would be required to do the entirety of the fighting while the rest of the world's population hid in underground shelters. Although a good plan, it didn't consider the ravages of time, and somebody really should have updated it by the time the vole-like aliens returned in 1993. By now immediately recognisable as aliens, they were taken seriously, and everyone immediately dropped what they were doing and dived into the shelters. Global warming having caused them to be flooded in the meantime, of course, the entire world's population were drowned.

The three people, chosen at random from the phone book in 1937, were by a happy coincidence still alive, and after several days' fighting, came to an agreement with the vole-like aliens which satisfied everyone except Bertram Cox. The aliens departed happily and left the three surviving humans a small cat made of green electricity in return for Bertram's underpants and left kidney. Today, on the thirteenth anniversary of that epic and anticlimactic settlement, we celebrate the memory of Earth's three saviours, Bertram and the other two whose names I don't recall, and take the day off work in order to throw bricks at sheep in a ceremony instituted last year in Belgium.

Retail therapy

I went to Birmingham today, rather than practicing memorising things like I was supposed to. But I've got an excuse, sort of - my mother phoned me in the morning to blame me for pretty much everything she's ever done, which put me in a bad mood and feeling like I wanted to go out and take my mind off things. I much preferred it when she forgot I existed for years on end. Anyway, I'm not what you'd call a great shopper. I tend to cave in to high-pressure salespeople asking tough questions like "Can I help you?". If I don't say "Yes, please sell me everything in your shop," I feel guilty about wasting their time and cluttering up the store unnecessarily. But sometimes I can't help going into shops I have no intention of buying from or even any interest in the things they're selling, just because they're playing cool music. There was a clothes shop today blasting out "All These Things That I've Done" by the Killers at top volume, which is the kind of song you just have to sing along to if you're me. I wouldn't be seen dead in the kind of clothes they were selling (you know, the kind of normal clothes that everyone else wears, horrific things like that), but I think I did a pretty good job of feigning interest in the things for five minutes until the song finished and I could beat a hasty retreat.

I did do an hour cards practice this evening after getting home, so I'm not too worried about letting the memory stuff slide. Attempted 30 packs, possibly got as many as 27 right although I haven't checked yet and there are probably several mistakes. That would probably be enough to beat everyone at the WMC.

It's official, I'm fat and lazy

I started today with a couple of firm resolutions. Lots of memory training, and since I'd run out of sweets in the house, no going out and buying more. No training whatsoever and a metric buttload of sugar later, I'm feeling slightly guilty. It is, for those not keeping track, two weeks to the world championships. My standard of preparation is much better than last year's, but much worse than the year before's. I did do a full weekend's workout the weekend before last, and if I do a load tomorrow I'll still be happy with the day's work. I've rather unwisely accepted an invitation to a barbecue next Saturday night, so I'm not sure how much training I'll manage to fit in around that. Theoretically I could do lots and lots, but theoretically doesn't generally cut much ice with me.

I'm sounding like a stuck record here. I should be talking about something new and original. Hey, "Come On Eileen" is just coming on the radio. How long have I had it on? Not more than an hour or so, and that's the second time this song's come along. Same DJ too - it's Suggs on Saturday nights from six till ten. Perhaps he forgot. Or perhaps he just likes the song a lot. It is a good one.

I was thinking of telling an extremely tasteless joke about an advert on the radio, but I don't think I will. People expect certain standards from this blog.

My boomerang won't come back

The TV channel Boomerang is in its annoying "Scooby Summer" mode at the moment. This means that it quite literally shows nothing but Scooby Doo cartoons every single day from 6am to 9pm. I'm all in favour of a bit of Scooby every now and then (I even like Scrappy), but I can't imagine what makes them think people want to watch it constantly every single day. It's just plain silly. Hopefully they'll revert to normal again when it stops being summer.

There's also a free plastic boomerang with this week's Beano. I'd rather like to be able to throw a boomerang (in the sense of throwing the thing in such a way that it comes back, I mean), but I have a feeling that it would take a bit of practice, and practice of the kind that has to be done in wide open spaces. And I'm not self-confident enough to do that kind of thing somewhere where people can see me. So barring a trip to the Sahara desert or Antarctica, I suppose boomeranging is just not a skill I'm ever going to acquire. It's a darn shame, because imagine how cool it would be to be out in the park, nonchalently pick up a boomerang that someone's left lying around and throw it in a perfect curve. Then wander off while everyone goes ooh and aah and who was that handsome boomerangist?

