I've got a dirty mind

So I was just about to start blogging about journeys, mindful that I keep dropping memory-jargon like that into this thing without bothering to explain it for the benefit of my overwhelmingly too-sensible-to-know-all-about-memory-jargon audience, when the phone rings. Nobody calls me at ten o'clock at night, because they know I go to bed early a lot of the time, so I was wondering who the heck it was, but it only turned out to be filmmaker Nick. And maybe it's just the thought of late night and phone conversations, or maybe I'm just in a silly mood tonight, but at one point he said "Another thing I want to do with you is...", and I suddenly thought "He sounds like he's talking on a phone sex line!" and had to spend the rest of the conversation trying not to giggle at everything he said. I think he's just got the kind of voice that you'd expect to hear on one of those lines, not that I'd know.

That's mean. I say all kinds of horrid things about Nick in this blog (the word 'evil' crops up quite often, doesn't it?), but it's just my way of mentally dealing with the idea that I'm quite excited despite myself by a film being made about my mnemonical exploits. And he's a very nice guy to work with too - if I didn't want him hovering around me with a camera, I wouldn't have told him I was going to New York, would I?

Anyway, when I said 'journeys' last night (the first time in that sentence, not the second time. God, I'm a terrible writer), I was talking about the mental journeys I use to keep the information I'm memorising in sequence. What I do is have a series of backdrops, in order, pre-prepared in my mind, and at each one of these settings, visualise images that I've made from the numbers or cards I'm looking at. These images, of course, are also pre-prepared, and I'll go into detail about how that works another time.

But what it all boils down to is that I have lots of these journeys, each consisting of 26 different points. Some of them are around houses or buildings I've worked in, one point in each room, and some are around streets, with a point at each corner or place of interest. I have twenty-five-and-a-half journeys at the moment (the half is one where for some reason I could never remember what the last few points look like, so I eventually gave up and just used it as a half-length journey for whenever I need one. It's around the little villages between Boston and Tumby Woodside, taking the scenic route - through Anton's Gowt to Gipsey Bridge and down to Bunker's Hill. Don't you love those Lincolnshire village names?), but I need a minimum of 34 for a full world championship, so I need to dream up some more, or I'll have to use some of them twice (which causes problems because if I reuse them too soon, I remember the images I put in them last time).

I've come up with three more today - one around the new office at Burton (which might be a problem in the future, because half the building is still, well, a building site, and I don't like it when my mental journeys no longer match what the places look like in real life), one around Meadowhall in Sheffield and one in and around Ace's parents' house in Nottingham. But while racking my brain for other places I know that I haven't made a journey from yet, I thought of Peterborough, and dragged something up kicking and screaming from the dark crevices of my long-term memory.

I used to have journeys around Peterborough, and I'd completely forgotten them. After the 2004 world championships, when I stopped practising, a lot of my newer journeys faded out of my mind. Several others I extended and used for pi, which kind of ruins them now so I can't use them any more, but a few I just forgot completely. Going into the world championships last year, I remembered a few of them, but the Peterborough ones had slipped my mind completely. I'm trying now to put them together again, and it's hard work. I remember individual locations on them, and a few short sequences, but not how it all fitted together. I can't remember how many there were, but it might have been as many as three - I think there was one based on the route into town on my motorbike, from when I used to go to college there from Boston (an hour on a little motorbike in winter is no fun at all, by the way). It's coming back to me now as I write this, which is part of the reason I'm babbling on at such great length.

And another two, I think, around the Queensgate centre and around the town. It'll come back to me. Of course, I could just think up a new journey that wouldn't exactly match the old one, but where's the fun in that?

Broody

I'm now the age my dad was when I was conceived. This isn't just a mathematical curiosity to me, it makes me think about how I'd always assumed my life would go. I've always thought that the age of thirty is about the right time to have children, and just always had it in the back of my mind that I would at that age. Now that I've got there, of course, I still don't feel grown-up enough, even if anyone wanted to help me out with the technical details of procreating right now.

