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Why doesn't new Blogger remember my login details, even when I tell it to? I think I'm much too busy and important to be expected to type my username and password in every night. I've a good mind to refuse to write anything tonight, in protest.

Actually, I've a good mind not to write anything because I'm trying to play in an othello tournament on Kurnik, watch Match of the Day and type this, all at the same time, AND when I'm finished with that and finally go to bed, it's British Summer Time, so I have to lose another hour to the government. Sometimes there literally aren't enough hours in the day.

Judge For A Day

I've just devoted part of my evening to reading the judgement in this legal case, which Paul O'Brien linked to. It's fascinating on multiple levels for me - I find the basic facts of the case hilarious (a work of modern art was supposed to be being stored by the defendants, but in fact they seemingly mistook it for rubbish created by building work, and threw it away), as a businessman (it's a side of me I do my best to conceal and suppress, but it's still in there) I'm horrified that the company didn't make sure to include their terms and conditions in correspondence with their clients (you ALWAYS do that, in case something like this does happen!), and generally speaking, I'm always intrigued and enthralled by the obscure workings of the legal process. I had to do an exam in business and company law for my accountancy qualifications, and even though it involved a lot of writing rather than number-crunching, and a lot of questions where there isn't a single right answer (something I hate more than anything else in the universe, except kiwi fruit), I enjoyed it a lot.

In fact, I rather think I'd like to be a judge, or as a second choice a lawyer. I appreciate that a lot of it would be boring and routine, and another lot of it would involve extremely unpleasant delving into the motives and reasoning of unpleasant people, but I think it would be worth it for the occasions when you get to hear two opposing art experts arguing as to the value of Hole and Vessel II. Plus you get all the fun of pedantically observing the rule of law and/or interpreting it in ways that nobody, least of all the people who wrote the laws in the first place, has ever considered before. And then you get the fact that everyone looks up to you and thinks you're clever, which is always a bonus in any job. I'd go and look up how to be a judge now, but it's late, and you probably had to go to public school anyway.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to work out how to get better at hour cards. I did a practice today, attempting 30 packs and getting 27 right, exactly like at the WMC last year. But I have great difficulty getting beyond that level, and it's frustrating. I hate plateaus. Or is it plateaux? I don't like the things, anyway. If I attempt more packs, I get fewer of them correct, and it's been like that for a couple of years now. With everything else, I'm still gradually improving my best results (very, very slowly), but here I'm stuck.

Miscellany

I've bid on a tape of The Tale of the Bunny Picnic on eBay, even though it's a fiver, which is a ludicrous price to ask for something like that, because I was gripped by a sudden urge to hear the big song at the end again. I've been sort of humming it to myself for the last twenty years or so, and today I looked up the words and had trouble fitting them with the tune as I remember it, so now I need to hear it again to make sure I know what it goes like. And it seems it's the only piece of film in the world that isn't on YouTube.

Boston Utd beat Mansfield Town last weekend to drag themselves out of the relegation zone. It made me wonder why I never go to Mansfield, when it's only down the road. Still, there's an othello regional there this year, so I'll have a good opportunity to find out what's so bad about the place.

There's a new strip in the Dandy called Space Raoul, by Jamie Smart who did My Own Genie, and it's brilliant.

The interview this morning was surprisingly fun. It was very apropos-of-nothing, because they didn't bother with the general talk about forgetfulness that they were sort of planning beforehand, and just dropped a chat with me into the middle of the breakfast show. And it was a completely pointless kind of chat, too - I made them laugh by recounting the pi record story and reciting a hundred or so digits just to prove I could do it, and only spent a few seconds on the remembering names bit that I was expecting to do. I'll have to see if I can get some more media exposure like that.

I'm not sure whether to watch "The Yellow House" with John Simm as van Gogh, or just switch off the television set and go out and do something less boring instead. I will confess that I just don't get van Gogh's art. I don't honestly think it's all that good. I do like John Simm, but somehow I feel like my opinion of the work of the historical character he's playing is more important for my enjoyment of an ITV drama.

I'm a writer, you know

I've actually been properly working on the book today. I've set myself a deadline - I'm going to have it done in a nice, tidy, complete draft form to show people (whether they want me to or not) at the Cambridge championship on May 6th. Then I'm going to get a proper job again and be respectable, in return for which my grandma will refrain from hitting me over the head with her walking stick.

