Dreißig Minuten

Ooh, I feel accomplished tonight. I've done practice sessions of half-hour cards, half-hour numbers and half-hour binary - with an hour's recall time for each, that's four and a half hours of proper training for the German championship. If I can do that kind of thing most weekends between now and the end of July, my brain will be ready for anything!

Didn't get particularly great scores, mind you, especially in the numbers where I made oodles of annoying little mistakes, but the important thing is that I didn't have nearly as much mind-wandering as I'd expected to have. Considering I haven't done a big lengthy memorising session for aaaaages, in fact, I was on really great form. I'm happy!

Another good memory-related thing - I found a half-eaten bag of tooty frooties in my jacket pocket this morning that I'd forgotten all about. I love when that happens!

Someone please remind me

I keep meaning to do the Online Memory Challenge on Sunday mornings, but I always remember it when I'm in the middle of something else and anyway it started twenty minutes ago. This is, of course, the first memory-based challenge, and I tend to fail it. So could someone give me a poke to remind me beforehand? Thanks.

Statto

"How does it feel to join Herbert Sutcliffe, Denis Compton, Geoffrey Boycott and Graham Gooch as the only English batsmen to score centuries in three successive Test innings?" an interviewer asked a bemused Ravi Bopara after today's play. Clearly it was news to him that he'd accomplished this quite impressive but rather obscure feat, but he managed to come up with a nice answer. I was impressed.

And it put me in the mood to find some statistic I could use to motivate myself to do some memory training - I like achieving statistics. And here's a good one - from the Austrian championship in November 2004 to the World Championship in August 2006, Clemens Mayer won seven consecutive memory competitions. I'm on five at the moment, so if I was to win the German and UK championships this summer, a world championship win would beat that record. Woo!

Of course, winning the German championship is pretty unlikely, since they don't generally do English translations, but it's still something to aim for...

Fat and useless

That's me. I never do anything productive these days. Well, from now on, starting tomorrow, I'm going to be hard-working and efficient and also eat less and exercise rather more. That's a Zoomy guarantee!

I am going to Pittsburgh in July, you see, and I intend to be perfectly in shape, body-wise and memory-training-wise by then. Like I said, starting tomorrow.

I don't normally write about work, but...

Gah, I've had too much to do at work this week! And it's only Tuesday! I need a holiday!

Actually, I'm wondering whether I should go to AnthroCon (the world's largest gathering for lovers of funny-animal comics, cartoons etc) in Pittsburgh in July. It would be nice to get away for a week or so and see the sights of a place I've never been to. But the only thing stopping me is the fact that I went to New York in March, I'm going to Hamburg at the end of July and then probably Bahrain in November. Four foreign trips in a year is rather the kind of thing I disapprove of in others. If you tell me you go overseas four times in a year, I'll decry you as some kind of bourgeois snob who the working classes need to rise up and overthrow and probably not want to be your friend. So I'd feel like a bit of a hypocrite.

On the other hand, I can just about afford it, more or less, and I really want to do it...

The superhuman power of eternal youth

There's an article about me in the Derby Evening Telegraph (and you can read it on the website even if you're not fortunate enough to live in Derby), telling the locals who might have missed it that I'm in Men's Health magazine.

Someone from the Telegraph did call me, at work, last week and ask for a quick interview. I told him my home number and asked him to give me a call outside office hours, but in the end they seem to have decided that my input wasn't necessary, and just gone ahead and written the article without it.

The best thing about this is that they've assumed my status quo is still what it was the last time they interviewed me - so the article says I still live in Derby, and, best of all, that I'm still 31! I'm never going to do another interview with anyone again, so as to stay youthful forever!

If you're roughly my age and from the same country

You'll be pleased to see that this is available on YouTube.

If you're the wrong age or the wrong nationality, or if you were hoping for a more interesting blog tonight... sorry.