I'm gonna live forever

Okay, next Wednesday you all have to skive off work and/or come to Britain to see me on This Morning. They're even putting me up in a hotel in London on Tuesday night! And, in a shining example of effective time management, I've arranged a job interview at DHL at East Midlands Airport for late Wednesday afternoon. Although to be honest I'm not over-enthusiastic about the job.

But that's all for next Wednesday, and as the old saying goes, next Wednesday never comes. Tomorrow, on the other hand, we have the othello nationals! I would really like to do well in it, although as I've hardly played the game for months now, it's unlikely that I will. Still, it's my dream that one day my page on the othello wiki will mention something about my othello-playing ability.

TMWRNJ!

Okay, this is cool - This Morning want me on the show! I get to hang out on national TV with whoever hosts This Morning these days, possibly Phillip Schofield! Don't know what day yet, but I'll keep you informed. Also, I've just been talking to someone over the internet who didn't know my real name, and when I told him he said "You're Ben Pridmore? Wow!" I never meet people who've actually heard of me without being told! I'm really turning into a global celebrity! I'll have paparazzi going through my bins before you know it!

I also did that interview with the Rheinische Post today, so if you're a devoted reader, stay tuned. Alexei the UK correspondent says that he might be able to write the article some time soon if the paper stop insisting he write about Madeleine McCann and nothing else. So don't hold your breath.

It's that time of year again

It seems I'm probably going to have a big birthday party again this year. I always thought of myself as the type not to have a big bash, what with it being so depressing being as old and ancient as I am (I CAN'T be 31 next month, can I?), but after the last two years of having a get-together with all the gang, it's become one of those annual traditions. The plan is to try to find an apartment to rent for the weekend somewhere nice, like Manchester.

But 31? I don't know how that happened.

Holy Pillow Talk, Batman!

Ahh, bliss! BBC4 are repeating the sixties Batman series. Which, although I wasn't around in the sixties to watch, I have fond memories of thanks to the repeats on early-morning ITV in the eighties. Those were the days. And being on that channel and not bothering to turn the telly off led me to another interesting discovery - did you know Doris Day was still alive? It's news to me. I don't know why, but I'd just automatically assumed that she was dead. I'm going to have to look up all the other people I've been assuming were no longer with us now, just to make sure they're not going to be turning up unexpectedly on my doorstep. I'll start with Julius Caesar.

The documentary, which I turned off after five minutes despite being vaguely interested in Doris Day and her continued existence, was one of those horribly badly made ones with sort of semi-dramatisations of what the narrator is saying in the background, so that when it recounts how she was hit by a train at the age of thirteen we hear train sounds, clanging bells and a scream. Yuck. If the documentary about me contains anything even vaguely like that, I'm going to sue somebody. Or at least decry it in public as loudly as possible. The filming's finished now, I don't know if I mentioned that - Nick is now busy editing it into some kind of coherent whole (I don't envy him), and it'll be out either late this year or early next, I forget which. So mark your diaries.

It took me years to write, will you take a look?

Okay, I've decided I need to get on with writing this book of mine. I don't even care about getting it published, I'm just sick of "How To Be Clever" sitting there in absentia and mocking me with its non-written-ness. Enough of this talking to people about it, composing chapters in my head, vaguely assuming it'll get done one of these days. It's been a good four years now since I started "writing" it, it's just silly now. So from now on, I'm really, properly going to work at it. And everybody reading this has to constantly pester me about it and complain that it's not on the shelves of Waterstone's yet. Okay?

Hanjie!

I seem to have got addicted to hanjie puzzles - those Japanese ones with the grid where you colour in squares according to the numbers at the sides. I've been doing them for years, since they first started appearing in Tough Puzzles magazine (called 'Tsunami' in those days, until they changed the name after the big real tsunami), but to pass the time on the way to Bahrain I bought a book of puzzles that had lots of hanjies in, and now I can't get enough of the things. I suppose there are worse things I could be addicted to. Like sudoku. That would just be weird.