As well as the book, there's plenty of preparation work still to be done for Cambridge, so I'm going to be kept busy. But this is a good thing. There's no place in this world of memory experts for loafers.

The never-ending media circus

I've got an interview on Radio Lancashire on Thursday morning, in case I have any Lancastrian bloglings who might want to tune in to the breakfast show. I don't know when exactly, it was going to be 7:55 tomorrow, but they've postponed the bit about forgetting names and anniversaries by a day. I'd be interested to know what fascinating subject has bumped me.

Of course, they're under the impression that I might have some words of wisdom to impart on the subject of remembering names. Anyone who knows me knows otherwise, but I didn't have time to point this out - having asked the Alzheimer's Society people for my contact details (a new way to find me that I haven't encountered before), the conversation went "You'll do it? Great, I'll call you five minutes before we go on air. Bye." Still, it's not going to be an in-depth searing exposé, judging by the five-minutes-before-the-news timeslot. It'll go:

Tony Livesey: So, Ben Pride-more, you're the world's number one memory man, do you have any advice on how we can remember those important wedding anniversaries?

Me: Gor, I dunno.

Tony Livesey: Great! And now it's Hercule Poirot with the news.

I'm actually annoyed with my memory today. I woke up singing a song I'd been dreaming about (it was a strange alternative title sequence to Tiny Toon Adventures), but at some point in the morning I totally forgot the tune, although I can still remember the words. It's frustrating - I think it was an original tune, at least that's the impression I had this morning when I could remember it, but now it's disappeared from my brain the sceptical part is saying "oh, it will just have been one of those Japanese songs you were listening to yesterday, you can't compose music." This is the second time I can remember writing about something like this happening in my blog. Next time I dream a song, I'll grab a tape recorder when I wake up and sing into it. I don't own a tape recorder, so there'll be a certain amount of running down the street in my pyjamas and then hanging around outside... a shop that sells tape recorders, which come to think of it probably don't exist any more. It's all MP3s and DVDs these days. Modern life is rubbish.

Wait a minute. I do own a tape recorder. It's sitting there on top of my telly in plain sight. I haven't used it since I was practising reciting pi in 2005, but for pete's sake. What's wrong with my memory today?

Blame it on the weatherman

It's cold and intermittently haily around here today, and I've achieved very little in the way of work. I've been contemplating getting a real job again and giving up on this life of freedom sooner rather than later, but then I've also been contemplating joining a gym and not being so fat, and I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen. Still, if I don't improve my work rate, I'll feel like I'm wasting my life.

I have been having some fun wasting my life today, though - I've been watching Japanese things on YouTube (as an alternative to working on the textbook because I've got to a hard bit), and this is the kind of thing we should have been entering in the Eurovision Song Contest. It's such a catchy tune that you're dancing and singing along to it as soon as it starts, and it doesn't matter at all if you don't understand the words. I certainly don't, so I apologise if you do and it contains explicit sexual references or a savage denunciation of western society - I'm assuming based on the wonderful cartoon that accompanies it that it doesn't, but you never know.

The beat of the drum goes round and around

Yes, I'm writing about TV two nights in a row. Sorry. But tonight on BBC4 it's "Tube Night", four solid hours of programmes about the London Underground. The theme nights these people come up with never cease to amaze me. It's just started with a 1958 film about the night shift who work on the Tube after it's shut down, and a bit later on there's episode 1 of the Doctor Who story "The Web of Fear", which I've never seen (the BBC saw fit to destroy all the other episodes, so watching it is likely to be a little unsatisfying, but never mind).

I think that when "Moonwalking With Einstein" is a big hit, there needs to be a Memory Night spectacular to tie in with it. Or possibly a whole Memory Week - we need documentaries about famous world championships and champions, repeats of Dominic O'Brien on Friends Like These and Ant and Dec, Andi Bell when he was on Transworld Sport that time, me on The Weakest Link... come to think of it, there's more than enough footage there to do a really great theme night, without even having to dip into foreign TV shows! I'd still like to do a US-championship-style thing in Britain, maybe that can be the centrepiece of the week's themed entertainment?