Rail Rage Redux

My train this morning was sitting in the middle of nowhere for twenty minutes because of a cow on the line. I really have nothing to add to that.

Rail rage

Remember me saying yesterday that I was going to go into work early today? Well, that was the plan, but then when it came to getting out of bed in the morning I decided to snooze for another five minutes and woke up just in time to get up, get dressed and dash down to the station to catch the 8:38. Only to get there and find it had been cancelled due to a technical fault. So I was half an hour late, and had to stay late tonight to get things done.

I really hate working late. I don't get paid extra for it, even if I manage to get in on time in the morning, it's just out of professional committment or possibly just not wanting to get told off for missing deadlines.

Enough work-talk. I've done too much of that lately. I still haven't written that 150-word memory for the Alzheimer's people. Having decided to write about my dad and his clown costume from the first Red Nose Day (he got on the school bus with me and demanded that everyone give him money), I find that I'm really struggling to put it into words. It's just because it's going up on the internet, with my name on it, with people to read, so I want it to be just right. And I know that that description also applies to this blog and I don't have a problem with writing this, but you know... it's different, somehow.

Butterscotch Angel Delight

Isn't nearly as nice as I remember it being. Once again nostalgia can't stand up to harsh reality.

I was going to write about something slightly more lengthy and interesting (well, maybe not interesting - an essay about why I love the hugely underappreciated cartoon character Sniffles - but certainly lengthy), but I think I'll go to bed instead. I need to be in work early tomorrow because some fool's scheduled a three-hour meeting of minimal use or interest to me in the middle of the day and I've got lots of real work to do. These things are sent to try us. And when I moan about something like this, the audience have to ask me whether I've written those books yet. Keep me on my toes, please.

Just for you, Mike

Seeing as Mike Carroll, who if I had a fan club would be not only the president but also the person who does the fiddly jobs of printing and stapling the newsletter and sending it out to everyone, is always on at me to get some more photos taken of myself and shown to the world, here's me and my brother drunkenly but passionately singing at his party last month.

I'm still not going to get a camera - they're just too much hassle all round, and besides, I'm camera-shy. Except when it comes to VPS get-togethers, and those photos can stay restricted to VPS people, thank you very much. I don't think the world needs to see me in Lursa's dress.

Normal service

As I've mentioned before, I don't like posting on here while I've got my brother staying with me over the weekend. I don't know why exactly, since he reads this anyway, but that's just the way my mind works. Anyway, I haven't got anything too exciting to say, so I've probably spared you loyal readers a couple of days' worth of tedium by not forcing you to read me droning on about nothing in particular.

It's going to be all work and a strictly minimal amount of play for the next couple of weeks - not just work in the accountancy sense, although that's been a bit of a drag lately, but work on winning the WMC, which has luckily still been fun. But evenings and weekends of the next 14 days are hopefully going to be taken up by memorising cards and numbers, followed by a week's break before the competition. I'm definitely committed to winning it this year (and hopefully by a huge margin too, if I'm at my best and nobody else has got all that much better since last time).

As for the day job, I don't seem to have been firing on anything close to all cylinders for the last couple of weeks. There's been a load of stuff that I'm finding it impossible to get excited about, and I've just generally felt that I'd much rather be somewhere else. I think it's the time of year. Ever since 2002, my life has tended to start a new adventure of some kind in November, and it worries me that there's nothing on the horizon this time round. November 2002 was when I left my job at Adams, I started at Parkhouse in November 2003, in November 2004 I changed jobs and offices at Parkhouse and started working with a different set of people, and in November 2005 I started at Nord Anglia. But I am seriously thinking in terms of handing in my notice and wandering off into the wilderness again, and I need more people to tell me that that isn't a good idea at all, please. Because believe me, it isn't.

