Travel plans

Contrary to what I said yesterday, I'm jetting out to Japan on June 5th, and filming with the BBC on the 14th. Which, I realised this morning, is my brother's birthday. I'll have to ask someone at the BBC to remind me on the day, in case I forget again - him being in China makes it easy to forget he exists, apparently.

Anyway, I'm pleased to report that I weigh 12 stone 11. Which, thanks to my anorexic blogging of my unsuccessful efforts to lose weight over the years, I can safely say I haven't weighed since January 2008. The goal is to get down below the 12 stone 4 I was in October 2007, when I first vowed to lose a few pounds and then spent the next three years getting fatter and fatter.

I'm also still training my memory on a regular basis, and doing reasonably well at it, too. Which makes me wonder whether I should start looking for a job (it's two months tomorrow since I left my last one, which was the point at which I decided I'll decide) or leave it for another month and keep up the good work...

Hard at work

Next Saturday, June 4th, I'm going to Sheffield to play othello, on the 6th I'm going down to London for the exciting pilot episode of a new BBC show that I may or may not be allowed to talk about (I really should read the things I sign, or at least remember what I've skimmed through, but never mind), and then I'm apparently going to be flying out to Japan again for a big exciting TV show that they've decided at very short notice they want me to appear on.

Incidentally, I hate it when people come to me and ask "what kind of fee do you expect for doing this?" I mean, admittedly that's probably better than "we're not going to pay you, by the way," which are the terms on which I usually do TV shows, but I'd much prefer it if they named a fee, so I don't face the embarrassing prospect of asking for too much or too little.

Anyway, I'll have to learn to speak Japanese again now. That'll drive all the Chinese out of my brain. It's a tough life.

no Nou no

I was down in London today, filming for the upcoming (in the distant future) BBC show I've been talking about. I've signed the official secrets act, so I'm not supposed to talk about what it involves, you'll just have to be pleasantly surprised when you watch it. Today's stuff, though, was the exact same interview I've done a million times before, so you probably won't be surprised by that bit. But the rest of it will be interesting!

And I came home to find that I've been sent two copies of the new book "Kiseki no Nou no Monogatari" by Dr Ken Mogi, who filmed me last year for the TV show "The Best House 123". The book's all in Japanese, but I'm in it, so if anyone out there can read the language, I've got a spare copy you can have.

They came with a letter thanking me for giving permission to publish the book, which I don't think I did, but since I would have gladly given permission if anyone had asked, I don't really mind.

I've got a lot to say!

For a while now, I've had trouble thinking of something to blog about, but it's all go at the moment, so here's a midday blogging to keep you all informed about the trivia of my life.

Many thanks to the oodles of people who told me that they might possibly come to the Cambridge Memory Championship, and much more sincere thanks to the people who've said they'll definitely come. There are enough of these that I've gone ahead and booked the venue, so it's definitely going to happen now. The current entry list is:

Competing
Yan Minis
Jürgen Petersen
John Burrows
James Ponder
Mattias Ribbing

Possibles
Florian Dellé
Kranthi Raj
Katie Kermode
Khatnaa Kh
Ytep Ho-Yin
Christian Schäfer
Anton Fagerlund
Corrina Draschl
Johann Randall Abrina
Martyna Syguda
Idriz Zogaj
Boris Konrad
Ed Cooke

Several of those possibles almost certainly won't be there, since that list includes the kind of person who replies 'possibly' to every Facebook invitation for fear of offending people. There's also a mental calculator who I invited by mistake, who said he'd come if I turned it into a mental calculation competition, but I'm not going to do that. The ever-wonderful duo of Phil Chambers and Dai Griffiths will be helping me with the arbiting.

In unrelated news, I really love the BBC! The one bit of this upcoming show I wasn't enthusiastic about was a day of filming a little documentary-type sequence about me to establish who I am. I've done so many of those things in the past that I asked the BBC person if they were going to do it in an interesting way at least, and she replied "Well, it's a comedy show, so it's going to be a comedy sketch, not a documentary-type thing." Which is super-groovy and now I'm looking forward to the whole thing!

Although it will take me away from my studies, because as well as a lot of memory training, I've spent the last two days learning Chinese with the help of the absolutely fabulous website Memrise.com! It's the work of Ed Cooke and friends, and it's really really useful for building Chinese vocabulary! I'm starting to think I might understand a word or two of Mandarin by the time I get to the next World Memory Championship!

