The Blue Peter Badge, chapter 94

I'm well aware that this blog has turned into "The Saga Of Zoomy's Blue Peter Badge", but I think I have to record that I found it again. It had fallen down behind my armchair, where I briefly dumped my jacket on Thursday night before deciding to be tidy and hang it up instead. So now I'm reunited with my status symbol, and I don't need to mention the thing again. Yay!

So, what else can I talk about? Let's try memory. I've been seriously unmotivated to train my memory lately. I don't know if this is in spite of or because of the fact that I've been doing so many tangentially-related memory celebrity things like This Morning and Radio 4 and the chimps and Blue Peter, but I'm really unable to sit down and practice the long or even medium-length memory disciplines now. I've become a performer rather than a competitor. Which isn't good. I really want to win the WMC again - I'd hate to go down in the history books as someone who only won it once, because I know, all modesty aside, that I can do better than that if I really live up to my potential.

Maybe it's just because it's Christmas. I always get depressed at Christmas.

Oh, I don't believe it!

I've lost my Blue Peter badge! It must have fallen off somewhere yesterday, because it wasn't on my jacket this morning. And still isn't, for that matter. I can't believe I didn't notice it last night when I hung the jacket up - possibly someone broke in to my flat last night and stole it. But this is terrible! I look like a normal person again, someone who's never been on Blue Peter and had Socks the cat sitting on his lap and everything! Well, I'm not going to stay badgeless. I'll buy one on eBay. Or steal one from someone else. Or draw a picture and send it to them.

I didn't wear the badge

At least, not for the interview. But I put it straight back on my jacket immediately afterwards. And in a charity shop in Burton, two people were very impressed by it. A woman in the shop told me that she's always wanted a Blue Peter badge, and that when she was little she sent them a story she'd written, but they wrote back saying that she hadn't written it herself, she'd just copied a story written by someone else. And she swears she didn't. It must have been a terrible childhood trauma, and I felt deeply sorry for her, but if she was hoping I'd give her my badge to make up for all her upset, well, she'll have been disappointed.

The interview went passably well, though - I'm making an effort to write about real life in this blog a bit more, because I'm conscious that I don't do that very much. I wouldn't have given me the job based on that interview, but I'm tougher than most people, so you never know.

Today on Blue Peter, Burgess Meredith memorises things!

I won't talk about the actual contents of the show until it's on telly next Wednesday, but I will say now that I've got a Blue Peter badge! My trousers are absolutely covered with hairs from Socks the cat! I got my own dressing room at Television Centre! I've never had my own dressing room on a TV show before!

I should have thought a bit more about the actual dressing part, though. I decided to wear my black suit jacket and trousers with a predominantly white T-shirt because I thought it would look cool and memorable. What I failed to take into account was the fact that I have a rather large and pointy nose, and the Blue Peter studio is currently festooned with animatronic penguins. I can't help thinking viewers will make comparisons.

Still, all this celebrity stuff is REALLY getting in the way of real life - I got a call from one of the recruitment agencies on Tuesday morning just before leaving for London, arranging an interview with Coors in Burton for tomorrow morning. What with being a nationally famous children's TV entertainer nowadays, I really haven't got a lot of time left to read up on the job and the company in preparation. It sounds like a cool job, though, so I'll do my best.

Should I take the Blue Peter badge off my jacket before the interview? All professional logic says yes, but I want people to see me wearing it. I will brush off the cat hairs, though.

Worst advert ever

I saw an advert on a tube train today for Vicks First Defence, which went along the lines of "A stinking cold is the last thing you want for Christmas. Vicks First Defence fights the cold virus in the early stages and may prevent symptoms developing. In fact, 77%* of people who used First Defence said they didn't get a cold. Happy Christmas."

The asterisk leads to some very small print saying "2006 satisfaction survey of 90 UK users."

So let's get this straight. Out of 90 people who used this product last Christmas, TWENTY of them developed a cold over the Christmas period? What percentage of people would normally get a cold over that kind of timespan? I'd be very surprised if it's as high as 23%. It seems to me that this First Defence stuff actually makes it MORE likely that you'll get a cold! And they're using this statistic for advertising purposes?

