Something slightly concerning that just occurred to me

Nord Anglia plc's financial year ends on August 31st. They'll want the annual accounts done as quickly as possible after that date, no doubt. The World Memory Championships start on September 1st, in Malaysia. I'll be wanting time off to go there and get back, and recover from jetlag, and after I get back I'll inevitably be pestered by newspapers and things (who always refuse to leave me alone for the week or so after the competition, especially if I win). There's going to be a serious conflict of interests here.

Actually, I've always kind of wanted to hand in my notice because my job was getting in the way of my hobbies. It's possible that I might have a chance. I'll leave it a while before I discreetly enquire about how cool the bosses are likely to be about the whole thing.

On the other hand, I'm in a really great memory mood today - I've been properly training the long events for the first time in a while, and I beat my world record in binary (with 3845), and almost certainly beat the world record in hour cards too, although I haven't had a chance to check them yet (trying for 30 packs, and there's at least a chance that I recalled them all correctly). More importantly, if I do an hour numbers tomorrow, and maybe something else like names and faces too (if I'm really feeling good), I'll have done the kind of weekend routine that I was doing a couple of years ago but haven't been able to fully get back in the swing of since then.

I know there aren't many people in the world who enthuse about their ability to sit down for three hours memorising and recalling playing cards, but hey, each to his own. And I think it's pretty darn cool.

Ugh

This is the second time in two weeks I've lamented about drinking too much, so I apologise, but obviously I'm turning into one of those comical drunks who everyone laughs at on the street in old movies.

It's not like I even had all that much in the pubs in Burton last night (okay, four pints of Stella which is always one too many for me, a bottle of Smirnoff Ice and a couple of swigs of other stuff), but for some reason today I had the worst hangover of my life. Obviously I'm getting old. But I got up at the normal time today fully intending to go to work, and staggered as far as the bathroom (about three steps from my bed - very small flat) before realising that walking around really wasn't going to be an option. So I called into work and asked if I could have a day's holiday (boss's response: "Of course you can!" in the usual tones of astonishment that I felt it necessary to ask rather than just not turning up) and then spent the whole day in bed, apart from one quick vomiting interlude.

I've still got a headache. Possibly it's a virus of some kind - that sounds much more socially acceptable than just making myself very ill after a night out with work people.

Felix

On the train home tonight a twenty-something woman got on at Burton behind me carrying a cat in one of those cases you carry cats around in, I don't know if there's a name for them. She was talking to it in a squeaky voice, "Where shall we sit, Felix? Let's go down here, Felix..."

She sat further down the carriage and continued to squeak a conversation with Felix all the way to Derby. Meanwhile, I was craning my neck and trying not to look too obvious, but trying to see whether there was actually a cat in the box at all. I could only see through the slats in the plastic at the back, but I could see all the way through and couldn't actually spot any sign of Felix in there at all. Maybe he was lying down, covering his ears and pretending to be asleep like any self-respecting person would when faced with someone like that, or maybe he only existed in the mind of that woman.

I hope it's the latter. Talking to a cat in a box like that is just plain annoying. Talking to an IMAGINARY cat in a box takes real style.

The Armstrongs

An extra post tonight, because I've just watched the first episode of "The Armstrongs", the BBC2 fly-on-the-wall documentary about a double-glazing company in Coventry. I wouldn't normally have watched it, but one of the stars is othello player Michael Handel, and I'm glad I heard about his appearance in advance, because the whole show was very funny. It's played for laughs, hyped as a real-life version of The Office, and actually comes very close to living up to the hype. It's well worth checking out next week - Michael is particularly good (getting plenty of plugs in for othello tournaments), and the Armstrongs themselves are the kind of people you really have to admire.

Stretching a point

I'm going out to the pub with work people tomorrow night, to celebrate Colin's 21st birthday, and I choose to count this as being invited to a 21st birthday party. Regular readers will know that I consider this a mark of being cool and not over the hill and nearly thirty.

Granted, it's sort of a blanket invitation to everyone in the finance department, and not technically a party as such, but elderly people like me will take every remotely-like-a-21st-birthday-party-thing they can get.

A horrible dilemma

Tonight's European football matches kick off in fifteen minutes, and I still haven't decided which one to watch. Arsenal or Liverpool? Arsenal will probably be the more exciting game, but on the other hand Liverpool will either win conclusively and get anyone watching it feeling all patriotic, or lose embarrassingly and provide perverse entertainment for me tomorrow with my Liverpool-supporting colleagues.