I've broken my TV aerial

I don't use the thing, because I've got cable, but it sits on my telly to look decorative. Or at least it did until I knocked it on the floor and broke it. I suppose I could sellotape it together, but it wouldn't look as cool. Or would it? Maybe it would look cooler, actually. Yes, I will sellotape it. Forget I said anything.

I'm mentally writing a novel at the moment. It's been floating around my head in various little threads for years, but now the thing's coalescing into plots and paragraphs of purple prose. I think I'm going to have to write it down and see if anyone will publish it. I know I said I was going to write that stupid memory book, but you try telling my brain that. Maybe I'll write both. And then publish them, together with "Jayce and Alex" as a three-pack. It'd be different, anyway. I don't want to say what this novel's about in case someone steals or derides the idea (I'm very sensitive). But I think it's going to be pretty good.

Something I missed

It's now a year and five days since I started this blog. Not counting the false start in October 2004. Hooray!

I wrote to all the memory people I was meaning to write to (except one who I just realised I forgot, darn it), and put in a good bit of practice tonight. Did a pack of cards in 27.20, a new personal best - it was the kind of recall that took the full five minutes of hard thought and finished with a bit of guesswork, but they all count. I seem to do my best times when I haven't tried speed cards for a week or so, so I should be good for the world championship if I stick with the plan of doing a final mega training session on the weekend before. With my brother coming round this weekend, I've only got two more after that. Ooh, nerves building up. I'll admit I had a slightly anxiety-based dream about doing abstract images at the WMC last night. But a bit of nerves is good for you.

Hi, fans

I have a huge pile of "fan mail" (by which I mean emails from people involved in memory competitions, who aren't actually fans of mine so much as rivals) to answer, and I was planning to go through it all tonight and get it out of my inbox. But in the end I decided to sit around doing nothing instead. I get like that sometimes. So if you're expecting an email from me, it'll be tomorrow, probably.

It's getting to be the silly season when everyone goes crazy about "memory sports". Well, the vast majority of the world's population still hasn't heard about it, but a few more people than usual realise that the World Memory Championship exists, and it maybe gets a mention in a couple of newspapers and things. This is the height of fame and fortune for us mnemonic types. I'm actually quite looking forward to it at the moment, and hoping I get the local paper tracking me down and interviewing me again. I'll get over it.

Also, I've blown a fuse, in the more literal than usual sense of the phrase. I need to get a new one and I have no idea where to get one from in Burton during my lunch break. But the current situation involves either having the kitchen plug sockets working, or the living room ones. And yes, I haven't got a real kitchen so the kitchen sockets are about six feet away from the living room ones, but it's still an inconvenience. Why can't this house have the kind of fuses I can deal with, that you put new wire in like my old place? I've never had to cope with these cylindrical things before.

Hanging out with the impaler

I dreamt last night that my best friend was a man called Ethan, known to his friends as Vlad. He was a really nice guy, and it was kind of disappointing to wake up and remember that he doesn't exist. The dream didn't see fit to narrate how he acquired the unusual nickname, so we can only speculate. As to why my subconscious mind came up with the name in the first place, I can only assume it's because one of my neopets (the one I adopted and didn't name myself) is called 0_Vladimir_0, Vlad for short. And the name Ethan must be because I was thinking about the Transformers comic storyline featuring a character called Ethan Zachary recently, although why anyone would want to be friends with the man who killed Optimus Prime, I can't imagine.

Meanwhile, in the waking world, I'm trying to think of a memory. Any memory from my life will do, as long as it can be expressed in 150 words (so I can see this is going to be a problem for me, I can't say good morning without launching into a rambling three-volume epic). It's for the Alzheimer's Society Million Memories campaign, which will be launching in a couple of months with interviews and top tips on how to keep your memory sharp from some guy called Ben Pridmore. What, couldn't they find any real celebrities to do this kind of thing?

Anyway, my mind's a blank. So far they've got "Lynda Bellingham's special family Christmases; AA Gill's unforgettable trip to Paris; Richard Briers and his first home on a struggling actor's wage in 1960s; and Jo Brand's first and dangerous driving lesson", so I need something along those lines. But now I can't think of anything that's ever happened to me prior to sitting down and typing this latest paragraph.

