Oh, simple thing, where have you gone?

I'm thirty-three-and-a-third years old, either today or tomorrow, depending on how you look at it. Tomorrow if you pretend that the year is made up of twelve months of equal length, today if you consider that it's 122 days since my 33rd birthday today. Anyway, it's official - I'm a long-playing record. I'm the somewhat disappointing second sequel to "The Naked Gun". I'm a third of the way through my life, assuming I fulfil my lifetime ambition of dropping dead on my hundredth birthday, just before the arrival of the telegram from the Queen, prompting all my friends to write back by return of telegram condemning her rudeness in sending a telegram to the deceased and upsetting everyone like that, and in turn causing Her Majesty to be so grief-stricken and mortified that she realises the error of her ways, abdicates, abolishes the monarchy and the government and institutes a perfect socialist utopia.

I'm going to celebrate it tomorrow, anyway. And by 'celebrate', I mean that I'm going to spend the whole day wailing, lamenting and screaming curses at the gods for allowing me to get so old. It'll be fun!

Winterlympics?

Hey, is it the Winter Olympics? I hadn't really seen any build-up to it on TV or anywhere. Perhaps I should keep in touch with things more. But it's not like it's the real olympics, anyway. Those happen in London, in August.

The robots are mounting an attack on us! Our hero pulled the trigger on the gun.

My blog has recently been repeatedly attacked by evil robots posting lots of links to what I assume to be naughty websites (they're mostly made up of Chinese characters, with occasional words like "sex" and "18" thrown into the mix - and also, fascinatingly, "85cc", which makes me think that the websites might also involve a little motorbike like the one I used to ride. I'm almost tempted to click on it and find out).

This has happened four times now, and for some reason it posts these links to the same fifteen blog entries every time - most of them from March, April and May last year, two from November, one from January 2008 and one from November 2006. I'm not sure how it chooses which ones to target, and I'd be fascinated to find out. Still, it's boring to delete them all repeatedly, so now I've switched on the setting of comment moderation for all posts over 14 days old. So do feel free to comment on my old posts, unless you're a Chinese motorbike sex machine, but if you do, I'll have to approve the comment before it appears on the internet for the world to see.

Training

No, not the memory kind, a different kind. I was out on a Microsoft Access training course today - I'm great with Excel, but I've never really done anything with Access, and it's a bit like being the world memory champion in that if you're good with Excel, everyone assumes you know everything about every vaguely-related computer software. Still, now I know enough about Access to bluff my way through a conversation, so my reputation is assured.

Listing history

At the weekend, I bought for 20p from a market stall "Hunter Davies's Bigger Book Of British Lists", published in 1982. It's a book full of lists of trivia, most of it up-to-the-minute details of what was happening in British life in 1981, and there are some fascinating facts to be found.

Did you know that there were 27,870,000 telephones in Britain in 1981 (and a population of 54,129,000)? Or that there were 615.7 million calls to recorded information services in 1980-81 - 401.1 million of those being to the speaking clock? Second on the list was dial-a-disc, with 102.5 million calls, then cricket, with 30.5. I remember those - you dialled 16, and you got the latest cricket news if it was the cricket season, or a pop song (randomly selected) if it wasn't. No YouTube in those days, people had to entertain themselves somehow. Calls cost 10p, as I recall, although my recollection is based on a few years later, so it might have been 5p back in 1981. Still, to be amongst the top 10% of male wage earners in 1980, you had to earn at least £179 a week.

The top five television programmes for 1981 were Coronation Street, The Benny Hill Show, This Is Your Life, To The Manor Born, and Magnum. And even though there were only three channels to choose from in those days, the average individual watched 3.37 hours of TV a day.

Finally, and most interestingly, the top-selling toys of 1981 were...

