Who the heck is Abraham Stapleton?

Subtitle to this blog post: "My great-great-grandmother is a filthy hussy with little regard for Victorian moral standards"

I'm sorry to keep blogging about my family tree, but I'm having a whale of a time researching my illustrious ancestors at the moment and can't really think of anything better to write about. And yes, you can still be illustrious if you're a family of working-class peasants. Everything is relative.

So here's the puzzle I'm struggling with at the moment. It's 1841, census time, and in Star Lane, Bourne ("a star is bourne"?) lives James Pridmore, 60 years old, with a blank space in the 'occupation' column and a house full of other Pridmores. The 1841 census didn't have the oh-so-handy 'relationship to head of household' column that later censuses had, so until I splash out on buying some more birth certificates (I've bought one big batch from the General Records Office already) I just have to guess that 50-year-old Elizabeth Pridmore is James's wife, and the six other Pridmores aged from 20 down to 1 are his children and/or grandchildren. One of these children is six-year-old Eliza Pridmore, my great-great-grandma. And down at the bottom of the list is the unexplained two-year-old Abraham Stapleton.

Fast-forward ten years to 1851. Eliza is now working as a domestic servant, while twelve-year-old Abraham is now living in the household of 87-year-old John Fowler, along with John's son Thomas (40) and Thomas's wife Jane (35). The 'relationship' column has now been introduced, and Abraham Stapleton is described as John Fowler's "grandson".

In 1855, Eliza has a son, William Thomas Pridmore (my great-granddad). There's no father on the birth certificate, which just tells us that William was as illegitimate as Eliza was illiterate (her signature is an X).

In 1861, little William is now living with Thomas and Jane Fowler (John Fowler seems to have died in the meantime), and is described as their "grandson". Eliza, meanwhile, now has a home of her own, describes herself as a charwoman, and is living with another illegitimate son, John W, and her widowed grandmother Elizabeth (probably James's wife mentioned above, although her age is 74 here when it logically should be 70). There's also an 11-year-old "lodger" called Mary Mitchelson, but I'll deal with that mystery another time.

So my original thought was that the Fowlers had a son who got Eliza in the family way and left his parents to bring the kid up. But a) I can't find any trace of Thomas and Jane Fowler having children, and b) What's with Abraham Stapleton? My current working hypothesis is that the Fowler family were kindly friends of the Pridmores who took in various bastardy Pridmore brats over the years and passed them off as grandchildren for the sake of appearances. I've officially downgraded myself from one-sixteenth Fowler to one-sixteenth God-only-knows.

Eliza married William Gilbert in 1862, and I'm guessing that he was the father of her second illegitimate son, since John W Pridmore becomes John W Gilbert after the wedding. Despite the coincidence of names, William Pridmore almost certainly wasn't William Gilbert's son, since he continued to live with the Fowlers while William and Eliza went on to live a comparatively respectable life, having another couple of in-wedlock children along the way.

Nonetheless, Eliza and William clearly kept in touch - the Gilberts moved to Sheffield by 1881 (after living in Boston, Lincolnshire before that, weirdly enough! They lived on Lincoln Lane, in one of the houses that were demolished long ago to make room for the car park) and when William moved there with his wife and three small children, they lived with the Gilberts for a while before getting a place of their own. It's a big happy non-traditional family, and I think it's completely awesome! But I would like to know where Abraham Stapleton fits into it...

Good news, bad news

I've had my bike stolen, which is extremely annoying, not least because I'll have to walk to work for the next couple of days and maybe longer until I can get a new one. That'll teach me to leave it chained up in Nottingham city centre after dark for half an hour.

But to cheer me up, I've got in touch with a super-distant cousin (we've got great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents in common) on a genealogy website and discovered the extensive family tree of the Culpins, whom my great-granddad married into. The great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was Richard Culpin, born around 1675, and the family line from him to me goes through his son Richard Culpin b.1700, his son Richard Culpin b.1727, his son Richard Culpin b.1766, his son Richard Culpin b.1797, his son Richard Culpin b.1828 and his daughter Sarah, who married William Pridmore.

