FOUR blogs today!

Because those disappeared blog entries have reappeared. It's some kind of conspiracy against me, I'm sure of it.

It needs to be said

Yes, three blogs today, to make up for the disappeared ones. After nearly a month of steady weight loss (11 pounds in total!), I put a couple back on last weekend after going away for a high-calorie picnic and then a Burger King on the way back just for the heck of it, and since then I've been struggling to stick to eating right. In fact, yesterday, I bought one of those big giant bars of dairy milk because it was relatively cheap, and after eating half of it in the space of five minutes (entirely composed of I'll-just-have-a-little-nibble) I decided to be resolute and throw it in the bin.

And now it's calling to me from the bin, where it's all wrapped up and would be perfectly edible. Giving in to temptation would make me the worst kind of monster, I know, but I'm really sorely tempted. I'm not even hungry, I'm just bored with healthy food. I'll just have to exercise some willpower...

And hey!

Where are the blog entries I posted this week? The pesky system seems to have deleted them! Who has deprived the world of my ramblings about BBC Television Centre being circular?

Speed 2 - this time it's on a boat

I've regained the ability to memorise things quickly! For the last year or so, secretly, I haven't been memorising numbers and things as fast as I used to. General rustiness was the reason behind it, but I just couldn't get back up to the speeds I used to have when I was practicing every day. But for the last couple of days I've been as speedy as I ever was, and now that I've rediscovered that art, I've been training speed memorisation just as fast as I can, to see how accurate my recall is at warp 9.

The answer, interestingly, is that doing 1500 binary digits in just under seven minutes my recall was excellent, more than good enough to break a record or two; doing 30 rows of abstract images in just under five minutes I could recall them to just about acceptable levels with effort, but I need more work to get up to world-championship standard; and doing 468 decimal digits in just over four minutes I was a long, long way off recalling them adequately. Top top speed in numbers has never really worked for me, but I'm still hopeful that I can do it with some more intensive training. The bar has been raised to stupidly impossible levels these last couple of years (ahh, I remember breaking the world record with 333 and everyone thinking I was awesome...) but at least when someone else has done it I know that there's no reason I can't do it too.

With speed cards I already go as fast as I can, more or less, but I ran through a pack in just over 21 seconds today, for the first time in a long while. Didn't recall it correctly, but once again there's hope that with a bit more training, anything's possible...

BBC Television Centre

It's only the second time I've been there, but it's an extremely groovy building. It's all big and circular. Also, travelling there was a lot easier than last time, because I insisted on taking the tube rather than a taxi. Taxis are nasty things. Anyway, the upcoming programme, "Epic Win", will involve a strange memory challenge that I'll keep a secret so as to build suspense. It should be fun, though. Stay tuned to BBC1 for the next two or three months until it's broadcast.

This will at least keep me busy until the World Memory Championship finally happens, because I've heard that it's being rescheduled again. Probably a good thing, giving me more time to train, although I did an extremely speedy binary practice this morning before going to London, so I'm feeling confident again now. Yay for me!

The vicious circle of dieting

I was doing really well at the whole weight-losing thing, but then I went away last weekend and was unhealthy (because you don't want other people to see you eating healthy food, do you? They'd think I was weird!) and when I weighed myself yesterday I found I'd put a couple of pounds back on. And of course this makes me want to eat chocolate and sweets to make myself feel better, and that'll only make me even fatter. I tell you, it's hard to be supermodel-thin like I am.

Also, sorry for the lack of updates, I just never seem to find the time for blogging. But I've been memory-training fairly adequately, I've done an hour numbers and 30-minute binary practice since last we spoke, and if I do all three 'marathons' each week between now and October, I really will win the world championship, probably. Maybe. Anyway, update about the Cambridge championship is coming soon, promise.

Tomorrow, though, I'm going to London to discuss things with the BBC for an upcoming programme. Which makes me sound a lot more like a TV star than it should, because this isn't a major big deal kind of thing. I'm also in the mood to write books and things, so maybe I'll do that. All I need to do is get out of the habit of using phrases like "and things" in every sentence, and I'll be fine.