1 - Rubik's Cube
2 - Star Wars figures
3 - Sindy Doll and accessories
4 - Lego
5 - Astro Wars
6 - Action Man
7 - Rubik Snake Puzzle
8 - Connect 4
9 - Britains Farm & Space figures
10 - Kensington

Kensington? Astro Wars? I don't recall what I got for Christmas that year (probably a kick up the bum and consider-yourself-lucky, but possibly some Star Wars toys too), but I've never heard of those two lines. Ah, poor people of 1981, still three years away from the glorious revolution that was Transformers, He-Man, Thundercats, MASK, Action Force, all those classic toys of the greatest toy-and-cartoon era of history.

Who wants to be a millionaire

I did the lottery last night, for the first time in a while (I buy a ticket every time I'm sitting at my computer on a Saturday and an advert for the lottery comes on telly - I'm easily swayed by advertising) and won £10. Of course, since it's on the computer, it doesn't really count as money - I really should buy a ticket from a shop some time, and get a real £10 note to put in my pocket, that would be a lot more satisfying. Still, it seemed rather miserly to transfer £10 back into my bank account, so I decided to spend it on the instant win games on the National Lottery website.

And I can tell you, it's easy to see why people develop gambling problems. I had no idea those virtual scratchcards were such fun! I was playing the monopoly-themed game (remember that strange obsession with monopoly I had recently?), and it's really extremely cleverly made. It really does feel like you're playing an exciting game, even though you're actually just essentially watching a video and then being told whether or not you've won. It could be very addictive, and I might just have to delete my account, just in case I get tempted to try it again. I hope the person who designed it got paid well, anyway.

You know, it's been much too long since I went to Las Vegas. I'll have to see if I can fit another holiday into my busy schedule...

The Evil Genius

If by 'evil', we're talking in terms of the sin of sloth, and by 'genius' we mean the kind of person who can remember things, then yes. I've spent the whole day reading "The Evil Genius", by Wilkie Collins, rather than doing anything I was intending to do.

In BATE, TO Runnymede, John with Charter goes

Remember this blog post last month, when I couldn't think of a plausible way to fill the missing line in that poem? The above line came to me out of the blue today, so I thought I should record it, just to give a sense of closure to the whole thing. 'Bate' as in 'bad temper'.

Also, it gives me an interesting title for today's blog entry. I like to have a title that is in some way clever and funny, and I don't always achieve it. Often I have a subject I want to write about, but can't think of a title, and equally often I think of a fun title and have to come up with something to write that would fit with it. And sometimes I think of a phrase that would make a perfect title, but know I'm never going to get a chance to use it.

For example, I would love to write a blog with the title "The Spiders Immediately Become Timid", and start it with this wonderful picture of a timid giant spider monster:

(I've recently been introduced to the awesome works of Fletcher Hanks)

But the only circumstances in which I could use this title and picture would be in a blog chronicling my attempts to rid my flat of spiders or insects - and I really quite like spiders, and I'm probably never going to get any kind of bug infestation problem. I never have any luck like that. So that blog title was just going to sit in my head, unused, if I hadn't brought it out tonight.

Right.

Weekend - memory. Lots of it. Until I've memorised so much that I can't remember anything ever again, up to and including my own name. I've got it written down somewhere, it really wouldn't be a problem. And no watching all those cheap cartoon DVDs I bought last weekend until I'm back in World Memory Champion form.

Also, research some way to get around jetlag, because if we do end up going to China for the WMC, that time difference is really going to kill me. Ideally, I'd like to go out there a week early to get properly synchronised, but I don't think I'm going to have the holiday time or the money to do that.

Numbers, numbers, numbers

What am I going to do about my system for memorising decimal numbers? It's not a bad system, but it's not better than everybody else's. And "better than everybody else's" is the kind of thing I strive for. But however I play around with possibilities, I can't think up a clever way to move to a four-digit-image system. I may have to come up with a non-clever way, and just memorise ten thousand images by sheer brute force. It has to be done, if I'm going to break records...