Richard Culpin VI, funnily enough, waited until his fourth son (and tenth child overall) to carry on the chain of Richards, and Richard VII died as a baby. If I was the sixth Ben Pridmore in a family tree, I would've made sure to have had at least eight or nine sons by now, all called Ben, just to make sure the family tradition continued.

A collective regime of peace and love

I don't generally devote a blog to sharing a cool song I found on the internet, but:



Great Ceauşescu's ghost, this is a work of genius! A complete history of the Soviet Union, told in terms of Tetris. The lyrics are brilliant, and the video is sensationally epic! And the group who created it, Pig With The Face Of A Boy, a neo-post-post-music hall anti-folk band, have a really great website with lyrics, merchandise, a picture of themselves crouching in the undergrowth and more, that you all should go and check out right now!

Living here in Allentown

I have a not-writing-about-work-in-case-they-fire-me kind of policy, but I think I'm justified in mentioning, since it was in the newspapers back in October, that the company is planning to reduce the number of head-office staff by about 20%. And having had that vague announcement dangling Damocles-swordishly over us for the last three months, we got details yesterday of who, when and how.

My job's safe, so don't fret, but it's disturbing to work in a department with a lot of people who are getting the chop. It sort of makes me feel like resigning anyway and finding a new job somewhere else. Or else resigning and going on holiday to Las Vegas, which is my usual response to work-related stress. I haven't been to Vegas since I started working for my current employers, and I could really do with a break. My savings wouldn't last me very long, though... maybe I should tell my hordes of Chinese fans about my book? That'd get me a few sales through Lulu, I'll bet you!

Unpaid advert

James Ponder has put together some abstract images practice papers for everyone, and you can find them at The Home Of Abstract Images!

Meanwhile, I've been caught up in family-tree-researching [note - after two or three attempts to spell that word that starts with gene and ends with ology, I decided to give up. I'm too lazy to look it up, although doing so would have taken less time than typing this parenthetical explanation] for the last couple of days. I've even fallen behind on my memory-training schedule, although I'm determined to catch up tonight (just need to do a bit of binary and I'm back on track). But I'm going to add new bits on to the end of yesterday's post, rather than making a new one with each new discovery. So you can all safely ignore that bit if you're reading through my old bloggings.

In other news, I got my copy of "How To Be Clever" today. It looks quite cool, really, considering it was made using Lulu's default cover style and printed in A4 because I was too lazy to re-format my Word document into something more professional. Many thanks to the many, many people who've asked me to email them a copy - I didn't realise there were so many people out there who didn't get it foisted upon them a couple of years ago! It's still not worth reading. I've never considered it to be a real, finished book, just a very rough draft. So don't blame me if you think it's rubbish, I told you so.

A bit more George Harry

Because what kind of working class hero would I be if I eulogised my officer great-uncle and didn't also pay tribute to his three brothers who were also killed in the war? So from a combination of census and war records, here's a brief family history of the many offspring of William Thomas Pridmore and his wife Sarah Jane. Because I know all my blog readers will be just fascinated by the detailed history of my family:

1) Ernest William Pridmore, born 28 July 1877 in Pickworth, Rutland (where William Thomas grew up). Was an 'errand lad' aged 13 in the 1891 census, married Elizabeth Ellen Waters in late 1900 and shortly thereafter was working as a bricklayer's labourer in 1901, while Elizabeth worked in the knife and fork factory (they were lodging with Fred and Eliza Hughes, aged 23 and 19), and by 1911 was still a bricklayer's labourer, but with a home of his own and three living children (and one who had died) - William aged 9, Nellie aged 5 and Lillian aged 3. This makes him possibly the only Pridmore in the whole family tree to have more daughters than sons. We're a hugely male-dominated family. Also living with them were Robert and Herbert Waters, who I would guess were probably Elizabeth's widowed father and single brother.