Anyway, that rant was the main reason I've come to this internet cafe/barber's shop in the heart of London tonight, but I suppose I should also mention that the chimp memory filming went very well too - I see they made the BBC news tonight, too, so I'm sure it will be old news by the time the documentary makes it to your screens, but you will have the fun of seeing me attempting the same memory test and scoring significantly worse than Ayumu the chimp. It's going to be great!

Make a note in your diaries (and cross out the other one)

See me on Blue Peter on Wednesday December 12th! And not the 5th, as I might have said before! It's being recorded in advance, you see.

Check out my memory chimp friends on BBC News! In fact, the performance you can see by clicking on 'number memory test' is rather more impressive than anything I can do (without practice, anyway), although I think Ramón Campayo, who specialises in split-second memorisation of random digits, could still beat them. Actually, I wonder whether that film's a bit misleading and there's a limited number of positional distributions of digits that the chimp has seen plenty of times before, but that's just me being a sceptic. Still, I think tomorrow I get to have a go at the same test, or something more similar to it than the one they knocked together for this documentary last time - we're basically redoing the whole thing that I filmed with them previously.

The life of a memory man really is groovy, isn't it?

Word of the day

It occurred to me that I was aware that there is such a word as 'amanuensis', but I had no idea what it meant, or how I became aware of the word's existence without also learning its meaning. So I looked it up on the internet and now do know what it means (I would share it with you, but I'd hate to think that this blog was educational in any way), but I still can't think where I heard it from in the first place.

I am friends with several pretentious people who like to use big words, it might have been from one of them, but perhaps I was asleep during the conversation and didn't pay attention to the context. Or maybe I came across it in some unnecessarily pompous factual book or article I read and didn't pay particular attention to.

Well, however I heard the word, I'm now enlightened and, being both pretentious and pompous, will do my best to use the word in everyday conversation and everyday bloggery as often as I can. And I'll maybe employ an amanuensis to transcribe my blog and show it to people who haven't got computers, so they'll all know how clever I am!

Ooh aah Tominaga

I was rather hoping for a super-rare European win at the world othello championship, but despite the best efforts of Stéphane Nicolet, the trophy goes back to Japan again. Still, it looks like it was a great tournament. I would write more, but it's late at night and I'm typing in between rounds in a somewhat smaller-scale othello tournament on kurnik.

It's quite staggering to realise that it's December, though.

Have cards, will memorise

I finally got round to buying two new packs of cards today, to bring my total of useable packs back up to 36. Maybe I'll have a go at memorising the whole bally lot of them in an hour tomorrow. I doubt I will, knowing how useless I've been at the whole training thing just lately, but you never know.

Other than that, I can't think of anything to write about tonight. Or rather I can, but it's all about subjects I would never sully this blog with, like the latest entertaining developments in the latest political scandal, or the fact that I was mentioning Christopher Biggins in this blog before he was cool, or the fact that the fourth-most-emailed story on the BBC News website is about a puppy that got its head stuck in a watering can but is okay now. So I'll just leave it at that.

Now, it is beginning of a fantastic story!

I've become worryingly addicted to Bubble Bobble. I dug out the old Sega Master System a couple of days ago and played it, and I've been hooked ever since. I've been semi-hooked on the game ever since I bought it back in, um, 1992, probably. That kind of time period, anyway. But I've usually had other things to do with my time to keep me from playing it all day and all night...

I have done some things today, though - I've been practicing memorising cards and then reciting them immediately, in preparation for Blue Peter. I'd rather not make a total fool of myself on such a big show. And I'm persisting with the swimming thing. Let's see if I've lost some weight by mid-December, shall we?