Ooh Ecc

My ambition to not be fat really isn't helped by the fact that the little shop at the office has started selling eccles cakes. I can't resist eccles cakes, and whenever I notice that they're on sale, I just have to buy one. And then, obviously, eat it. It's not good for my waistline. I also got somewhat addicted to ecclefechan tarts over Christmas, ever since Sainsbury's listed them on their top Christmas lines list for my memory stunt, and I had to look up what they were, and think "Oh yeah, those things! I love those things!" What is it with pastries that start with 'ecc'? I must just be eccentric.

To illustrate this point, here's the picture of Wee Eck that I used in my Sainsbury's presentation to demonstrate associating characters with things like ecclefechan tarts:

Although nobody had heard of him, so the point didn't go across very well. This is probably why my memory talks are generally rubbish - I'm talking to the wrong audience. The entire Class 3 at the primary school where I do my reading volunteering call me "Ben 10", and they're enormously impressed by my miming of activating the Omnitrix and turning into Fourarms. Never work with adults.

Snooker or darts?

I harbour vague ambitions to become good at both snooker and darts. And what with the memory thing and everything else, I probably haven't got the time to get good at both of them before I'm forty years old and too fat to play either (have you noticed how the fat players never win at snooker or darts any more?). I might just invent a new game that's a combination of the two, and call it 'snarts' (because 'dooker' just sounds silly). It would be a great game, but spectators would frequently be injured by the very sharp balls when they hit a wire and bounced off the table.

Blackbeard

My beard's got to the kind of bushiness-level where I always agonize over whether to let it grow a bit longer or just chop it short. I sometimes think it looks quite good very full, but the moustache is definitely too long (it gets in the way when I drink) and trimming the moustache but leaving the rest intact sends me plummetting headlong into the territory of 'looking like I care what I look like', which really isn't somewhere I want to go.

I'll probably just leave it another few days before taking the scissors to it.

Horrors!

In the course of wandering around the internet tonight, I found out that Mr Peacock, the headmaster of my old school, has retired! And been replaced by a Mrs Heather Payne! This won't do. Admittedly I'm just jumping to conclusions based on the name, and I might be wrong, but I don't see how Mrs Payne is going to fulfil what I see as important prerequisites for a head teacher, like striking fear into students with an imposing well-over-six-foot frame, full beard and deep booming voice. I tell you, education isn't what it was. Mr Peacock was 'the new head' when I started there in 1987, so this is really quite a significant era for QEGS. It inspired me to have a look at the website, which has had a bit of a revamp since I last checked it out.

The coolest part, for former pupils, is probably the 'Departments' menu, which now has a page for each subject, most of which list the teachers who teach it, and so allow us to see who's still there, after all these years. Even more alarming than the new head, a couple of these pages list the teachers' first names! These modern education methods have gone too far! Apart from Mr "Call Me Steve" Harvey, who came along when I was in the sixth form, such things were unheard of and viewed with great suspicion in my schooldays. I'm sorry, but Mr Edwards is not a Bob. He's "Mr Edwards" to his face, "Taffy" behind his back if you're feeling brave, "R.W. Edwards" on report cards, "My dad" if you're Rachel Edwards in my class, but I'm fairly sure I could never call him "Bob", even if I met him nowadays.

Mr Hull and Mrs Scarborough are still teaching art - she started there when I was in the second year, I think, while he's been there since the year dot. Mr Roger Howard is still deputy head and still teaching English (and, presumably, hockey, unless he's got too old for that, but he was surprisingly passionate about the game). Mrs Boddy, Martin's mum (for some reason, my class had multiple teachers' kids in it) is still teaching maths, but apparently not biology any more. Mr Carr is still head of biology, Mrs Boucher is one of the five names listed under "our four specialist biology teachers".