It kind of bugs me, actually, that I'm probably never going to have offspring. Although the idea horrifies me on lots of different levels, there's still part of me that likes the idea of passing on my accumulated wisdom and ideals to some poor impressionable child. A sort of drive to make some kind of concrete contribution to making future generations not quite as unpleasant as they would otherwise be.

And it's Monday tomorrow and I've got to go back to work. I haven't done a lot of memory practice this weekend - just a half-hour binary (3650, a bit below the record but better than anyone else has ever done in competition). I'm going to dream up a few more journeys this week, on train journeys (effective time management, you see), and drum them into my head with a bit of training in the evenings. With a night out with the work people on Friday and then othello the next weekend, I'll not have a free and non-hungover weekend for a while, so I'll need to keep in shape.

Peter's Friends

I noticed that the brilliant film "Peter's Friends" is on Channel 4 tonight, at 1:45am. I had a vague memory that my video of it was broken, but when I checked it it turned out not to be, so I watched it this afternoon. If you haven't seen it before, I'd advise anyone reading this to set their videos tonight - it's one of those obscure movies that I think everyone needs to watch at some point in their lives.

Stephen Fry plays Peter, who after inheriting his father's huge mansion and fortune invites his best friends from university around for a party. And over the course of a weekend they talk, argue, break up, get together and generally entertain. It's funny and moving and compelling, and the acting from all the central characters is top-notch. Tony Slattery is actually really great as the hapless middle-class boyfriend of Alphonsia Emmanuel, who just doesn't fit in with the friends any more than Slattery fits in with the likes of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson in real life. And the film added Rita Rudner to my list of people I must check out some day (it's been about ten years since I first saw the film, but I'll get round to it eventually). She co-wrote it as well as appearing as Kenneth Branagh's awful American wife who he's deeply embarrassed by. All this and Hugh Laurie's musical talent on full display, a beautiful scene where everyone sings "Just the way you look tonight", and a soundtrack of great hit tunes. One of my all-time favourites.

Ah, the weekend

And not a moment too soon. I'm all worn out for some reason. Can't even think of anything to blog about tonight. Well, I can, but when I actually came to sit down and type it (the astute readers among you will notice that I'm sitting down and using my laptop, not lying on the floor to use my inaccurately-named desktop), it occurred to me that it was boring, whiny and offensive to both my parents, so I won't bother.

Conflict of interests

I've just noticed that the World Memory Championship clashes with the British Othello Championship - they're both currently planned for the first weekend in September. This is really, really annoying, and not just because it's taken me a good two weeks to notice. It's not like I've got a difficult choice to make between the two, I can't miss the WMC after all the work I've put into it, but I really like the othello nationals and it'll bug me, being half a world away while they're taking place.

Also, that means my only chance of qualifying for the world othello championship is winning the Grand Prix - which in othello circles means getting the best results from the five regional tournaments in the year. And I can't go to Oadby because that's the weekend I'm in New York, and another one's in Salisbury, which I normally don't bother with because it's just too far. And Geoff will be going to all of them and he always beats me anyway. I've only got myself to blame for there being one in Salisbury, by the way - it would be in Derby if I'd agreed to host it, but I'm just too darn busy this year.

Also, my back hurts. I think I've sprained it or something. Probably when I woke up in the middle of the night for some reason and thought I saw someone standing in my bedroom. I can't recall whether I actually screamed out loud, but I jumped about ten feet in the air, and was suddenly wide awake with my heart going like the clappers. It was just a shadow or something like that, possibly a ghost, but I'm still kind of freaked out about it. I've never done anything like that before.

Going Underground

I'm reading "The Secret People" by John Wyndham at the moment. I found it in my pile of books, and I have no idea how long I've had it or why I haven't read it before. Maybe someone sneaked it in among my belongings with some kind of sinister purpose in mind. It's good, though. Ancient science-fiction is always fun to read. There's something quite charming about the opening chapter, in which our hero, flying his rocket plane from France to South Africa, stops in Algeria to refuel.