In other news, the World Othello Championship is underway, and it looks like it's going to be a close contest - you can't really identify any favourites to reach the semis yet, although Matthias Berg seems to be doing very well, Ben Seeley's obviously still on form despite being out of practice, Anon Hongthong, who I've never heard of before today, seems to be beating everyone he meets, all the French seem to be looking dangerous, and check out Geoff on five out of seven, including some really good wins! Which reminds me I haven't emailed him my transcripts from Cambridge like I was supposed to, but never mind. He won't pester me about it till he's back from Greece...

But if you've been bad, he will kill you

It's that time of year when everybody's thoughts turn to a silly song on an episode of Maid Marian And Her Merry Men from nearly twenty years ago. So I was very pleased to find that typing "Father Bloopy" into YouTube not only gives me the song itself, but also enlightens me as to the existence of a band who named themself after the song. And not only were they genius enough to call themselves Father Bloopy, they also did a cover of Dragostea Din Tei live in Miami Beach, in which they more than make up for any shortage of musical talent with raw enthusiasm. This is my kind of band, and I'm going to find out whether they've got a fan club and join it.

Never work with children or animals

Next Tuesday I'm going down to London to watch footage of the Japanese memory monkeys (well, chimps, but I'll take alliteration over accuracy any day) and offer my expert opinion on their thought processes for that documentary. Then I'm staying in a hotel overnight at the BBC's expense yet again (it's a shocking waste of licence fee money, it really is) and on Wednesday I'm memorising information about an assortment of children Blue Peter have dragged in off the street.

[Please ignore the following observation, it's unworthy of an intellectual non-lowbrow-political-observational-comedy kind of blog like this one, but it came into my head when I typed that last sentence: If Revenue and Customs had also asked me to memorise information about children instead of putting it on two disks and losing them, they wouldn't be in the mess they're in right now.]

I've also been working on How To Be Clever a tiny little bit! I'm starting to be in the mood to actually do something with it, for the first time in ages! I might just be able to crank out some kind of finished product after all! But this enthusiasm seems to have come at the expense of practicing actual memory stuff - I haven't done a real training session for ages. I'm feeling all unmotivated right now, and I really need to keep in mental shape if I'm going to win the WMC. I've been doing speed cards quite regularly, but nothing else, and it's the long disciplines I really need to work on. I wish there was a competition, even a little tiny one, some time soon.

Seriously, who ARE these people?

I don't know who Ziggy and Chanelle are. I keep seeing one or the other of them on the front of trashy magazines, apparently describing the intimate details of their breakup, but I honestly do not have the faintest idea who they are or why they're famous. What am I missing? In fact, don't tell me. I'm actually quite proud of not knowing. It shows that I live on a higher plane than the kind of people who care about these, um, celebrities (if indeed they are celebrities).

Anyway, I really genuinely am a celebrity, and I can prove it. All you have to do is watch Blue Peter on Wednesday December 5th. Woo! I'm not supposed to write about exactly what's going to happen, for some reason, but I think I can safely promise that it'll be an unexceptional and by-the-numbers routine episode of the long-running show that will go down in history as one that doesn't get mentioned in the history books, ever. But it'll have me in it.

Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow!

I've just spilled a kettle full of hot water over my left hand while filling my hot water bottle. Ow!

Back home, surprisingly

I was planning to stay over in Cambridge tonight, seeing as I'm going to London tomorrow, but we finished the othello earlier than expected and I thought I might as well sleep in my own bed and play about on the internet tonight. The tournament was a lot of fun, though - held in a different room at Trinity College than the usual one, this one featuring a lot of glass not just on the walls but also the floor of the kitchen (up on the second floor, overhanging the edge of the floors below, so you could see beneath your feet down to the concrete outside. Groovy.) Twelve players and a non-playing-but-there-anyway Aubrey, and I ended up 4th on four wins out of seven, narrowly ahead of David Beck on Brightwell Quotient tie-break. I didn't beat Imre, although I was really hoping to do that three Christmas tournaments in a row, but did beat David (who's rated higher than me, so I won't have suffered too much rating loss from being comprehensively outclassed by Crichton Ramsay, who's rated lower). Nobody beat Imre, in fact, he squished everyone he came up against and won the tournament, with Graham second and Geoff third.