Day of rockening

Well, we're not going to win the Eurovision Song Contest again this year. After Lordi's win last year, you just know gimmicky costumes are going to feature in every performance this time round, so the great British public have selected "Flying the Flag" by Scooch, who dress up as flight attendants and can't sing. Admittedly all of the songs to choose from this year were terrible, but this one was particularly so. Terry Wogan and Fearne Cotton also made a mess of announcing the winner (they tried to do a gag where they each said a different name, but of course Terry bellows so loudly that nobody could hear Fearne saying anything), and it all ended in confusion. But still, John Barrowman was on it so the experience wasn't all bad. And yes, I could have spent the evening doing something other than watching this rubbish, but Eurovision just appeals to me. If I confess that another of my unfulfilled dreams is to win the Eurovision Song Contest, would you just laugh at me?

I also went to Nottingham today, and I must say the newly-unveiled market square looks fantastic! I've got so used to the whole area being boarded off and hidden away while noises of construction emerged every now and then, I'd forgotten it wasn't meant to look like that. There are squirting fountains and everything. The layout is brilliantly designed and original, and I think it's fantastic. When I'm a zillionaire I'll get the same person to design my back garden.

What I need is some kind of telepathic typewriter

I seem to have a great talent for writing, but only when it comes to composing bits of the book/website/exciting superhero comic in my head at any time when I'm not sitting at my computer and typing. When it actually comes to writing it down, it doesn't work anywhere near as well. I should make some kind of resolution to sit down and transcribe what I'm thinking about as soon as I think of it, because I have a habit of sitting down and mentally composing huge long essays without bothering to write anything. I sometimes suspect I'm not a natural writer. Natural writers are the ones who write.

Not pretending any more

This is the real post for tonight, seeing as the one this afternoon was just pretend. But I haven't really got anything to say, seeing as I spent most of the day either waiting for a plumber or waiting for a TV crew. And I've already pretended to blog about the filming, and the plumber adventure really isn't exciting enough to merit a blog post to itself.

Tomorrow, though, I'm sure I'll manage to do something worth writing about.

Pretending to do my blog

I've got the TV people here, and the guy thinks it would be good to start with them pretending to interrupt me typing my blog. So while they wait outside, I'm sitting here pretending to type. Well, not pretending as such. I'm actually typing. I'm honest, you see, unlike television producers and their cinematic fakery. I suppose I'm going to pretend to say hello to them as if I'm meeting them for the first time when they come in, but that's the limit to the deception I'm prepared to perpetrate here. The whole thing is going to be a triumph of cinematic verity. Although I might not post this, which would make it a fake/pretend blog post of some kind, because the camera's pointing at me now and it's making me all nervous and I keep spelling things wrong, which just makes me look bad. Also, this whole thing is kind of incoherent, and when the guy came in I said "hello, I'm pretending to write my blog", which I thought would be funny at the time but actually came out sounding really stupid. Why did I agree to do this again? I should probably stop with the stream of consciousness stuff before I end up typing something really embarrassing.

The above paragraph is a shining example of why I don't write my blog when there's someone else in the house. Still, if this thing does get made and shown on Current TV, and you see me typing on my laptop, that's what I was typing. The inside story, brought to you by Zoomy.

Blue CHEATer, more like

I watched Blue Peter today, because I'd heard they were going to apologise for the slight mix-up in a competition last year when they awarded the prize to a passing child in the studio rather than anyone who'd phoned in. It turns out that the show is exactly the same as it was when I used to watch it regularly however many years ago that was, which is rather comforting. Well, except for all the modern technology, and come to think of it they didn't make anything today, which is a bit disappointing.

They did have the results of another competition, to design a new Bash Street Kid, and I couldn't help notice that one of the winners was a girl with a split personality called Rose and Thorn - you know, like the old DC comics character with a split personality, Rose and Thorn. Frankly this doesn't restore my confidence in the fairness of Blue Peter competitions. But then, I'm just jealous because I always wanted a Blue Peter badge and I never got one. I never entered a competition or wrote in to them, but I wanted a badge anyway. They could have just sent me one to be nice.

I've got the Current TV people coming to film me tomorrow. I watched a bit of Current TV yesterday to see what it was like, having read about it. I'm not terribly impressed. But still, you all have to tune into it now in the hope of catching a five-minute chat with me.

I'm currently wondering whether to risk destroying my laptop in order to listen to an old CD. It's a cheap one that I haven't listened to for years, vaguely remembering that it was broken, but I took it out and tried to play it tonight and it turns out it still sort of works - it plays okay but makes rattling, grinding noises and periodically stops, freezing up my computer in the process. But I can't remember what one of the tracks goes like, so I won't be able to sleep tonight unless I play it. I'll risk it, after I post this.