And furthermore, last Saturday's Doctor Who was a really really good one. After the downright dreadful pirate story last week, we needed something good, but "The Doctor's Wife" surpassed all my expectations. It was very much in the traditional style, studio-bound albeit with state-of-the-art special effects thrown in, with just four guest stars (and one voice), a role for Rory that was more in the mould of the male companions of the sixties rather than alternate whining and comic relief, a clever and original plotline and some nice acting all round (although David Tennant would still have played it a lot better than Matt Smith...). It was only on watching it for the second time that I noticed it was written by Neil Gaiman, which made me nod and say 'well, that explains it, then.' He's really awesome.

The Cambridge Memory Championship 2011!

The traditional friendly memory championship that always takes place on the first Sunday in May in Cambridge, England, will this year take place on Saturday July 30 at Attenborough Nature Reserve near Nottingham. England. See the nature reserve's website here

The competition will only take place if enough people want to come! So please let me know right now if you want to take part!

The entry fee will be £30 (or free of charge for people who have never taken part in any memory competition before) - it might be less than £30 if there are a lot of competitors, because I only want to cover the costs of hosting the competition, not make a profit! This fee includes a hot lunch.

There will be prizes, for a change - no cash (unless someone donates a prize fund), but trophies and medals for the winners.

The venue is quite close to my house - free accommodation is available on my floor, if you bring your own sleeping bag. If you prefer a hotel, there's a nice place just over the road from me: Rockaway Hotel or plenty of guest houses in Beeston or Attenborough.

The competition will start promptly at 9:00am and finish at 5:00pm, and will be a national-standard 10-discipline championship (15 minute numbers, 10 minute cards, etc).

The nearest airport is "Nottingham East Midlands", but it's actually not very near Nottingham and it's difficult to travel from there to here by public transport. Birmingham Airport is better, you can get the train to Beeston (for my house) or Attenborough (for the competition venue) very easily.

Many thanks, and hoping to see you all there

Ben Pridmore

PS Anybody who enjoys my occasional attempts at humorous writing here on this blog would certainly love to read Moonwalking With Horses, the collected edition of all the silly things I've blogged about over the years, plus a few other never-before-published writings for the die-hard Zoomy-fan. This book will not improve your memory.

Networking

You know, people are actually buying my book. Even though the marketing for it consisted of me telling people not to. Perhaps reverse psychology really works, or perhaps people want to read my book but not my blog, I don't know. But anyway, Lulu are sending me four-figure sums of money every month in royalties. That's two figures on one side of the decimal point and two on the other, obviously.

And I periodically get emails saying that someone's following me on Twitter. I set up a Twitter account about a year ago on the offchance that I might want to do something with it one day, and haven't yet wanted to, but people find it every now and then and keep an eye on it in case I choose to share my wisdom. Today's follower is a "Free lance post production specialist based in London and Devon" who possibly thinks I might need post-producing some time. Or maybe he's post-produced me before and I've forgotten about it. At the BBC I met an editor who knew me from Extraordinary Animals, and I spent the conversation subtly trying to establish whether she'd actually met me while working on the show or not. I wish I had a good memory.

Anyway, I was thinking that I should publish another book or two. I could compile all the bits of nonsense I've written on this blog and elsewhere over the years and self-publish it as 'a glimpse into the mind of a world memory champion'. Or get round to what I've been meaning to do for the last ten years and re-write my beloved children's book, get someone to illustrate it and publish that as the latest piece of tat from an F-list celebrity that your children might like to read. And I could tweet incessantly about it and tell everyone to spread the word until it goes viral.

Also, I could accept some invitations to connect with people on LinkedIn. I have no idea what that is, but people keep inviting me.

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.

Why can't I find things?

I know for a fact that I own a hacksaw and a ball of string, and they would both have come in handy today (for reasons that I'm going to leave tantalisingly unelaborated-on), but I couldn't find them. It's no good, I'm going to have to spring-clean the flat. I hate tidying.

May-mory

That's a play on the word 'memory', but I realise now that it wasn't very obvious. Anyway, I did an hour cards practice this afternoon, for the first time in a very long while. I've been doing speed training for the last few days, but if I'm to have any chance in the world championship I need to be regularly doing marathon practice from now until October (or whenever it is. I should check.)

