Twenty-nine tomorrow

Which inspires me to look back over the last year and think "What have I achieved while I was 28?"

Not all that much, really. The year when I was 26, I quit my job, grew a beard, spent a lot of time wandering around wondering around the subject of what to do with my life, spent a month in Cambridge learning how to teach foreigners English, came up with some revolutionary new techniques for memorising numbers and playing cards, lost a lot of weight, got a new job, quit it, went to Kuala Lumpur and muscled my way into the top echelon of memory people.

When I was 27, I got a better new job, moved to Derby, made what I think was a real contribution to stopping the whole 'memory sports' thing splitting into warring factions, won the world championship (and the 'world cup' that would have been another world championship if I hadn't suggested the name change), played some uncharacteristically good othello and qualified for the world championships of that, and was on The Weakest Link.

What have I done while I've been 28? Played in the world othello championships that I'd qualified for in the previous year of my existence, and did quite badly. Found that I couldn't motivate myself to try to win the world memory championship again, decided to memorise pi to 50,000 places instead only to give up on it when someone else did it better, entered the world memory championship after all and did quite badly in that too. Got made redundant.

No changes of job, address, facial hair, no world champion titles, a definite sense of lack of achievement in any of the areas that matter. Am I just being pessimistic? It just seems like the pace of my life has been slowing down as I inch my way reluctantly towards thirty.

So what am I going to do with the final year of my third decade on this planet? I think it's time for some new year-of-my-time-on-this-planet resolutions!

Well, there's going to be a new job, for starters. And unlike the last one which mainly relied on me doing really easy things that everyone else thought (wrongly) were difficult, this one is likely to involve actual work. Making a go of that is going to be a big achievement, I think.

There'll probably be a new address if I stay working in Burton too. Consider me officially resolved to get a nice place and keep it relatively clean and pretty-looking.

Memory things? I'm not sure what to resolve, just yet. To keep in training is a good one, whether I go for the WMC or not (and I think I probably will). Next weekend, I'll make sure to do a proper training session, and keep in the habit of doing it whenever I get a chance. Will I go for pi or not? Seems a shame to waste all the work I did earlier this year, but then again at least half of it has drained out of my brain already, so it'll mean a lot more work. Oh, what the heck. Consider that another resolution. I'll be checking my progress against this ill-advised list for the next year, so I'll regret it later, but yes. Recite pi to 50,000 places, maybe next March. Depending when or if Boris does his speed cards contest thing.

I think this also calls for a general resolution to do something new and spectacular. Getting a book of some kind published would be good.
Be it How To Be Clever, Jayce and Alex, or something else entirely. In fact, I hereby resolve to write not just HTBC, but something else entirely too, and make a decent effort to get someone other than my circle of friends to say it's good.

Also, I need to resolve to be nicer to my mother. I know it's a bad idea to write about that here, since as previously mentioned she's almost certainly reading it, but what the heck. Got a card and present from her this morning, with a letter attached - and none of this "I wish it was easier for us to relate" stuff either, a nice friendly letter. Seems she's been part of a study on synaesthesia by University College, London. "I have it quite strongly," she says, which is news to me, but as you might have gathered we're not big on communication in this family. I haven't, but synaesthesia has been a frequent subject of discussion in memory circles. Daniel Tammet says he's synaesthetic, and so did the famous (and, according to Oleg Stepanov, wildly overrated) Russian memory man Shereshevsky. But none of the 'real' memory people, as far as I know, do.

By 'real' people, I mean the ones who do well in memory championships, of course. I make no claims that this relates in any way to actually having a good memory. Anyway, I'll give my mum a call tomorrow, if I can summon up the nerve. Although I'll have to get the number from Grandma, obviously.

Incidentally, it's Neil Aspinall's birthday today. Tends to get overlooked in all the John Lennon hoopla that goes on at this time of year, but I've always thought Neil seemed like a really great guy. Maybe not the Fifth Beatle, but at least the ninth or tenth.

Two and a half hours (and, if we're being technical, three minutes, since I was born at 12:03am) of being 28 left. Is it too late to do something spectacular? The only thing I can think of is to take all my clothes off and run screaming down the street, but it looks a bit chilly out there. And there's no streetlights, so I might tread in something nasty.