But then, I watched Liverpool on Saturday, against Man U, so in the interests of impartiality I probably should watch Arsenal tonight. But then again, I generally prefer watching Liverpool for some reason. And yes, I watched a whole football game while my football-hating brother was my guest. I'm a terrible host, aren't I?

Seeing as there's footy on telly, I've skipped my usual memory practice tonight. I don't know if I've mentioned it here before (as that would involve remembering things, which I'm surprisingly bad at), but I'm definitely organising a memory competition at the MSO in Cambridge on May 7th. All I need to do now is finalise the format - I'd made up a six-discipline, suitable-for-complete-beginners kind of competition, mindful of not having enough time for a full championship-standard event, even the quickest kind, but it turns out there's a new-style event that has recently been invented by Gunther, with lots of five-minute disciplines.

Had Gunther been the only one to point this out to me, I would just have ignored it (he irritates me a tiny bit, so I tend to be prejudiced against his ideas - and besides, I objectively don't like such short disciplines anyway), but Simon Orton, who doesn't irritate me at all and whose opinions I respect, suggested it too. So I put it up as a poll on the memorysports forum, confident that the regular posters there (who are all the people I think of as 'my gang') would vote for the choice I said I preferred. But it turns out that the majority seem to like the horrid new event better than my idea, so I'm just going to have to go along with that and organise the nasty thing. Ah well...

Come along and we can cross the bridge together

As I've previously mentioned, my favourite website in the world is offline at the moment. And Captain Vegetable, the owner and creator of Virtual Pooh Sticks, is impossible to contact, so nobody knows what's happening, except that his reassuring message has reappeared on the VPS website, promising to get it fixed as soon as he finds the time. Which I suppose is better than nothing. Fractionally.

The Farmer's Wife

Apologies for not posting anything over the weekend. As I've mentioned before, it's kind of inhibiting to write this while I've got someone staying with me.

It's not a shortage of trivial thing to talk about, of course, I'll never run out of those. For one thing, we moved down into our real office on Friday afternoon. It's great, we've got all the latest technology like flat plasma screens and wireless mouses and keyboards hooked up to our obsolete PCs. I like the idea of tail-less mouses. It fits with my theory that all technology is in fact magic and doesn't conform to any scientific logic. I'll explain it in detail some time if I'm really bored, or else write a book about it, but basically the idea is that anything's possible if enough people believe it is.

What's more interesting is that Campino have started selling a different assortment of fruit sweets - peach, raspberry and blackcurrant. Not all mixed together in one sweet, separate sweets in each flavour, all mixed together in a bag. I wholeheartedly applaud this idea, because previously they've just sold peach, raspberry and blueberry, and blueberry sweets taste horrid. Blackcurrant isn't very nice either, but at least it's a British flavour that more people like over here. It offends me when sweet manufacturers don't tailor their product for each international market - keep that up and we'll be eating grape-flavour skittles, which is just wrong.

I like Campinos. They're like eating real fruit, only with a delicious chemical aftertaste.

Come on everybody, let's clean up the house

I'm trying to motivate myself to tidy up a bit around here. I think it's a losing battle, but it does need doing. I've washed my bed sheets tonight for the first time in about... well, it must be four months at least. People tend to find that a quite unpleasant detail, for some reason. It's not like the Queen's coming round, it's just my brother, but it's nice to clean up every once in a while - for one thing, if I end up moving out of here it'll be less of a job to pack up and get the flat more or less into the kind of condition I got it in. Not that I think I have any hope of getting my deposit back, it's just not in me to clean things that thoroughly.

I'm feeling under pressure to write something entertaining at the moment, because Jeremy Dyer has kindly posted a link to this blog on the British Othello mailing list. I hate the idea of people I know actually reading this thing, for some reason. Which makes you wonder why I'm writing it at all, but hey, I'm a complex character. Or completely insane, one or the other. I can only write interesting entries when I'm not imagining anyone reading the end product.

The ice beam

Watching an unexceptional game of football tonight, Bolton v Marseille in the Uefa Cup (the European competition for teams not good enough to play in the Champions League), which has been enlivened by the commentators' efforts to find something interesting to talk about. In the first half, a Marseille player went down injured, and the physio treated him with a strange-looking device that caused some extensive debate between Colin Murray and Pat Nevin:

"What is that, some kind of machine gun?"
"It looks like something out of Doctor Who, doesn't it?"
"I mean, what is it, what does it look like, I've never seen anything like it before..."
"Looks a bit like one of those speed guns."
"Oh no, he's not going to get a ticket, is he?"