The ICT department now has six teachers, apparently, one of them my old form teacher Mr Forster (he's just listed as "Mr G Forster", but he was always "Ged" behind his back, which is what you get for having a vaguely silly first name - see also Mr Lester Thompson the geography teacher). When I started at the school, Mr Forster taught "commerce", and IT lessons were taught by Mr Chatfield the elderly geography teacher. They mainly consisted of sitting in the room full of BBC micros and reading books about what could be done with super-computers that were far beyond the school's (and most small countries') budgets.

The PE teachers aren't listed, but it's probably safe to assume the ones who taught me aren't teaching it any more. People like Mr Leach, who kept on teaching PE well into his sixties but must have finally retired by now, are rare. He was extremely cool, though, in his ever-present faded blue tracksuit, occasionally flinging himself to the floor of the gym or changing rooms and doing press-ups just to show that he still could, then bouncing back to his feet again and suggesting that we all go for a ten-mile run through the rain and snow. Mr Sanderson's still teaching history, Ms Boocock still in the geography department. There are now three German teachers (in my day, it was one-and-a-half) and three Spanish teachers (none at all when I was a lad), but the entire foreign language team has been replaced since I left the school. "Bob Edwards" and "Tony Sanderson" are still teaching RE, but there's nobody I recognise in D&T or music.

Still, that's quite an impressive number, even without "Captain Peacock" (as my dad always called him) still at the helm. I just wonder if the chess club's still going without Dr Chambers's guidance. Apart from the fact that he didn't play chess, he was a really great school chess club organiser. Maybe the chess club doesn't even meet in the chemistry lab any more! Change is bad.

The anonymous pirate

I re-read Treasure Island during the long flight to Tokyo, and there's something about it that's always intrigued me. I'm sure people have written on the subject before, so if I'm treading on someone's literary-critical toes, I assure you it was unintentional. Except if you're John Sutherland, the writer of those really cool 'Literary Detective' essays, in which case yes, I'm unashamedly copying your style. Imitation, flattery, etc.

Throughout the book, narrator Jim Hawkins keeps an almost pedantic tally of how many of the twenty-seven men who set sail on the Hispaniola are still alive and whose side they're on. So when Jim returns to the island after his thrilling confrontation with Israel Hands on the schooner and stumbles into the hands of the pirates, the reader who's been paying attention knows even before narrator-Jim has told him so that there are now only six of them remaining. Drink and the devil have done for the rest.

This is the first time Jim has been in close contact with the mutineers, and so the first time we the readers get to really know them. The emphasis not just on plot, but also on character, revolutionized the writing of adventure stories, according to the badly-written foreword in my copy of the book, and it's certainly true that everyone in Treasure Island is a three-dimensional, rounded, believable human being, and that's what makes the story so fascinating to read. Compiling the little character details throughout the book, but especially in this chapter, we know that the six buccaneers are: Long John Silver, the arch-villain; Tom Morgan, the old, grey-haired, mahogany-faced sailor who, with Silver, was part of the infamous pirate Flint's crew in days gone by and who we first met back in Silver's pub in Bristol when he played along (helped by some heavy-handed prompting) with Long John's deceptions; George Merry, thirty-five years old, long and ill-looking with yellow eyes from the fever that many of the pirates contracted camping out in the swamps, who becomes the ringleader as the mutineers finally lose patience with Silver; Dick Johnson, the youngest of the crew, the one who Jim earlier overheard being talked into joining the mutiny by Long John, and who had a good upbringing before he fell in with a bad lot, carries a Bible with him and is deeply worried about the way things are going; John, whose surname we never learn (which is a pity, really, because he's one of at least four Johns on the Hispaniola, the narrative convention of avoiding duplicated Christian names not being something Robert Louis Stevenson had any time for - there are also three Toms with speaking parts), who was shot in the head during the first attack on the stockade but got up immediately and ran away, and by this point in the book is well on the way to a full recovery, though he's deadly pale and doesn't talk much; ... and one other man, about whom we know absolutely nothing.