2) Albert Pridmore (who seems not to have had a middle name), born 1 May 1879 in Wittering, Northants (where the family were either visiting or lived for a very short time before moving to Sheffield). I can't find him at all on the 1901 census, but he was recently married at that point to Margaret, two years his junior. By 1911 they'd been married for 11 years and had four living children - Albert jr aged 10, George aged 4, Ernest aged 2 and Harold aged three months. Two other children had died. Albert, like his brother, was working as a bricklayer's labourer (their father was a bricklayer - presumably it was the family business). He listed his birthplace as Sheffield, not Wittering, on the 1911 census. Albert joined the army as a private in June 1915 (he was 36 - compulsory enlistment for married men of his age didn't come in until the following year), was wounded in action on 2 May 1917 and died in Bradford hospital on 22 June.

3) John Thomas Pridmore, born 23 February 1881 in Sheffield. Joined the army aged 18 in 1899 and fought in the Boer War, then left the military, married Harriet Annie in 1907 and by 1911 had two children, Ernest William aged 3 and Gladys aged eleven months, and was working as a railway porter. He joined up again when war broke out (despite his army experience, he was never promoted beyond private) and was killed at Ypres on 14 October 1914. "Buried where he fell," according to the records - a lot of men died that day, 62 years exactly before I was born.

4) Arthur Edward Pridmore, born 1 April 1883. Followed his brother John into the army in May 1900 and fought alongside him in South Africa, according to the military record, although the 1901 census (taken the day before his 18th birthday) lists him as still living at home and working as a brewer's labourer - I'm thinking that he probably joined up in May 1901, not 1900. He remained in the army, becoming a recruiting sergeant, and married Annie Elizabeth in 1909. They had no children by the time of the 1911 census, but they had a five-week-old "visitor" in the house, as recorded by the census form, by the interesting name of Leslie Fredrick John Dyer. They lived in Dewsbury, away from the rest of the family in Sheffield. When war broke out, Sgt Arthur returned to the front lines, and was again fighting alongside John, but apparently this time giving his older brother orders. He was killed at Ypres four days later, on 18 October.

5) Florence Pridmore, born April/May/June 1885. Details about the girls in the family are harder to find - she was presumably married by the time of the 1911 census, but there were about a million 25-year-old Florences in Sheffield alone at that time. It was a popular name. Aged 15 in 1901, she was working as a "spoon & fork buffer", a wonderfully Sheffield occupation!

6) Lilian May Pridmore, born April/May/June 1889. There's a 21-year-old, Sheffield-born "Lillian something Pridmore" working as a servant to the Bennett family in nearby Ecclesall Bierlow in the 1911 census. The something might well be 'May' - the transcribers read it as "Cong", which is just silly. The handwriting is not good.

7) Wilfred Pridmore, born April/May/June 1892. By 1911, aged 19, he was still living at home and working as a labourer in the steel foundry. He would almost certainly have been in the war too, given his age, but he survived.

8) Oswald Pridmore, born Jan/Feb/Mar 1894. At 17 years old, he was a "horn buffer". Again, he would have been the perfect age for conscription into the British Army, but came through the war intact. Next step on my research list is to track down Wilfred and Oswald and find out what became of them.

9) George Harry Pridmore, born 23 June 1896. See yesterday's post. He seems to have always been known as "George Harry" - his parents had had another son called George (between Lilian and Wilfred), who was four months old at the 1891 census but died shortly thereafter. There were two other children who died, somewhere along the way, according to the 1911 census return.

10) Sidney Pridmore (or maybe Sydney - he generally spelt it with a Y as an adult. The 1901 census form has either a y written over an i or vice versa, it's impossible to tell, but in 1911 he's unequivocally "Sidney"). My 'Sheffield granddad', born in 1900 (I've got the exact date somewhere, but can't find it - he was ten months old on 31 March 1901), lived until 1982 and had a similarly huge army of children himself, putting even his own father to shame by having just one girl out of the thirteen. He and his brood deserve a blog-writeup sometime too, just as soon as I can get all the information together.


Anyway, sorry to bore you all with that. I know I wouldn't be all that interested if you told me all about your ancestors, but hey, it's my blog, I can write whatever I want. Nyah.

