Sorry, sorry

It seems that with all the fun filming today and everything (which I would really love to write about - possibly I'll break my rule and tell all the backstage secrets after all), I underestimated how much time I'd have to get my flat into the kind of state that two guests can sleep in tomorrow night. So I'm taking a two-minute break from a frenzied process of shovelling rubbish into the corners to clear a bit of space, in order to post this quick blogging instead of the lengthy and fictional entry I promised for tonight. Sorry about that.

Little girls from Sweden dream of silver-screen flirtation

As I've mentioned before, I'm being filmed extensively for the next three days. Some of the stuff we're doing sounds like fun, but this time round I won't talk about it that much, I'll leave it as a surprise for when the "Super Genius" documentary airs. Of course, that leaves me a little short of something to actually write about, but I'm well overdue for another outpouring of unusual fiction, so brace yourselves for another burst.

Funny money

At some point on my travels today (been up to Matlock, pitching our teaching-memory-skills-in-the-schools scheme) I've acquired a 1949 shilling coin passed off as a 10p piece. Quite nice condition, too, apart from a little scratch on one side that makes it look like George VI had a duelling scar on his cheek. They're being sold for two or three pounds on eBay, although whether anyone's buying them at that price is another matter, but I think I'll keep it, just in case I ever end up travelling back in time and need some money to finance my inaugural world memory championship several decades early.

I would love to know how this coin ended up coming to me in change - shillings haven't been legal tender for about 15 years now, so surely it can't have been passed around by mistake all this time? Maybe it's magic.

And speaking of taking the King's shilling, it's a great shame that Russell T Davies is leaving Doctor Who, but if he really had to go, Steven Moffat (who of course wrote Press Gang many years ago, thus making sense of that really quite brilliant "King's shilling" segue back there) is probably the best choice for a replacement. Hopefully it'll still be good and will still feature David Tennant in 2010 and beyond!

What did you do in the war, Daddy?

I had a dream last night that my father (still alive) had published his memoirs, and that they consisted mainly of entertaining anecdotes about his time as a soldier fighting in the Vietnam War. I worry about my brain, sometimes.

Discipline

I'm feeling quite optimistic about abstract images now. With any luck, and any practice, I'm aiming to get a reasonably high, Gunther-worrying kind of score maybe not at the Derby competition this weekend, but at the German, UK and World championships.

I'm not sure, all in all, how I'll get on at the Derby championship (assuming I'm able to compete rather than having to arbitrate, which still isn't certain). I'm not going to get much more chance to practice this next week - lots of documentary filming, a trip to Matlock to talk about schools memory demos, probably an unnecessary trip to Cambridge to return some clocks I've ended up with, maybe if I find a spare moment even some job-hunting. But I think I'm in half-decent form, and it'll be good practice to spend a whole weekend memorising - it's the long-lasting concentration I really need to work on. Assuming I get to compete, that is.