This sixth pirate is a complete mystery. We're never told his name or any physical details about him, he just hangs around his colleagues like a ghost. In the earlier part of the book, the mutineers included among their number a lot of nameless characters who only got their brief moment in the spotlight when they were killed, but now we have this one anonymous man remaining with the five vividly-described villains (well, John is a bit of a shadowy figure, but his bandaged head gives him character). Pirate X intrigues me. Is he young like Dick, old like Morgan and Silver, or somewhere in between like George and (probably) John? Tall or short, brave or cowardly, healthy or sickly? He presumably joins in with the actions attributed to all five of Long John Silver's scurvy crew as they glare at him, huddle together in mutinous conference, get drunk and waste their limited food rations, spread out through the woods on the search for the treasure, and so on, but he never says or does anything individual that we can definitely identify.

Jim the narrator quite often describes things that 'one of them' has done, without naming names, so it's possible that Mr X has a line of dialogue here and there. The most likely point comes when the treasure hunters stumble on a skeleton, laid out straight with arms stretched above its head, which turns out to be pointed exactly in the compass direction described on the map:

"I thought so," cried the cook; "this here is a p'inter. Right up there is our line for the Pole Star and the jolly dollars. But, by thunder! if it don't make me cold inside to think of Flint. This is one of his jokes, and no mistake. Him and these six was alone here; he killed 'em, every man; and this one he hauled here and laid down by compass, shiver my timbers! They're long bones, and the hair's been yellow. Ay, that would be Allardyce. You mind Allardyce, Tom Morgan?"

"Ay, ay," returned Morgan, "I mind him; he owed me money, he did, and took my knife ashore with him."

"Speaking of knives," said another, "why don't we find his'n lying round? Flint warn't the man to pick a seaman's pocket; and the birds, I guess, would leave it be."

"By the powers, and that's true!" cried Silver.

"There ain't a thing left here," said Merry, still feeling round, among the bones, "not a copper doit nor a baccy box. It don't look nat'ral to me."

"No, by gum, it don't," agreed Silver; "not nat'ral, nor not nice, says you. Great guns! messmates, but if Flint was living, this would be a hot spot for you and me. Six they were, and six are we; and bones is what they are now."

"I saw him dead with these here deadlights," said Morgan. "Billy took me in. There he laid, with penny-pieces on his eyes."

"Dead — ay, sure enough he's dead and gone below," said the fellow with the bandage; "but if ever sperrit walked, it would be Flint's. Dear heart, but he died bad, did Flint!"

"Ay, that he did," observed another; "now he raged, and now he hollered for the rum, and now he sang. 'Fifteen Men' were his only song, mates; and I tell you true, I never rightly liked to hear it since. It was main hot, and the windy was open, and I hear that old song comin' out as clear as clear — and the deathhaul on the man already."

"Come, come," said Silver, "stow this talk. He's dead, and he don't walk, that I know; leastways, he won't walk by day, and you may lay to that. Care killed a cat. Fetch ahead for the doubloons."

'The cook' is Silver, 'the fellow with the bandage' is John, Morgan and Merry are identified by name and Dick wasn't around to witness Flint's death. The 'another' who gives the gripping description of Flint's last moments must be our mystery man. He's presumably also the 'another' who wonders about Allardyce's knife, which shows both that he knows Flint's personality and that he's got quite a sharp mind - this might be the only time in the whole book that anyone thinks of something before Long John Silver gets it. Admittedly he plays second-fiddle to George Merry, who's a pretty unimpressive specimen, but perhaps Mr X is just sensibly keeping his head down. He might just be the brains of the operation.

