I'm in Newark Airport right now, waiting for my connecting flight back home - I should be still in the air en route from St Louis, but my flight was cancelled and the good people there put me on an earlier flight instead with no fuss at all. I'm impressed - I vowed never to fly with Continental again after they left me stranded in New York that time a couple of years ago (if I'd noticed before arriving at the airport that the St Louis people had booked me on a Continental flight, I might have asked them to change it), but they're off the naughty list now, for certain. That means my plane-company naughty list is empty again - I need some kind of travel-chaos horror-story, obviously.
Anyway, I've had a great time these last few days. Lots of not-too-strenuous memory tests, a surprisingly well-attended public meeting where I chatted generally about my life, failed spectacularly to perform any kind of impressive memory stunt and still got lots of applause and admiring noises, and a whole lot of sightseeing in the lovely sunny weather, too!
Actually, everyone in St Louis thought the weather was unbearably hot (as always, I hit the hottest weather in recorded history when I happened to be in the USA), but after I'd got used to it, I really enjoyed the heat and humidity. It's a nice change from the general miserableness back home.
So, are there any memory-folk reading this who'd like a similar holiday? The psychologists there are keen to do the same tests on a whole group of people who know about memory techniques, and I'd hugely recommend it. Most of the tests are word-based, so it's probably the kind of thing that would work better for English-speakers, but I don't know for sure.
As soon as I get back home, I'm going away on holiday again (my life is one big holiday these days, isn't it?), so I'll blog you all again in a week or so...