And so on for quite some time, even after the game had resumed. It turns out it's some sort of contraption for spraying cold stuff onto someone's injury. The Channel 5 commentators, being people who aren't good enough to get jobs on the BBC, are always fun to listen to. Tonight's game also included the disclaimer "Of course, we try not to be biased. We do want the British team to win, obviously..." Makes a dull, bad-tempered 0-0 draw quite entertaining, really.

Back in the real world, the office is nearly finished. We'll be able to move downstairs from the mezzanine level where we're occupying unfinished boardrooms and corridors, and into the actual office space soon. It looks quite pretty now, all new flatscreen monitors and shiny new phones. I don't really like open-plan offices, though, I prefer each little department to have its own little office - makes it much easier to play on the internet or have a quiet nap without anyone noticing.

What's in the mail today?

Well, since nobody thought to send me a card or present (shame on you all), I've been trying to decide what the most romantic thing anybody's ever said to me is. And the conclusion I came to is that nobody's ever going to beat "Want to come and kill humans and bathe in their blood with me?" Wolf can be such a sweetie when he wants to be.

What I did get today, on the other hand, is fan mail, which is always nice. It happens about once a month, somebody who I've never heard of looks me up on the internet to ask me something about memorising playing cards. The latest guy actually describes himself as a 'huge fan', which is great for the ego. I just have to avoid disillusioning him somehow (possibly by relocating to Antarctica before he notices how bad I am at giving memory advice). Still, he even praised the chapter of "How To Be Clever" that I sent him, and encouraged me to write the rest of the thing, which is cool. I'm almost in the mood to sit down and do it, too.

But before I do, and even though I seem to have been talking about othello much more than usual just lately, I should mention that the French ranking list has been updated, not including last weekend's tournament, but counting a couple of foreign ones before it. I've dropped down from 141st to 143rd, but only because of the unfairness of alphabetical order. The two people on the same number of points as me are listed as 141 and 142. Now, normally I'd just get around the problem by changing my name to Aaron A. Aardvark, but even that wouldn't work this time, because the current number 141 is Jens Aagaard-Hansen, who I bet just made that name up in case this situation ever happens. I need to rename myself something starting with a number, or possibly a punctuation mark of some kind.

Hey, maybe I could call myself ?

Winning othello strategies

I've just been looking at my games from the weekend, using Zebra the othello program. Oh, and hey, it's called Zebra because it's about black and white, I suppose. I never thought of that before. Anyway, I'm still none the wiser as to why I did so terribly on Sunday and so comparatively well on Saturday (I beat Josbert van der Zande, Elisabetta Vecchi, Roman Kraczyk and Roel Hobo, who are all better than me). I tend to just make moves up as I go along - there's some kind of analysis going on in my mind, but it's generally a pretty subconscious kind of thing. When I sit down and go through a game, I generally have no idea why I made a particular series of moves, whether the computer says it's genius or insanity.

I'm still planning to try memorising oodles of positions and correct moves, but I have no idea when I'm going to fit that into my busy schedule. Training for the WMC comes first until September at least. Unless I get bored with it.

Less beer, more sleep

That seems to be a recipe for success in othello tournaments. Although that's based on a very dodgy premise, assuming that I would have done better today had I not been hungover and tired. But I did really quite well on day one, winning four out of seven and not losing the others too spectacularly.

But I'm too tired to write about it now, and Father Ted's on telly (Chirpy Burpy Cheap Sheep), so I'll write more tomorrow. Unless I write an extensive critique of Bear In The Big Blue House instead, I'll see how I feel.

My Own Genie

The Dandy isn't generally worth reading. It never has been, really, although it's had its moments over the years, it's always been second best to the Beano somehow. But there's a strip in it nowadays called My Own Genie which is absolutely freaking hysterical every single week. It outshines everything else in there by a long way, with its genuine wit and perfectly-timed comedy. The artwork's unconventional, in keeping with modern Dandy policy, but in this case it still manages to put the point across like it should. And the writing is in a class of its own.

I just thought I ought to mention that. No time to say anything else, off to Cambridge. I'll be back on Sunday, bloglings!

Good grief

The US Memory Championship has just announced (at rather short notice) that it will be adopting a radical new format, with different events and a focus on things that look good on TV. I'm all in favour of this kind of thing if it gets a bit of publicity for the event, even if it is completely different to the way the big memory championships work.