St James Infirmary Blues

Check out this fantastic post on Dennis Hyer's blog! He's pieced together the sensational backgrounds from the Betty Boop cartoon "Snow White", and that's quite a feat since Koko is dancing in front of them in the cartoon itself (also check out Dennis's previous post for a clip of the song from the toon - it's an unmissable Cab Calloway performance).

I've probably said it before, and I'll certainly say it again, but in the early 1930s (if not in the whole of cartoon history) the best cartoons in the world, by a long, long margin, were the ones produced by the Max Fleischer studio. They are insane, surreal, clever and absoluely hilarious, and it's really quite criminal that they're not better known these days than they are. "Snow White" is a fine example of all the best points - like a lot of these cartoons it starts off with a story, a fairly straight telling of the fairy tale (years before Disney's, I would remind you), but then lurches into the song and dance routine, and finishes with the Queen turning into a monster and chasing our heroes, who defeat it in short order (Bimbo pulls on its tongue and turns it inside-out) and then dance in a circle to celebrate. The seven dwarfs have vanished by this point, forgotten in the way that the setup plots in Betty Boop cartoons usually are.

There are so many great moments in Snow White - I just love Betty dressed in her cold-weather outfit (her usual skimpy dress, plus a tiny woolly hat perched on top of her head), the animation is fluid, detailed and looks wonderful, and the musical number (one of three Cab Calloway Betty cartoons, and they're all timeless classics) accompanied by those amazing backdrops is maybe the most visually arresting sequence the Fleischers ever did.

It's often said that if not for the Hays code, which came into effect in 1934 and severely limited what you could put on screen, Betty Boop and Max Fleischer would have gone on to be as big as Walt Disney and his gang. They certainly deserved to. But Betty (being basically a personification of sex) had to be drastically toned down under the new rules, and people forgot how great she had once been, watching her awful late-thirties cartoons where she dresses in modest outfits and points at series of weak visual puns. It's a crying shame, it really is.

Bimbo and Koko are the ones I feel sorry for - at least people still remember Betty Boop today, thanks to the revival of her merchandise in the last few decades. Her sidekicks, scrapped in the mid-thirties because they weren't allowed to have characters openly lust after the heroine any more, have disappeared into cartoon limbo, the poor things.

Ooh, I could crush a grape!

I'm really annoyed with myself. Memorising binary digits this morning, everything was going fine until well into the recall, when I realised I'd used a wrong journey by mistake, and hadn't even noticed. My journeys are in a fixed sequence (a completely arbitrary one based on the order I wrote them down on a piece of paper a couple of years ago, but a fixed sequence nevertheless) and I always use them in the same order. But today I realised I'd skipped to an entirely wrong one (the Queensgate centre in Peterborough) somehow, and then gone back to the normal sequence after it.

Very strange. But it doesn't matter, of course, as long as I remember where in the sequence I put this rogue journey (I used six-and-a-bit journeys in total). And that wouldn't be a problem, because I was doing that thing where I link the last image in each journey with the first of the next. It's a sort of double-check failsafe thing. So I concluded that I'd done Queensgate after Meadowhall, and wrote it all down. Something still didn't feel right, but I knew it had to be that way round. When I came to check my answers, it turned out I'd got the sequence wrong - I'd blanked on the last image of the Burton journey, and that same image was one of the final group of images in Meadowhall too, so I'd got them mixed up. I actually did Burton-Queensgate-Meadowhall. So I'd written two whole journeys - 52 rows of 1s and 0s, 1560 digits - in the wrong places.

I hope that makes some kind of sense. I have great difficulty describing the inner workings of my brain. The simplified version is that I made a really major fundamental mistake that I didn't even think it was possible for me to make. The most irritating part is that my recall was excellent - even without those two journeys I ended up with a score of 2830. With those extra rows in the right places, I would have scored a bit over 4000. I can take comfort in the fact that it was caused by an unlikely combination of circumstances - the wrong journey (which I've never done before) and the annoying duplication of one image in just the wrong places (which is statistically unlikely) - so I'm not likely to do the same thing again at a competition. But it's still infuriating!

The recurring image, incidentally, was Skeeter from Muppet Babies. I think this is some kind of karmic retribution for not going to see Howie Mandel in Las Vegas.

Still, I shouldn't complain. I also got 79 in abstract images, which is a timely reminder that I really need to work on that some more, and a more than acceptable 1920 in hour numbers. And got it all done with plenty of time to spare for sitting around watching TV! It's great having no social or professional life.