At lunch we'd all piled into the pub we traditionally go to before anyone realised that it had turned into an unnecessarily posh restaurant. We ate there and had the committee meeting anyway, and the meal, although unnecessarily posh, was nice (chips piled up like jenga blocks, I ask you...). At the meeting, Aubrey announced that it's silly him being such an absentee chairman, stepped down and said he thought Geoff should take over. Nobody complained, not even Geoff (probably rendered speechless by having the job thrust upon him like that), so the BOF got a brand-new big boss for the first time in however many years. Almost certainly the first non-British chairman of the British Othello Federation.

It's the world championship next weekend in Greece, and I wish I could be there (Imre, Graham and David are the British team, with Geoff there representing Australia) not just for the othello but for the hopefully rather warmer weather. It was extremely cold today, and I'd decided not to bring my jacket with me on the grounds that it isn't really properly winter yet. I'll wear it tomorrow, I wouldn't want to catch whatever you catch if you get cold.

Something for the weekend

Ahh, nearly the weekend again. If I was gainfully employed, that might mean something, but still, this weekend will be fun. On Saturday we have the Cambridge Christmas Othello tournament, held as usual in late November, then on Sunday I'm heading down to London to meet up with James and James (but not James - he can't make it) and plan out our big university tour of memory performances and teaching.

This is going to be really cool. I'm wildly optimistic about us recruiting whole armies of impressionable young students to the ranks of memory competitors, and the experience of demonstrating memory in front of an audience and running university competitions is an extremely groovy kind of idea. Hope it all works out without any really major disasters...

Blow me down

Well, England made a complete mess of the football, didn't they? Ah well, that means I won't spend so much time watching matches on telly instead of practicing for the world championship. And Germany DID qualify, so all my rivals will be too distracted by football and will be rubbish at memorising things! See, there's a good side to everything!

Also, I'm not too unhappy at the result because I've just bought the collection of old Popeye comic strips, and it's fantastic stuff. I had considered boycotting it on some sort of moral principle because I would have preferred them to reprint Thimble Theatre from the beginning rather than start with Popeye's first appearance (I feel deeply sorry for Ham Gravy, the original star, and think he deserves some time in the limelight after all these years), but I decided that was silly. And I'm glad I did, because there's lots of good reading there. I'd really love to do a daily comic strip, and who knows, maybe some day I'll get round to doing that webcomic I've occasionally talked about for years now...

Asquith vs Asquith

"Father's fallen into the lion pit again," Henry said, strolling unhurriedly into the drawing room.

"How typical of the man," Mother tutted, looking up from the tapestry she was weaving. She had been working on the tapestry, which chronicled in detail the life of Herbert Asquith, adding fictional sections to fill in the gaps in her knowledge of the man (which had all been gleaned from his entry in an outdated copy of Who's Who from before he became Prime Minister), for several years now and it was approaching eight miles in length. "He knows the Archbishop of York is coming for tea this afternoon and he'll be expecting to throw some paupers to the lions. If they've already eaten your father again, they'll be fully fed and sleepy."

"That's what I told him, but he wouldn't listen," Henry said. "He was too busy screaming and pleading for help."

"I would never have married him if he hadn't drugged me," Mother said, adding a depiction of Asquith and his wife participating in a prizefighting competition in a field near Eastgate. "Believe me, Henry, if I'd had my way I would have married Prince Andrew and lived happily ever after."

"Yes, Mother," Henry said, a little annoyed by his mother's frequent announcements that she wished he had never existed. "So who is going to pick up the Archbishop from the train station? Father won't be able to do it until he's passed through the lions' digestive tracts."

"And I'm afraid of cars, you're too young to drive, being only two years old, and your older sister, whatever her name is, isn't allowed to go within six miles of the train station because of that gypsy's curse. I shall have to ask Valerie to do it."

Mother turned back to her tapestry and Henry took this as a cue to find out who Valerie was and arrange for her to collect the Archbishop. An hour's research with the electoral roll narrowed it down to three candidates, and he sent carrier pigeons to each of them, asking for the favour and enclosing crude drawings of the Archbishop naked, in case they needed further persuasion.