Added on January 26
Deaths from childhood diseases were sadly something to be expected in places like Sheffield in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The excellent Sheffield Indexers website has burial records, which allow me to fill in the gaps in the family trees mentioned above:

5a) Beatrice Eliza Pridmore, born c. June 1887, buried 4 April 1889 aged 22 months. Daughter of Wm Thos Pridmore of 4 Edgar Street, the family's address as at the 1891 census, so certainly part of our family.

6a) George Richard Pridmore, born c. December 1890, buried 2 October 1891 aged 10 months. This is a little more dubious - the age fits exactly with the George R listed on the 1891 census, but the burial record calls him "George Pridmore, son of G R Pridmore". Looks like they put the son's initials instead of the father's. He died at 27ct Carlisle Street - perhaps the family moved house in 1891, they did seem to do that a lot.

9a) Percy Pridmore, born c. August 1898, buried 1 August 1899 aged 12 months. Son of W T Pridmore, died at 18 Doncaster Street. By the 1901 census, William Thomas and family were at 143 Daisy Walk, but Percy fits into a gap in the family, and there aren't that many Pridmores around.


Eliza Pridmore, daughter of E W, died at 4/4 Shepherd Street (Ernest William Pridmore's address in 1911) aged 18 months, buried 3 June 1905. She will have been his second child, and first daughter.

Frederick Pridmore, son of A Pridmore, died aged 5 months, buried 23 January 1904.

Lily Pridmore, daughter of A Pridmore, died aged 13 months, buried 8 January 1906. Both of these were at the same address, 2/2 Blue Boy Street - not where Albert was living by 1911, but they're almost certainly his two deceased offspring, meaning he and Margaret had their six children at very regular two-year intervals.

There don't seem to be any burial records of the adult Pridmores from this branch of the family on the website, but this means all the babies are accounted for...


Added on January 27
Wow, that Sheffield Indexers site is awesome! The school records provide me with a birthday for Ernest, and the nugget that the four oldest boys all went to All Saints School, Pitsmoor. Arthur is called "Arnold Edwd", but it's definitely him - they were all the sons of William, at 4 Edgar Street, except that when Ernest started school they were at Harleston Street instead. Ernest is on the admissions list twice, both times recorded as leaving due to 'med certificate'.

The records are patchy (the only other family member on the site is my uncle Lol, admitted to Highfield Special School in 1942), but it's a miracle that there's anything surviving at all, let alone freely available on the web!

The Pridmore family's addresses, as best I can tell so far:

They must have moved to Sheffield at some time between May 1879 and February 1881 - there's no trace of them on the 1881 census, either because there's a page missing or because they were missed off in the first place. On 18 February 1884 they were living at 4 Harleston Street, by 14 Feb 1887 they were at 4 Edgar Street, where they remained until the census in April 1891. By October 1891 they were apparently at 27 Carlisle Street, then to 18 Doncaster Street by August 1899. For the 1901 census they were at the pretty-sounding 143 Daisy Walk, then by 1911 were living at 34 Hunt Street, where they remained until at least the end of the first world war.


Added 28 January
A bit of birth-certificate-trawling gives me closer approximations of the birthdays of those Pridmores I could only estimate, plus middle names for baby George and Lilian, edited up above. This also tells me that Albert's son Ernest was born in Ecclesall Bierlow rather than Sheffield (if the brothers had refrained from naming their children after each other, this would be less confusing - John also had a son called Ernest in 1908, and he was born in York, where John's wife Harriet came from). Next step, I suppose, is to send off for the certificates and get an exact record...


Added 29 January
The latest family gossip:

There's something wrong with our Ernest. He continued to have children after 1911, and they continued to be almost all girls! What happened to that legendary Pridmore y-chromosome? He ended up with a total of six girls and two boys: William (1902), Eliza (1903), Nellie (1906), Lilian (1908), Elizabeth (1911), Ernest (1914), Hilda (1916) and Rose (1918). Having dutifully named his first son after his father, poor Ernest had to wait until his sixth offspring to have a namesake!