Gunther, on the other hand, has suggested that the World Memory Sports Council might like to take legal action against the organisers of the US Championship to stop them doing it. It takes me back to the summer of 2004, when he was suggesting similar sanctions against Andi's Memory World Cup (although Andi was the first one to threaten other people with lawyers there). I don't see why anyone takes the whole thing so seriously, I really don't. It's just a bit of fun, for crying out loud!

Still, Dominic made the very valid point that some of the budding American memorisers would probably want to get onto the world ranking list, for which we need standardised competitions all over the world (something they've never yet had in the USA, preferring a shrunk-down version in the previous years). Not that there even is a world ranking list at the moment, because the WMSC haven't got round to working one out yet, but still. It is cool to be able to say "I'm Number X in the world!". It's even cooler to be able to say you're the number one in the world, of course, so I hope I end up on top again when they do release the new list, however they work it out (I have my own world ranking list based on past WMC performances, and I'm number two on that, after Andi).

After the 2002 world championship, I really enjoyed going around telling people I was number sixteen in the world of memory competitions. Of course, there were so few people taking part in those days that it was really easy to get into the world's top twenty, not like today. But you didn't have to tell people that, did you? For some reason, I was less inclined to boast about it when I got up to number four, and then number one - probably because I'm just completely unable to boast without turning it into self-mockery of some kind, and it's hard to do that when you've got an achievement you're genuinely proud of.

What I do like telling people is my position on the othello ranking list. If only someone would manage to put together a proper world ranking list including all those great players from Japan and elsewhere, it would be even better, but Number 141 with a bullet on the French European Rating List is still pretty cool. I had to look it up to see where I was, by the way. I was thinking 142, so now I'm quite happy with myself. But I notice I'm one place behind Joel Blackmur, on 1708 points to his 1709. I'll have to do something about that this weekend...

Why I'm not a good accountant

I really don't care whether the company I work for makes a profit or not. I care about accurately reporting how much profit or loss it's made, as a matter of professional pride, but I don't give a monkey's whether it's making millions or going bust. The really good accountants genuinely do care about that kind of thing.

Also, I don't feel more than a tiny bit guilty about leaving on time tonight while my underlings work late (one of them's on holiday for the next few days, the other was late in because she had to pick up a bag she left on the bus, and anyway I'm going to have to start early and finish late tomorrow to get everything done, I just couldn't be bothered with it tonight).

Anyway, I've got Friday afternoon off work, which is nice. Only because I had half a day's holiday accrued that I need to take before the end of the month, but it'll let me get an early start going down to Cambridge for the weekend othello tournament. I have a tradition at the Cambridge International in February every year of going down there on Friday night and writing a diary entry in my room in Sleeperz. Of course, now I've got a blog and write about my life every day, that's kind of redundant. But on the other hand, I tend to get more into deep introspection than I do here for the world to read, so it's probably still beneficial, psychologically speaking. I don't know why, but it's fun to sit down at a prearranged time every year and write down what's happened to you in the twelve months previously, and what the heck you think is going to happen in the year to come.

Having written this essay every year, incidentally, I keep the bit of paper in my bag for a couple of weeks, then lose it or throw it away. That's probably psychologically beneficial too.

Work sucks

Actually, it really doesn't. I've just spent the day doing the most complex, tedious part of my regular monthly job, and I still quite enjoyed it. I feel kind of guilty about enjoying being an accountant, sometimes.

Of course, doing nothing but work does leave me without much to write about in this blog. A main reason for doing this thing is so that I can look back on it in years to come and see what I was doing. Do I want to see that I was doing nothing but work, all week, every week? I should skive off occasionally and do something exciting instead.

I'm definitely, absolutely, thinking about finding a flat in Burton now. Just as soon as I get round to it. Also on the getting-round-to-it-eventually list is getting some dollars for my trip to New York. Hey, maybe I could fill the blog with things I haven't done yet but really intend to!

Non-famous

I know I didn't want anybody to see me on telly, but I'm a bit annoyed by the fact that nobody saw me on telly. Doesn't anyone in the whole company watch Child Of Our Time? Sheesh.

Never mind. What's more annoying is that I'm listening to Virgin Radio and it's just the idiot DJ Geoff talking. They don't normally do that - I turn the radio on if I want to listen to music, and Virgin are normally quite obliging like that. Can't be bothered with skipping around the stations until I find something I like, I've just turned it off. Time I was in bed, anyway.

I'm never going to be a TV personality

I wasn't going to watch it, but in the end I couldn't resist it. Could have been worse, I suppose - it could have gone on longer than the couple of minutes it was. But that was more than enough of me shyly mumbling about impwoving your memowy to put me off doing anything like that again. Apart from the thing like that that I'm still doing at the moment, with Nick. And I had no idea I rolled my eyes up into my head in such a scary way while I'm memorising. I'll have to watch that, it makes me look really weird.