Willy!

The champion of Crufts 2007 is a dog called Araki Fabulous Willy. Seriously. What kind of person calls a dog 'Fabulous Willy'? It gives the poor thing a lot to live up to in life. Still, congratulations to it. Similarly, congratulations to David Thomas, who did win the US Memory Championship yesterday. Now if his parents had decided to call him John I could have had a really rude joke there, couldn't I?

Anyway, I haven't spent the whole day giggling at words that stopped amusing most people around the age of seven - I've decided to spend the next three days doing a full world memory championship's worth of practice events, all ten disciplines, even the ones I don't like. So I've been getting memorising and recall papers ready for that. This is going to take up a heck of a lot of time, and I'm not entirely sure whether it's feasible - at memory competitions you have someone else to mark your papers and work out your scores for you, and you very seldom have to cook your own meals in between events, but I think it'll be fun.

Then on Thursday I've got the latest TV person coming to film a typical day of mine, so I'm going to have to think of something to do. A genuinely typical day for me wouldn't really be worth filming, after all. I'll do exciting and telegenic things and pretend I'm like that all the time.

Let's hear it for me!

Yippee skippee! I won! Well, not won as such, but I came second, and that's considered in modern fashionable circles to be even better than winning. Seven of us at the Oadby Regional, which is a nice number for a seven-round tournament because you can do all-play-all. Eight is even better, obviously, because then you can do all-play-all without someone having a bye each round, but I shouldn't complain. I got off to a flying start, in fact, beating Steve, Roy and Geoff to be in the lead at lunch, then lost not too horribly to Jeremy and Phil before rounding the day off with a win over David... hang on, I can get this right... Beck. There were a lot of close games and interesting results all round, it was a superb advertisement for the game. Although the only people who would have seen this advertisement would be the seven players and the occasional elderly churchgoer who wandered in during the competition (which took place in the lobby of the Baptist church).

Phil won, with 5½ wins, me second with 5, then Steve on 4½, David on 4 and the others on other scores that I can't remember. I don't know why I'm quoting the full results like this when I can't even be certain that I'm right about them - look them up on the yahoo group when somebody who thought to write them down gets home and posts them, if you're that interested. The important thing is that those wins over David and Geoff will give my rating a boost - it's been in freefall for ages, so maybe this is a good omen for the 2007 season. I might even start to entertain thoughts of having a chance at the British Grand Prix title, although that would just be silly - I might occasionally get a good result like today, through luck rather than skill, but I'm fairly certain I can't do it at all five regionals. Still, I'm happy. I've never won one before, and I've only finished second a couple of times - I'm trying to decide whether this second place (by a mere half a point) is cooler than that time in London when I beat everyone except Graham (who's so much better than me that it hardly counts as a loss when I inevitably lose to him). I think I'll arbitrarily say that it is, so that I'll feel good about myself.

At the train station on the way home, I saw a notice appealing for information about an incident on a train recently. What kind of incident, I don't know, because all the notice said was that there was "an incident involving a white male" and that "the male at one point was spoken to by a member of staff". Passengers who might have been on the train are asked to come forward if they noticed "unusual behaviour from a male between Leicester and Kettering". Is that really all the detail they can give us here? I mean, trains from Leicester to London are generally packed full of white males, and most of them are spoken to by train staff at some point, unless it's one of those trains where nobody bothers to check the tickets. Clearly the incident was so memorable that people who witnessed it will understand what the poster meant, and such a transgression of the boundaries of British decency that they couldn't bring themselves to describe it, but that's hardly fair on the members of the public who weren't on the train and are now trying to imagine exactly what might have happened, based on this minimal information.

You've come a long way, baby

Oadby (near Leicester) tomorrow, for the first othello regional of the year. Also traditionally the regional I can't go to because I'm doing something else exciting, but this year there doesn't seem to be any reason for me not to go there. I'm not sure if I should be happy about that or disappointed. Technically I could be in New York again for the US Memory Championship, but I've done rather too much frivolous world travelling this month as it is, and since they're still not allowing foreigners to take part I couldn't justify the trip as practice for the WMC.