I've found a husband for Lilian (not Ernest's daughter, Ernest's sister. Ernest senior's sister, that is. These duplicated names are very confusing). She married John C May in 1917, thus becoming Mrs Lilian May May. She must have really loved him, to have married a man whose surname was the same as her middle name. They had just two children that I can find (perhaps John was a bit less Yorkshire than the Pridmores), Charles born 1918 and Florence born 1919.

Florence (Lilian's sister, not her daughter), meanwhile, remains elusive. She may have married a John Palmer in 1908, but then again she might not - I can't confirm it with any 1911 census data.

I also can't find a wife for Albert. In 1911, he was married to someone called Margaret, but who she was and when they married I can't tell from any information available online. With that and his absence from the 1901 census, I suspect something scandalous. Or at least I hope for something scandalous, because a lot of these Pridmores lived very boring lives.

John's wife, meanwhile, was Harriet Annie Myton, and after Ernest (1908) and Gladys (1910), they had another son, Frederick (1913). I'm sure they would have gone on to have a traditional huge family had he survived the war.

Arthur's wife was probably Annie Elizabeth Ashworth, and she came from Ireland. No sign of any children for them, though they were married in 1909, and Arthur's military service seems to have been mostly based in England.

Wilfred possibly married a Chloris G Moorhouse in 1913. "Chloris"?

Oswald currently shows no sign of having married anyone or done anything, ever.

My great-uncle George has died

It was 92 years ago, but I've only just heard about it.

Having overcome my dislike of lulu.com, I did a search for the name 'Pridmore', to see if any of my perennially-unproductive namesakes have self-published a book too. Not much joy on that front (there are quite a few Pridmores in the world, but most of them prefer to labour in obscurity all their lives and never show up on the internet or the bookshelves), but I did find a seller of World War I photos and obituaries, which provided something extremely cool!

Remember my 1911-census obsession of last year, which included this bloggery about my then-ten-year-old granddad, also involving his older brother George Harry, 14-year-old chemist's errand boy. I'd sort of wondered what happened to him, seeing as my dad was named after him and thus his name filtered down through the years into my middle name...

Well, here's what I found on Lulu today:

22 years old when he died, and just a couple of months before the end of the war, too. What's really fascinating, though, is that he was an officer! Just a 2nd Lieutenant, but even so, that's pretty good for a young man apparently without any education after the age of 14 and from a family consisting entirely of rank and file types! Must've been the brains of the family.

Also, although he's got the dark hair and big nose of the Pridmore clan, he's got a longer, thinner face than most of my relatives. But he has got the same hairline I had at that age...

Because You Demanded It

No, I'm not dead. I was kidnapped by working-class people who mistakenly believed I'm the King and wanted to force me to institute a parliamentary democracy. It's all been sorted out now.

Anyway, I've been bullied into putting my book on Lulu. You can buy it here if you want. It costs a tenner, some of which may or may not end up being paid to me, I'm not sure how it works.

Yes, I'm still emailing it for free to anyone who asks me; no, it's still not worth reading under any circumstances; no, it hasn't changed since I wrote it many years ago, barring roughly half a dozen proof-reading corrections kindly supplied by Simon Orton two and a half years ago and finally incorporated today, and a couple of parts where I changed the 'current' date from 2008 to 2010 (forgetting that it's not 2010 any more).

So in summary, and in all seriousness, don't buy it. Ask me for a copy if you want to read it, but I wouldn't recommend it.

It really is taking me a long time to get used to it being 2011. I blame the Royal Mint. I got a 2011-dated 50p coin in my change today, and according to the internet they were first issued last October. This is more confusing than it sensibly needs to be, and I'm going to write a letter of protest, spending the 50p on a stamp in the process.

Money money money

I've got my Chinese money! I'm moderately wealthy!

Also, I've now completed two weeks of the new improved 2011 memory training schedule without missing a morning or evening. Now, though, I need to move on to phase two, which is getting back into the habit of doing hour cards, hour numbers and half-hour binary whenever I've got a free weekend (like this weekend coming up). It's quite difficult to get into that routine, but once I do, it'll be very much worth it.