Two of the Valeries collected the wrong Archbishop from the station and delivered him to the wrong house, but the third brought the correct Primate of England to Henry's house, albeit to the tradesmen's entrance. He negotiated the kitchens and scullery to find his way to greet Mother, who had abandoned the tapestry and was putting the finishing touches to a sausage roll.

"Ah, sausage roll," said the Archbishop, picking it up and eating it. "Not so bad. I've had better, mind. And the weather's rotten. And why isn't the train station closer to your house? The Archbishop of Canterbury gets to visit people whose houses are right next door to the train station. And I don't like the colour of your ceilings. Change them. Right, where's your lion pit? I saw a pauper on the way here."

"Ah, um..." Mother said, nervously throwing half bricks through the windows.

"Why don't I take the Archbishop to the lion pit, Mother?" Henry said with a reassuring wink. Mother looked confused for a moment, but nodded and went to get the paint and brushes for the ceiling. Henry led the Archbishop outside, and the two of them returned five minutes later looking in the best of spirits.

"Splendid," the Archbishop said. "I've never seen hungrier lions, poorer paupers or better decorative carvings. There's no need to change the colour of your ceilings. Oh, you already have. Well, change them back. Splendid. I shall recommend you to my friends and arrange for someone to give you fifty pounds. Valerie, take me back to the train station."

He left cheerfully through the window and Mother picked up her tapestry and got to work on it again. "Mother," Henry said, somewhat put out. "This is the moment where you're supposed to ask me how I arranged for the Archbishop to feed paupers to the lions after all."

"Mm," Mother said, not looking up. "I don't really care."

Even more vital statistics

It turns out that Woolworth's haven't completely got rid of the weighing machine, they just stuck it in a dark corner where nobody ever goes. But I braved the paper plates and napkins section and weighed myself today to see how much weight I'd lost after my vow roughly a month ago to get back inside the normal weight range for my age, height and gender. And here are the results!

---------------------------------------------------------
YOUR MEASUREMENTS

Weight.......................12st8.1lb/79.9 kg
Height.......................5ft8.1in/173 cm
Body Fat Estimation:
Fat Index.................22.9%
Fat Mass..................2st12.1lb/18.2 kg
Free F.Mass...............9st10.0lb/61.7 kg
Age and Gender...............31 ♂

REFERENCES

Your Normal Weight is between:
59.9 kg-74.5 kg
9st6.0lb-11st10.2lb
Your current Body Mass Index
is 26.7 kg/m². The Normal B.M.I.
value is between 20 and 24.9

Normal Fat Index............17-23 %
Normal Fat Mass: 12.6-18.4 kg or
1st13.7lb-2st12.5lb

19/11/07,Monday..............11:16:53

This in not a medical act.

· Do not self medicate.
· Control your weight.
· Consult your doctor regularly
or pharmacist.
---------------------------------------------------------

I've GAINED three and a half pounds? That's ridiculous! I've been swimming! I've only occasionally eaten a whole bag of tangfastics in one sitting! I've been reasonably conscious of my intention to lose weight most of the time, and I've still gone and got fatter? Nope, not possible. The machine must be broken.

I have lost some height, though. I'm a centimetre shorter than last time the machine measured me. That's something to be proud of.

Excitement

Ooh, Blue Peter are phoning me tomorrow! I'm going to absolutely insist on a badge as payment for whatever they want me to do. I drive a hard bargain, I know, but sometimes you have to stick to your guns. Perhaps I should try to watch an episode too, so as I have half a chance of remembering the presenters' names.

This reminds me of "Pink Peter", which was a comedy sketch some people, possibly including Robert Webb but I can't remember for sure, put on in one of our school productions. It was extremely funny, meaning that it almost certainly was Robert Webb, since his bits were always the only reason to watch those shows. I'll name-drop that to the Blue Peter people and they'll think I'm even cooler than I already am.