I need to get some more books. It's not like I spend all that much time reading (just half an hour or so in bed every night, as a rule), but I seem to get through them really quickly, and I feel like I've read every book in my posession so often that I could recite it off by heart. I can't really rely on keeping on finding ones that I didn't know I had. I need to go to Oxfam and buy a shelf-full.

No one knows what lies behind the masquerade

I might be going to a masked ball in September. It's at a place called Ingestre Hall, and it does sound like quite fun. It sounds like what I think of as a typically Jenny kind of affair (which isn't meant to sound nearly as insulting as it does now I come to read it) - pre-1900 costumes preferred and masks compulsory, workshops on how to dance in the afternoon and a proper ball in the evening. I've never done anything remotely like this before, and I was lying in bed last night thinking of the kind of outfit I could wear for it. The trouble is, it would be staggeringly expensive, not just for the tickets (which will cost about £60), but for a proper mask (I'd have to get a really good one, a dragon of course, and they cost a lot of money) and an outfit to go with it (dark green velvet Victorian evening dress isn't the kind of thing you can pick up from Oxfam, in my experience), considering I'd only wear the get-up once. But on the other hand, you only live once, and it's fun to splash out and do something different and extravagant every once in a while. And why should my brother be the only one in the family with a range of stylish costumes for every occasion?

So little time...

I very nearly forgot to write this tonight. I was about to go to bed. I seem to be suffering a lot of memory lapses - after waxing lyrical about Life On Mars last week, I would have missed it entirely if I hadn't turned the telly on just as it was starting, with the intention of watching a cartoon on video. And what with all that confusion, I forgot I was going to write my blog next on the schedule.

Not that I was going to talk about anything earth-shattering, just that I was feeling lazy this morning and decided to get the 8:38 train (which gets me to the office bang on nine o'clock if it's not delayed), rather than the 8:27 like I normally do. So I got to the station at half past eight, only to find that the 8:38 had been cancelled and the 8:27 was just pulling away from the platform, only three minutes behind schedule for a change. So I was half an hour late for work this morning, which annoyed me enormously.

I'll get the 8:06 tomorrow. I need to get something as a thank-you present for the Cheadle people who are all finishing tomorrow, having stayed on a bit longer than originally planned to help with the transition. They've all been very helpful, rather more so I think than we Parkhouse people were when the same thing happened to us. Having decided to buy the three who trained me a big bar of chocolate each, I was irritated to hear my boss talking on the phone about her intention of doing something similar. She'll think I stole the idea from her now.

I should mention that my boss is great, actually. A couple of previous times when I've been two or three minutes late because of trains, she's said "don't worry about it" in tones of complete astonishment that I would feel any need to apologise. I think I'd rather be told off, actually - I don't take my job seriously, but I expect the people who get paid lots of money to do so. Still, I've just about resolved to move to Burton. There seems to be a real scarcity of cheap flats there - I haven't seen one that costs less than my current rent plus my monthly train season ticket yet! I know this place is extremely cheap, but it's still surprising. So I don't know why I'm so set on moving - the hassle of trains would be cut out, but the hassle of relocating would be a whole lot more hassly (if that's a word). I'm accustomed to the stench of fermenting beer that pervades the town now, though. I don't notice it any more.

Should I rethink my "no editing" policy?

I've just noticed that a character in last night's drivel is called Waterfield in the first paragraph and Wilberforce in the second. This seems like a pretty basic memory lapse, and possibly something I should be worried about, but I'm not going to bother to change it after making a big fuss the other night about how I don't like to go back and edit old posts. I'll just make the excuse that I wrote last night's entry a few words at a time, in between games in an othello tournament on Kurnik, so there was probably at least ten minutes between the first time I wrote the guy's name and the second.

In other news, I seem to be getting a heck of a lot of those scam emails about millions of dollars in a bank account in Burkina Faso, just lately. Do they think that if they send me dozens of the things, I'm more likely to think that one of them is genuine? They don't even seem to put as much effort into the things as they used to - I had a personalised one once, in which the millionaire who'd died overseas had the same surname as me. That was the kind of friendly touch that I appreciate - it makes the thing seem more like a finely-crafted work of art rather than purely a cynical attempt to con people out of their hard-earned cash.