Roundheads and Cavaliers

Since I haven't talked about comics for a while, I thought it would be fun to express my opinions of "Civil War", the epic storyline consuming Marvel comics at the moment. For the benefit of readers who aren't into American superhero comics, the two main publishers (Marvel and DC) have taken to doing this kind of mega-crossover to excess in the last couple of years. It has the effect of temporarily boosting sales when an individual issue of any superhero comic is part of a wider crossover, so the logic is that if they do it all the time, sales will go on getting higher forever. Last time they went down this road, the bubble burst in spectacular fashion and Marvel went bankrupt - the problem is that what people buy comics for in the long term is the characters and their ongoing storylines, and when they're being constantly derailed by a story being part 274 of an epic that expects you to pay hundreds of dollars to read the whole thing, it gets old pretty fast. On the other hand, Marvel nowadays have lots of money because their movies have been so successful, so that's not such a big deal now. And, more importantly, Civil War is actually really good. Unlike "House of M" last year, which was diabolical.

The idea is that a major tragedy caused by second-string superheroes the New Warriors, which kills hundreds of children in small-town America, sparks a huge public reaction and finally persuades the government to put through a law forcing people with superpowers to register with the authorities, get proper training and work under government supervision. Which is actually quite sensible, but it goes against the superhero tradition of anyone just being able to put on a mask and go out and fight crime. So all the world's superheroes pick a side and end up fighting each other. It's an interesting idea that hasn't been done before on this kind of scale. The individual heroes' storylines have mostly been well done, especially She-Hulk (which gives the New Warriors the kind of serious treatment they've been lacking for years now) and Thunderbolts (which is always great and seamlessly incorporates this storyline into its many ongoing plots). The only ones I haven't bought after reading them in the shops are Wolverine (which has atrocious art) and X-Factor (which gives a token acknowledgement to the Civil War background and carries on with its own impenetrable plots).

We automatically sympathise with the rebel anti-registration superheroes, but they're making an effort to give coverage to the other side too - Spider-Man, at least for the moment, is firmly pro-registration, even revealing his secret identity to the world, and in the latest Civil War issue Captain America and his rebels are decidedly out of line, starting a big fight when Iron Man and his join-the-government-team gang just want to talk. I'm enjoying the whole thing, and looking forward to seeing where it goes (although you just know that it'll end with the whole thing being swept under the carpet and the status quo restored, like they always do. Maybe with Spider-Man's wife written out somehow because the idiot in charge of Marvel doesn't like her).

DC are also doing an epic storyline in a rather different way at the moment - instead of crossing over into their regular comics, they're doing an additional weekly series called '52', on account of it runs for 52 weeks. I don't normally read DC, but I'm getting this because I think weekly comics should be encouraged - I hate waiting a month or more for the next issue. The gimmick here is that it's in real time - each issue covers a week in the life of the DC universe, while all their other comics have jumped ahead a year in the lives of their heroes. So in '52', we get to see a world where Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are all missing, without it getting in the way of the other comics. We're eleven weeks into it now, and it's been very entertaining. Although the latest issue is focusing on the least compelling of the various interconnecting storylines, so it isn't as good.

If you want to get into the world of superhero comics, either of these is a good place to start. Try "Civil War" especially - see if your comic shop can get you all the comics so far, it's worth giving it a try.

My new favourite golfer is Ben Bunny

Isn't that a brilliant name? Although I mainly answer to 'Zoomy' nowadays, I still like to be called Benjamin Bunny as a term of endearment, and I can't imagine how cool it must be to be really called that. Actually, it's probably not all that cool at all, and he's probably tired of all the jokes by now. He didn't make the cut (by a long way), so it's obviously better in golf to be a Tiger than a rabbit.

Anyway, I don't suck even slightly today. I've done a half-hour binary, hour numbers and spoken numbers practice run, bought all the little household bits and bobs I've run out of in the past week or seven, ironed a shirt and pair of work trousers, done at least one other significant thing that I was going to mention but have forgotten, and made a half-hearted stab at cleaning my kitchen sink. I'm great. Now I'm going to play an othello tournament on Kurnik, and see if I can win a game for a change.