He certainly has a talent for survival, anyway. Events come to a head a little later, when the disenchanted pirates finally rise up in rebellion against Silver and Jim, whose lives are only saved by a volley of musket fire from the trees - Dr Livesey, Abraham Gray and Ben Gunn have come to the rescue in the nick of time. The luckless John is shot again, this time fatally, and Silver with great satisfaction takes the opportunity to rid himself of the annoying Merry. The remaining three - Morgan, Dick and Mr X - run for it, and don't trouble the heroes again. We get one more little suggestion of Mr X's history when Jim notes that there are three men on the island ('Silver, and old Morgan, and Ben Gunn') who had aided Captain Flint in his many crimes, which would suggest that our mystery man wasn't one of the pirates in Flint's glory days, and only fell in with them more recently. But none of the three surviving mutineers gets any more character development from this point on. They are marooned on the island, rather heartlessly it seems to me, and I think it's safe to say that their chances of survival rest entirely on the shoulders of Pirate X - Morgan is old and not too bright, Dick is generally hopeless and seriously ill with malaria - so it would be nice to know whether or not he's the kind of man who could rise to the challenge.

So, why is this man such an enigma, in a book populated with so many great and memorable characters? I think a clue to the answer lies in his shipmate, George Merry. Merry goes unmentioned in the book until Jim finds himself in the enemy's camp. Unlike Morgan, Dick and bandaged John, who all had their moments earlier on, he has risen from anonymity and come to sudden prominence now that the plot needs a pirate to lead the opposition to Silver. A little history is inserted into the story when Silver berates Merry for having insisted on a more direct course of action than Silver would have preferred, right from the time they first landed on the island: "But who done it? Why, it was Anderson, and Hands, and you, George Merry! And you're the last above board of that same meddling crew; and you have the Davy Jones' insolence to up and stand for cap'n over me — you, that sank the lot of us!"

It's old news to the pirates, but it's new information to the reader that Job Anderson and Israel Hands, the two most senior pirates in the first three-quarters of the narrative, formed a triumvirate with George Merry all along. Anderson was boatswain on the Hispaniola and Hands the coxswain, but what was Merry? Just an ordinary seaman? We never find out, because we're not introduced to him until long after they've fled the ship. Clearly, he was a late addition to the plot - Stevenson, like most great Victorian writers, made things up as he went along without a clear idea how his story was going to develop. Perhaps he didn't anticipate the mutineers mutineering against Silver in the end, or perhaps he did, but envisaged Israel Hands being their ringleader before he came up with the wonderful scene with Hands and Jim tussling on the Hispaniola? Possibly he regretted killing Anderson off so comparatively early on and leaving himself without a figurehead for the rebellion. Luckily, one of the remaining two anonymous pirates was available to be elevated to a higher purpose.

Clearly, Mr X was held in reserve, just in case a new plot twist occurred to the writer that needed a new character previously unthought-of. He's the substitute player on the Buccaneers' team, who never got the chance to show what he was made of. You have to feel sorry for him, but I think there's enough ambiguity for us to choose to believe he was man enough to come into his own, retrieve the remaining treasure and get off the island to a happy ending.

Do you think I will relax my discipline just because I have won? No! I will still train hard...

The director took me out for dinner after my unimpressive TV filming, and we had nabe. On a related note, I do need to keep training my memory. I've had much too much time off since last year's world championship, and now it's time to get serious about it again. This weekend, lots of training. Promise.

Also, if you're ever in Tokyo, buy some "Meltykiss" chocolates. They're absolutely delicious, except for the green tea flavour.

I Wonder (Departure)

Yes, I'm back home again. I did get back last night, but I was too tired to blog about it. I'm still more than half asleep now, but never mind, it was worth it for a fun trip to Tokyo.

I don't know that my performance on the TV show, which was called "Wonder", was really worth the cost to the TV company of flying me out there, but they seemed happy with it, anyway. It's hard to describe exactly what the show is about, it's sort of a Juke Box Jury, only with things like memory champions and record-breaking scuba-divers instead of pop songs, and the panellists guess at answers to trivia questions on the subject of the week rather than rating it. So really, now I come to think of it, it's not much like Juke Box Jury at all. I've never even seen Juke Box Jury, it was before my time, so I don't know why I made that comparison in the first place.