Cards has always been the marathon discipline I've found easiest to get into without my mind wandering, probably because of the constant moving of my hands as I juggle the cards between them. If I can follow this up with an hour numbers practice, and then get into the habit of doing them both (and half-hour binary too), then I'll be all set.

I still need a new system for numbers, but that might have to wait until next year.

Rory McLeod's grandmother was right

The wind is really getting stronger around here just lately. It's blow-you-off-your-bike kind of weather, especially if you're as thin as I am nowadays. Well, was until I had a big pub lunch yesterday, anyway - that's probably piled all those pounds back on again.

Hooray for me!

I'm the best othello player in the world! Well, to put it another way, of the four people who came to the Cambridge regional today, I was the best. Which is just as good. And they were good players, too, not just some bunch of idiots I dragged in off the street and forced to play me at othello.

The Cambridge regional used to be the one that got the biggest turnout, but just these last two years it's started to be in danger of dwindling out of existence. I'm not sure exactly why, but the Cambridge MSO was almost small enough to not really count as a thing this year, so it's not attracting new people that way. Anyway, we did have David Beck, Iain Barrass, Roy Arnold and me to play othello, and Adelaide to organise things, and what more does any competition need?

So we had a double round-robin, and I won five games out of six, and played reasonably well in all five of them, so that the one game where I was rubbish and was soundly thrashed by David didn't matter (since he obligingly lost to Roy in another game). Wins in othello tournaments are very rare for me, and this was probably my most impressive result ever. I should probably retire now at the peak of my success, because it'll only be disappointing to everyone when I come last in the next one.

That was fun!

I should do that more often. I've been to Frankfurt lots of times, but only the airport and train station on my way somewhere else. It turns out that there's a city, too, and it's a nice place.

Anyway, I'm home again now, and the next week is going to be full of memory training. I've decided.

To heck with staying at home!

I found some extremely cheap flights and hotels, and I'm going to Frankfurt for the weekend. Just because I can. It'll be nice to see some sights of Germany without having a memory competition getting in the way! Also, this will be an interesting test of whether I can go for a quick holiday without resorting to my usual junk-food-eating ways...

Psychological secrets of Zoomy

I have recurring dreams about my teeth falling out. Not regularly, maybe once every six months or so, but often enough to be puzzling. Clearly this is something that my subconscious mind is deeply worried about, but I can't imagine why. My teeth are entirely healthy, I haven't seen a dentist for about twenty years and I never have so much as a toothache unless I accidentally use toothpaste with super whitening power (I think I'm allergic to the stuff, or else it's just generally bad for the teeth). I have got a missing tooth around the back, but that's because I never had a permanent tooth there, and the milk tooth eventually fell out. The baby tooth in the same position on the other side is still there, which I've always been impressed by. I've also never had wisdom teeth, which might explain my occasional unwise tendencies.

Anyway, as best I can tell, considering that I'm not working and never have occasion to check a calendar except for football schedules, it's the Easter weekend. I was thinking of going away somewhere, but everybody else is also going away somewhere, and they've booked all the hotels. I'll maybe stay at home and go for an Easter holiday some time after all these bank holidays, when all those other suckers are back at work. And send them postcards.

Toffee Crips

I've not really missed all the unhealthy snacks I customarily eat for this past week of dieting, but today in Nottingham I had a fierce and strangely specific craving for a Drifter. But then I went into two different shops looking for one (because I firmly believe in giving in to these kinds of urges immediately) and they both didn't have any! So I'm still officially on the diet, until I have a moment to go to the Co-Op down the road and see if they sell Drifters.

It's a chocolate bar, if you're foreign and think I'm eating vagabonds. Check it out on Nestlé's official website, which not only tells us that "on average, it takes one hour to make a Drifter bar from start to finish", which I find hard to believe in these modern times, but misspells Toffee Crisp as "Toffee Crips Biscuit" and claims that Breakaways are famous for their advertising slogan, 'Everyday should have a Breakaway'.

I've never heard that slogan in my life! If they're famous for anything, surely it's 'Don't take away my Breakaway'? Or am I just getting old? Anyway, that website is rubbish. I almost regret googling it now, but I thought it was important to keep my bloglings properly informed.

Speaking of bloglings, someone found me by googling "013457689014658757562987032105-5" - and if you don't remember what that number was then you'll never be the World Memory Champion - which reminds me how extremely sad it is that Elisabeth Sladen has died. And with Doctor Who coming back on Saturday, too.