And then there's the continuing dilemma of the four-digit number system. I have a nagging doubt that after all the effort of creating it, it'll turn out to be unusable and I'll have wasted a lot of time and made myself even worse at memorising numbers than I was in the first place.

And on top of that, I probably should do something about the Cambridge Memory Championship 2011. People keep asking me about it, but I'm more in a training-my-own-memory kind of mood than an organising-competitions-for-other-people mood right now. But still, blog readers (if any) - who's coming to the Cambridge Championship? Assume that it's going to happen in early May, and that there's a good chance it won't take place in Cambridge. Further details may or may not follow.

Ave atque Vale

I'm back from Ebbw Vale, and I just felt that I should point out that I'm still sticking to my memory-training schedule. I did some practice on the train, both ways, AND this morning in Dai's place after a late night's drinking. And what's more, I'm still free from cherry coke and eating between meals. I'm the most resolute person in the whole wide world!

W is not a vowel

Despite this, I'm going to Ebbw Vale tomorrow night, so as to poke my nose into the Boots there for work purposes. It's not often you get an opportunity to visit Ebbw Vale, all paid-for, so naturally I jumped at the chance. And since Dai happens to live there, we get the opportunity to hold a sort of international memory conference, too!

Headhunters are after me

Well, not really, but this seems to be a peak time of the year for all the accountancy recruitment agencies I've ever given my email address to, to send out mass mailings to everybody asking if they're looking for a job and showcasing the coolest (by accountancy standards) vacancies on their books.

It worries me when I see a management accountant job description and think "Oh, hey, that one looks pretty good!" I never liked being a management accountant, really, and I know that perfectly well. It's far better being a financial analyst, although I appreciate that most people don't see much difference.

Still, I'd probably reply to one of these agencies if it didn't mean writing a CV from scratch. I lost my old one when my old laptop died. And if they expect me to go to all that effort when I've already got a job...

Just as a follow-up to last night...

E4 show the movie Grease completely unedited, in the middle of the afternoon, complete with exactly the same kind of naughty references that they chop out of Friends. It's weird.

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure that this last week of blog posts really qualifies as the proper, long, interesting kind of blogging that I new-year-resolved to do, so I'll try to improve next week. If I feel like it.

Me and my Friends

I'm really going to miss watching repeats of Friends every day when E4 finally stop it later this year. I was thinking about buying the DVDs, but after all these years of watching the expurgated versions that E4 show, all of the passing mentions of pornography and prostitution in the uncut episodes would warp my fragile little mind.

I'll just have to watch cartoons in the evening instead.

Me me me

I thought I'd blog a thing or two about my profile pictures on Facebook, seeing as I just remembered that they exist. They're all really quite good pictures of me, except for one of them, and I very very rarely look good in photos.




This one over here, for example, looks like I'm doing some kind of street performance of memory skills.

I'm not. I'm looking through a pile of business cards, trying to find one of Gaby Kappus's that she could give to someone else. We're in France.




I don't know why I ever made this a profile picture. It's terrible. I think it was just a play on words, on account of it shows me in profile...

Check it out, there was a time when I had some remaining traces of hair on my head, no beard, and the original hat and lucky shirt! How I miss those days!

Me wearing Tony Buzan's hat, because
I'd lost my own, in Bahrain.

This one is from Central TV, which was a great interview, mainly because the TV image seemed to be stretched to make me look taller and thinner. I suspect one of the presenters is anorexic.

This one speaks for itself.

Coolest picture ever.

Not a resolution, but...

I'm playing othello online at the moment, for the first time in quite a while. Perhaps I'll add an extra new year's resolution to get good at othello, but I don't think I'll bother. One of these days, though, I'm going to memorise the best move in every possible position, just for the fun of it. Or the lack of fun of it, because doing that would quite literally take all the fun out of playing the game. But still, it'd be interesting...

