Sunday, October 30, 2005

Memory loss

While I was memorising thousands of binary digits this morning, part of my brain was adding up how much money I've got and working out what to do with it. I remembered that I'd spent a fairly significant amount of money some time in the last couple of weeks, put it on the Barclaycard and thought it was a good thing I was getting this extra money at the end of the month, because otherwise it would have stretched my monthly pay a bit. But I couldn't remember for the life of me what this expenditure was for.

I spent absolutely ages racking my brains, trying to work it out. I knew it was something unavoidable, not a regular monthly payment but something that I had to pay every now and then, and for about a hundred pounds, but what could it be? Okay, I'm pretty relaxed about my money, but could I really have spent such a lot of it and forgotten? After running through every kind of household expenditure and tax I could think of, I'd just about come to the conclusion that I must have either dreamt the whole thing or been hypnotised into handing over my hard-earned cash to Paul McKenna. I gave up and decided to wait for the Barclaycard statement to see if that would remind me, then took my glasses off to clean them and remembered - "Oh yes, the new glasses!"

I'm not sure what the moral to this story is. You can still become world memory champion even if you've got a memory like a sieve? I really am so relaxed about my money that I can spend it and not consciously register it? My memory is going as I spiral helplessly towards thirty years of age? I really was hypnotised, possibly by an evil optician like in 'The Miserable Mill' by Lemony Snicket? Or perhaps I'm just plain mad.

In other news, I've been spending quite a lot of time lately playing othello/reversi at Kurnik, a Polish games website where you can play just about any weird game you like, without downloading things or signing your life away. It's where all the cool othello players hang out nowadays, and I've been sort of meaning to start playing there for ages now, but only just got round to it (and then only because I was bored stiff at work). But the whole site really does deserve a plug - not many people go out of their way to provide a place where you can play connect 4 with people from all over the world.

Also, Kurnik is Polish for henhouse. I think that's an excellent name for a website.

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