Anyway, this Child Of Our Time is a funny kind of series. I've never watched it before, and probably won't again, but it's quite fun in its way. Although one of the bits involved giving one group of children a new toy and another group nothing, which seems a bit on the cruel side, and they actually made one little girl cry in another bit when she and her family got a test wrong. That's just nasty. Isn't there a law about being mean to small people in the name of entertainment?

A cool bit on now about gaze aversion, though. I've always found that fascinating, seeing as I have real trouble looking at people's faces at all. This is why I'm so bad at the names and faces discipline at the WMC (well, that and the mental conditioning I've given myself by going around saying I'm so bad at it - my scores in that one event have got progressively worse over the years, because I've convinced myself I can't do it. I really need to break that habit). And if you look at me on that bit on today's programme, I keep averting my eyes and looking around the room while I'm talking. I do that all the time when I'm nervous.

Anyway, enough science stuff. Topped 2000 in hour numbers today for the first time. I think I really am better now at the memory stuff than I ever have been. If I don't win the world championship this year, it'll be because someone else has got even better, not because I haven't done my best. So I'm going to be happy whatever happens.

What kind of butterflies grow from trains?

That's the final line of a Tony Buzan poem. It just about qualifies as 'profound', as per my promise of the last couple of days. If you're still not satisfied, you might like to read this down a really big hole. Anyway, it leads in to what I actually wanted to talk about...

So, one of the traditional events at memory championships is memorising a poem. Usually a Tony Buzan one nowadays (he's the founder and leading inspiration of the world memory championships, has done a lot of great things in the field of learning and education and expanding the mind's capabilities and believes he's a great poet too), but the first few world championships had poems specially written by Ted Hughes, and it was one of the few disciplines with some kind of real-life application. But since the world championships became genuinely international, and especially now that all the good memorisers are German-speakers, it's become increasingly difficult to translate the poem in a way that's equally difficult to memorise in multiple languages.

Because of this, the World Memory Sports Council, which basically consists of Tony and the couple of people who do the actual work of running the world championships (god bless 'em), has decided to replace the poem with something new. So Phil Chambers, the guy who does 99% of the work (and I'm never sure what exactly he gets out of it, putting in long nights shuffling cards, calculating the scores, arranging a million and one little details, but I'm very grateful) contacted the top five competitors of the moment (me, Clemens, Gunther, Astrid and Joachim) and the rest of the WMSC to ask for ideas and suggestions. We kicked around lots of different ideas for new disciplines, and in the end put it down to a vote between four different ones.

I don't think this was intentional, but Phil in all good faith suggested a simple enough idea - everyone involved in the discussion would vote on their favourite new discipline, with Tony having the casting vote in the event of a tie. This of course created the possibility of all the competitors voting for one thing and still losing out to the WMSC's favourite choice. And that's exactly what happened. After some wrangling, we all voted for Gunther's word-pairs suggestion, while Tony, Phil, Dominic O'Brien (eight-times champion who's not actively competing any more), Chris Day (the other person-who-does-the-actual-work) and Ray Keene (chess grandmaster who if he actively does anything for the WMSC besides being Tony's friend, I don't know what it is) picked Dominic's "abstract images" idea.

So now we have a situation where the WMSC have 'consulted' the leading competitors and then ignored them. Doesn't create much good feeling all round. Not that I really mind in principle - I don't actually like the idea of the competitors being able to choose the rules in the first place (what other 'proper' mental sport does that? But it's been the norm in the world of memory in the past, especially during Dominic's heyday) - but what bugs me about the whole thing is the part of Phil's results-announcing email saying "Tony Buzan has asked me to thank you on his behalf and let you know how pleased he is with the extremely high level of mentally literate discourse."

Tony has a tendency to think of himself as a god-like figure, revered by all, and no doubt really feels that those patronising words would be well-received by people who are being told that their views have been acknowledged and ignored. And Phil genuinely does revere Tony, so that thought no doubt never crossed his mind. That's the thing about this - nobody's setting out to do anything but be considerate of others, and it's still ended up with all-round bad feeling. Not Andi Bell levels of bad feeling, but Gunther especially is in a bad mood over the whole thing. Coupled with the decision to hold the WMC this year in Kuala Lumpur, the WMSC aren't hugely popular at the moment.

It'll all blow over, of course. But it's fun to watch while it's going on...