Mr Sleepy

Among my many new year's resolutions was one to get up early in the morning and go to bed earlier the night before (I've heard it has health, wealth and wisdom benefits), thus enabling me to do a little bit of memory training in the morning, start work early, finish work early, do a little bit more memory training and have ample free time for lying around wasting time and eating cheesecake. Because next year, those two favourite pastimes of mine are going on the resolution list.

This seems to have completely thrown my body clock for a loop, with the result that I woke up at four o'clock this morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up, had a bath, had breakfast, practiced memorising historic dates, then went back to bed and got up again at half past eight. It's extremely confusing. Perhaps I should just stay in bed all day, every day, and not care about being healthy, wealthy and wise? Because let's face it, I'm overweight, unlikely to be paid any WMC prize money and generally stupid, and I'd hate to change too drastically in case nobody recognises me.

Foxfire

I had to download Firefox to get one particular website to work, but even now I've given it a trial run, I still disapprove. I'm sticking with Internet Explorer for everything else.

I tend to automatically disapprove of anything computer-related that is trumpeted as being 'better than what normal people use'. This is why I will never go within a mile of a Mac. Even though I went to school with Robert Webb. Advertising just turns me off.

Nor can I imagine ever putting my fingers to a dvorak keyboard. Yuck.

Memory training!

I've added historic dates and random words to my training schedule - I don't normally practice those at all, but I figure it can't hurt. I might even throw in a bit of names and faces practice too, if I can really force myself to (because, as we all know, I'm rubbish at names and faces and consequently don't like doing it). I've put together word-o-matic and date-o-matic Excel files, using a random words list from the internet, and all the available former dates papers I could find. It's harder to make a names-and-faces-o-matic, although that's a pretty poor excuse since there's a perfectly good training thing at memo-camp.de. But I don't really like training on the computer so much. I spend so much time staring at a computer screen, both at work and at home, that memory training is practically the only rest my poor long-suffering eyes get.

We'll just have to see how I feel.

The Sound of Music twice an hour, and Jaws One Two and Three

I haven't watched very much TV over the Christmas holidays, which might explain the following alarming statement: The best thing I've seen on telly lately was "The One Ronnie". To celebrate his eightieth birthday, Ronnie Corbett stars in a show full of Two-Ronnies-style sketches with a lot of comedians from the present day. And it worked! It was genuinely funny all the way through, and perfectly in the classic style. It was like watching a brand new Two Ronnies Christmas special, and not even noticing the absence of Ronnie Barker! Harking back to the glory days of British comedy (you know, the days when saying "bottom" guaranteed a huge laugh from the audience), it was great entertainment.

Which made it all the more surprising that Matt Lucas and David Walliams, who were among the guest stars in that show, have come up with something so terrible as their new series "Come Fly With Me". I'm not sure if it's harking back to the glory days of British racism, or to the glory days of fly-on-the-wall documentaries being new enough that you can parody them in original ways, but it didn't really work. There just aren't enough jokes about budget airlines to fill a whole series, and so a lot of scenes derive all their humour from the two actors in blackface, talking in silly accents. Very strange programme.

As for Doctor Who, it was pretty good. On the one hand, if you're reduced to doing "A Christmas Carol" for your Christmas special, it's probably time to give up, but on the other hand this episode did do some interesting and clever things with the concept of time travel. I've been wanting to see this for quite some time - Doctor Who is a programme about a man with a time machine, but the new series doesn't really get to grips with that idea. When the Doctor travels to a different time, it's treated as if he's just gone down the road to another place. Probably the fault of the insistence on having continuing subplots running through each season, but it's nice to see some actual use of the Tardis in this one. (Yes, the Doctor does things that he's specifically said in earlier episodes that he's not allowed to do, but I don't care.) And the time-travel logic more or less made sense all the way through, give or take, sort of.

Now, the best way to write about time travel is demonstrated in the awesome movie I saw on the plane coming back from China - "Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel". It's absolute genius, and I don't know why I'd never heard of it before now. I obviously need to spend more time hanging out on nerdy websites.