Another thing that annoys me, while I'm in the mood to whine about anything and everything, is that guy who presents the snooker on the BBC. I forget his name. I try to avoid seeing premiership football scores at the weekend until I've watched Match of the Day in the evenings, and normally it's safe to watch snooker on Grandstand, because although they put latest scores up on the screen every now and then, they give you advance warning first so you can look away (or in my case keep watching but over the top of my glasses so I can't read the writing on the screen). But at the mid-session interval today, this presenter, whatever he's called, started off talking about someone else, and then apropos of nothing changed subject and rattled off the score in one of today's games. I'd send him hate mail, only that might upset him.

Hey, it's fun complaining about trivial things! I'd do it some more, but I'd worry about becoming one of those people who write in to newspapers. Assuming people still do that - I don't read newspapers, so I'm basing my assumption on the fact that people still make jokes about the kind of people who write in to newspapers. Possibly nowadays they've all got the internet and they just put it in their blogs.

How to tell the difference between horses and cows

When horses were introduced to Britain in 1873, there was great public outcry. Among the protestors were every member of the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the Royal Family, but nobody was able to prevent Jason "Horrible Martin" Waterfield importing five thousand of the creatures by ferry from Hungary. Taking advantage of the fact that none of the police and army officers stationed at the docks with the express purpose of keeping horses out of the country had ever seen a horse before, Waterfield was able to convince them that his large wooden boxes contained an unusual kind of land-based porpoise.

Even though Wilberforce, whose knowledge of equine biology was limited to hearsay and a badly-translated Latin text, had imported almost exclusively male horses (as well as three cats, eight trees, a Bulgarian woman and, ironically, an unusual kind of land-based porpoise, believing them all to be horses), they still managed to breed and spread around the country, causing most confusion among cattle-farmers who found it difficult to distinguish between their cows and the stray horses that wandered into their fields and climbed into cowsheds through the skylights.

To ease this agricultural crisis, the government issued a book entitled "How to tell the difference between horses and cows", and passed a law making its purchase compulsory for everyone in Britain over the age of nine and a half. The first edition of this book was of limited use to anybody, although it is now a very desirable collectors' item. Written by junior minister for colonial development Hamish Zmed, who had never in his life dared to leave London and had had little experience of either horse or cow as a result, the book limited itself to recounting anecdotes about parliamentary life and the activities of Zmed's next-door neighbours.

Following a series of public protests and assassinations of authority figures, a second edition of the book was issued. Although it again provided no help to anyone wishing to tell the difference between horses and cows, it provided a comprehensive list of the ways in which the two animals are similar. There is some repetition (the fact that both have four legs is mentioned twenty-seven times) and no sense of structure or order to the lists, but the information is entirely accurate, and remains popular today among those who for whatever reason need to enumerate ways in which horses can be compared to cows.

The author of this second edition can not be definitively identified. It was published under the pseudonym "Of Plaintive Griven", which may be a printing error, some kind of code, or the unusual real name of someone who otherwise made no impact on history. Every Prime Minister for the past century has claimed to be the author, but none of these assertions can be given any real credence. The most likely answer is that there was in fact no author, and the book was not in fact written at all.

A third edition is to be published next year, promising to answer at last the much-vexed question of how one can tell the difference between horses and cows. Although modern technology and more than a hundred years of experience have made it possible to do so with ease, the publishing house Gossamer Tripe believe there is still a market for a volume describing in detail the ways in which the species can be told apart. Parliament is currently refusing to answer any questions on whether this new edition will have government backing or whether it is a private enterprise. The identity of the author is also unknown, from which it must be assumed that the book will be written by a trained octopus, as happens all too often nowadays.

Edited to add

Two posts in one night? Well, it's Friday. Anyway, I just went back and edited a post from a couple of days ago so it says "I disagree quite violently with that", like it was supposed to, rather than "I disagree quite violently like that".