Anyway, we got to see snippets of the upcoming Japanese documentary, which looks really awesome, and have some entertaining banter in the studio, as well as a memory challenge in which I memorised the order of forty sushi dishes, and the panel memorised ten each. They got them all perfectly, and I had two mistakes, which wasn't the result the TV people were expecting, but never mind. One of the guests was the famous actor Hideki Takahashi, who's a really big deal in Japan, but I can't remember who the other people were. I was a bit lost with all the goings-on, since I was relying on a translator sitting perched behind me and whispering a running translation of what everyone else was saying (usually with up to five people talking at once), so my spoken contributions were minimal and usually not really an answer to the questions I was asked. Still, perhaps it looked better to Japanese viewers.

The translator, incidentally, did a really great job, and it wasn't at all her fault if I didn't know what was going on - she'd even had a crash course in the basics of memory techniques and competitions, and understood it all very well. She had a notebook full of Japanese writing with occasional English phrases like "Ben System" and "Queen Elizabeth's Glammar School, Horncastle", so the TV company had clearly done their homework extensively. The director, for one, knows more about the world of memory competitions than some of the people who compete in them, and was able to explain in details the principles of person-action-object, journeys, the difference between the Major and Ben Systems, personal details of all the competitors, anything you might care to ask. I'm confident that the finished documentary is going to be the best ever, so hopefully it will somehow end up being translated into English.

There's more to say about the trip, but it can wait until I wake up.

These people know me too well

In a last-minute email from the Japanese director, she asked if I could bring my Brazilian Mystery Cloak to the filming. "Aww, do I have to?" I thought, "It's too big for my little rucksack, so that means I'd have to bring the big one!" And I would have replied something to that effect, if the next line of the email hadn't been 'I am afraid it is a little bit heavy, and you have to change your bag’s size…
However, we appreciate if you bring it.'

And so how can I refuse to bring it along, when the director of this project has done her homework to such an extent that she knows I prefer to only bring a small rucksack on foreign jaunts? Best film crew ever, I tell you. So the big rucksack it is, I'm afraid. Still, it turns out my plane isn't until 12:35 tomorrow, so I can get the morning train and comfortably get to Heathrow in time.

Also, there's a sticky label on the back of my new passport with a barcode and the words 'Please remove this label'. If I don't remove it, do you think they'll refuse to let me leave the country?

Last-minute, dot com

People always ask me 'have you packed yet?' whenever I'm imminently going somewhere. Probably because I've never packed, until at the very earliest half an hour before I leave the house. I haven't even really thought about packing for my trip to Japan yet - I'm going down to London tomorrow night, probably, so as to catch my plane on Saturday morning. Or if the plane is a bit later than I'm thinking it is (I haven't checked), I'll get the early train on Saturday morning and save the fuss of finding a hotel for tomorrow night. But so far I haven't even written my list of things to take with me (passport, plane tickets, hat, all the essentials like that). I'll write the list tomorrow morning, and pack my clothes tomorrow evening.

The Japanese TV people want me to bring my world championship medals. Not all of them, presumably, because they give out hundreds every year, but I'm still going to have to trawl through all the piles of junk in my spare room to try to find some. I have no idea where I put my latest batch of medals - when I get home after a WMC, I'm generally tired enough that I just empty my rucksack onto the floor, go to bed and never see any of my various travelling accessories ever again.

Morning has broken

I'm having great difficulty dragging myself out of bed just lately. I've been wanting to get to the office early this week, but I'm physiologically incapable of properly waking up until eight o'clock. Perhaps I could save time and still get my lie-in by going to work in my pyjamas, but it's still a bit cold to be cycling dressed like that. I'll wait till the summer.

Anyway, have I mentioned that I'm going to Tokyo on Saturday? I probably have, once or twice, but it's still extremely groovy. I'm going to be memorising sushi.