Oadby is almost certainly the shortest distance I've ever had to travel for a mind-sports-related event. The World Memory Championship this year, depending on how far away Bahrain is in relation to Malaysia or Brazil or the USA (I need to get better at geography, I know) is going to be one of the longest. Assuming it happens, of course - this time last year we were assured it would be Malaysia again. But there have already been complaints from a lot of the European memory guys, who are probably going to have to pay their own way over there or miss out. Unless the organisers have such an amazing amount of money that they'll pay for everyone's tickets, but I can't see that happening somehow.

Of course, the WMC that I still rate as the best ever, Kuala Lumpur in 2003, was squillions of miles away from all the world's best at the time, and they all competed anyway, and a fantastic event it was too. So who knows, maybe this one will be the same.

I probably should also make a prediction for the US memory championship while I'm here - Josh Foer isn't going to defend his title, and Maurice Stoll also doesn't seem to be on the list of registered competitors. But David Thomas, who apparently lives over there now or at least can claim citizenship, is, and assuming he's kept more or less in practice since he last competed anywhere, he should be in with a good chance. I kind of hope he doesn't win it, though - I'd rather see the title go to someone who doesn't describe themself as "the world's leading authority on memory skills" with a straight face.

Shooting Pridmore

That's not the title of next year's hit movie, but a document that a TV guy has sent me detailing the way they want to film me. It sounds like fun - for some new channel that nobody's heard of, they're doing little five-minute interviews with interesting people. There's also someone else who wants to do an 'art project' about the Cambridge championship, which sounds like it'll be a bit different. And on top of that, I'm finally at liberty to say that the world memory championship is going to be in Bahrain this year (unless it changes again at short notice). I'd say more on the subject, but I'm still unwell after yesterday's excesses.

Drunken stupor

Vague memory of handing over all the money in my pocket to homeless man (whom my brother assures me is close personal friend) while lying on the pavement near Nottingham station. Subsequently taken to bar called "Prohibition" for more alcohol. Note to self: don't accept invitation to lunch with brother without expecting it to turn into all-day boozing. Really, really going to regret this tomorrow.

Book Revue

Another good thing about long plane journeys is that they give me a chance to catch up with my reading. I like to get a new book or two to read whenever I go somewhere far away. This time round, I was planning to get "Lisey's Story" by Stephen King, but while wandering around the bookshop I noticed "Making History" by Stephen Fry, which I'd somehow never heard of before although it was published ten years ago, so I decided to get that instead by way of apology. When I got to the second chapter and realised it was going to be about killing Hitler as a baby I started to regret my choice - could there be a more overused plot for a time-travel book? Heck, I wrote (or at least started to write) one myself as a teenager. My annoyance with the unoriginal concept lasted until about half way through, when they'd almost got round to actually changing history and I realised that rather than reading it as a novel I was just waiting for it to detail how the act had changed the world. I clicked a few mental cogs into different positions and started paying attention to the characters, and realised that it's actually a really great book. It's funny and clever and very readable, and I'd certainly recommend it to anyone. The basic changing-history bit was pretty similar to mine, too, and while I wouldn't have created a protagonist with the nickname "Puppy" in 1993 it's very much the kind of thing I'd do if I was writing that story now - I suspect that Stephen Fry is also a time traveller and has stolen some yet-unwritten masterpiece of mine. But then, I think that about all good books.

For the journey home I was again going to buy "Lisey's Story", but the airport bookshop only had it in a hardback edition so big I would have had a hard time fitting it through the door of the plane, let alone fitting it in my overstuffed rucksack. So I decided to go for "The Gunslinger", because I've always sort of meant to read the Dark Tower books, and it's only the fact that I don't really like early King as a rule that's stopped me before. But this is the 2003 revision of the original from 1970 or whenever, so I decided to give it a try. But for some reason I still couldn't get into it. I'll try it again another time, but in Minneapolis I decided to get something else, and ended up with "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" by Alexander McCall Smith. This is another series of books I've been meaning to read for ages, and this one has completely hooked me. It chronicles the exploits of Mma Ramotswe, the only lady private detective in Botswana (so no complaints about an unoriginal premise here), and the wide range of unusual cases she has to deal with, her unique thought processes that lead her to the solutions as well as a variety of conclusions about morality and the meaning of life. It's very well written - funny, touching, compelling, dramatic, clever, really everything you could want from a book. I've read the second volume since getting home, and I've just bought "Morality For Beautiful Girls" today.

I know I could be more profitably spending my time writing books rather than reading them, but I really am sort of getting somewhere with "How To Be Clever" too. Honest.