Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home

There's a ladybird wandering around my living room. Do ladybirds hibernate or die in the winter, or are they around all year? I don't remember. This one's still up and about, anyway.

I had a phone call this evening from a TV producer who wants to make a documentary about me. This being a phone call, I said he could, and then quickly sent him an email afterwards to say I wasn't sure about it. I checked up on him, though, and he's a very reputable and well-respected kind of TV producer, who does serious academic documentaries and is a vocal opponent of dumbing-down on telly, so it would probably be quite a good film if we did make it.

He says in his email that "I want to do for memory what the documentary film Spellbound did for spelling". I'm not sure how that works, exactly - Spellbound took something that's an enormously popular American institution and made people in Britain aware of its existence. Memory competitions can at best be charitably described as a minority interest. But if he did make a hit film about it, wouldn't it be cool? People in the memory world have been talking for ages about memory becoming popular with the masses, without ever really believing it will happen.

Trouble is, at least with spelling bees you get to hear the people spelling the words. What people don't appreciate until they've been to a memory competition is that they can most accurately be compared to an exam - it's all written, it's almost all done in total silence and there's very little in the way of visual effects. I just can't see it making a compelling documentary.

Incidentally, in the sentence after talking about Spellbound, the producer offered to come up to "Darby" to meet me. Just a slip of the keyboard, or did he run his email through a spellchecker before sending it to me? Even if he did, that puts him in a class above the guy from Endemol who emailed me before the world championships, if nothing else. I've never seen so many spelling and grammatical mistakes in one brief paragraph, and I've dealt with no end of illiterate types in my time!

In other news, the committee of the British Othello Federation have been discussing the latest amendments to the BOF rules by emails today. The changes came about because Anjar, who run the world championships, have decided to encourage more women to play othello by organising a Women's World Othello Championship alongside the main one. Basically, each country can now send as well as the usual team of three players (of any gender), one extra female player. All the players will compete together in the first two days of the World Championships, then the top four extra-female-players will have their own semi-finals and final for the WWOC title while the top four normal-team-players compete for the WOC. Simple enough?

Not if you're trying to phrase your national othello federation's rules in such a way as to avoid suggesting that we approve of gender-based discrimination (we can't stop Anjar applying it, and it would be just plain petty to refuse to send a participant in the WWOC. The French federation, incidentally, are just plain petty and proud of it). From the original draft referring to a "British women's champion", we've progressed to "When a special event is promoted to accompany the Main World Championship Tournament, the UK shall choose its representative(s) as the highest ranking qualified player(s) in the National Tournament. Should such player(s) have, or potentially have, qualified for the Main Event, they shall choose which Tournament they will play in expeditiously so that whichever place they vacate can be filled by another player. Ties for such places will be resolved in the same way that ties for the Main Event are, by a one-round playoff."

Or words to that effect.

We've got five active female othello players in this country, incidentally. And of those, one is Italian, one Australian and one American. Anjar are right, we really do need to get more women playing the game.

Hazel's last day at work tomorrow - she's using up her saved-up holiday time to finish early. I'd do the same if I had any holidays left to take - I'm actually busy there just at the moment with the month-end accounts, but there's a sense of futility to everything now, and everyone just wants to get it over with. Sixteen working days to go...