I don't really like having the ability to edit my previous posts - it's all a bit 1984, being able to change past ramblings whenever I feel like it. I've only done it three times before today, I think - twice to correct embarrassing spelling mistakes and once to insert a word in the thrilling story titled "Adventure" (which was the one post here that I've written on paper first and then typed up when I next got to a computer). And I wouldn't have bothered with that, only it was the word that made the sentence actually funny (well, I found it funny, I make no promises that anyone else would) - "Wigginsford-on-the-Sands, which while it isn't actually at the seaside does have the world's third-largest artificial pebble beach!" It took me a couple of months to notice that I'd omitted the word "pebble".

But that's the absolute limit that I'm prepared to go to with editing previous posts. I have to be careful, do it once and the power will start to go to my head, and soon I'll be rewriting past entries wholesale to reflect my new opinions, or make it look like I predicted something that has just happened so that people will think I'm cool. That way lies madness.

Does that star-spangled banner still wave?

There are times, if you're me, when a thought comes into your head and you can't get rid of it until you've sat and thought it through at length. In this case, for no reason whatsoever (except maybe that the Simpsons was on telly), the question occurred to me "How would they arrange the stars on the US flag if they added another state?"

Fifty-one stars is kind of awkward, you see. They like to do it in a pattern that's more or less square, in rows of roughly the same number of stars. The current one goes 6-5-6-5-6-5-6-5-6, from top to bottom, or 5-4-5-4-5-4-5-4-5-4-5 from left to right. It's pretty. But you can't do that with 51 and make it work out evenly - the best you could do is six rows of alternately nine and eight stars, and that would look more rectangular than is really desirable. Well, I wouldn't find it aesthetically pleasing, anyway, and I think my opinion is the most important one to take into account here.

And while I'm looking at old flags, good God that 31-star flag is ugly. Who the heck designed that thing?

Twenty-eight point three four

Am I good or what? Sorry, I'm just extremely happy with myself tonight - I just beat my personal best time at memorising a pack of cards by more than a second. Which is a big deal to me, because I've been struggling to get under thirty seconds for the last couple of weeks - it's really hard to cut down on split-second hesitations coming up with the right word for the right combination of cards. Also, I was having trouble physically turning over the cards fast enough, but I'm definitely improving with that now. I think a couple of other people have got down as low as 25 seconds in practice, which is the kind of thing I'm aiming for, but as long as I keep very gradually improving, it keeps my interest. I'm determined to break the 30-second barrier this year.

Back in the real world, I got an email at work today saying I'm coming up to the end of my three-month probationary period, after which I'll be a proper employee, needing to give a month's notice and everything. It seems to have come round fast, but at the same time it feels like I've been working there forever. The job sort of feels like an actual part of my life, which I suppose means I'm going to stay there. I'm not particularly good at it, but good enough to keep my reputation of a genius anyway - as I say in that book I haven't written yet, it's not actually about being good at anything, it's about giving the impression that you're brilliant.

So this really means I should move to Burton. Just to save the hassle and expense of the trains, really. Although it's not too bad, commuting at the moment, and it'll probably be even nicer in the summer (although it's been very warm and pleasant today). So I'm not in any desperate hurry to move, but if I see something nice in Burton, I might take it. I'd quite like a little bungalow or something, if there's one up for rent that's not too extortionate. God, I must be getting old...

I seem to have been "tagged"

I'm not sure exactly what that involves, because I'm hopelessly uncool, but I think it boils down to Sam wanting me to answer the following questions. Now, this isn't really the kind of thing I normally do, since it falls into the category of "things that everybody else does in their blogs", but on the other hand Sam's blog is always a lot more interesting to read than mine, so what the heck.

They're not really questions, if we're going to be picky, so much as things that I'm expected to list four of, so here we go:

4 jobs I have done - no real choice here. In a life of staggering lack of variety, I've had four paid jobs in all. All as an accountant or something similar - six and a half years at a cooked meat factory in Frampton, near Boston, six months at a sweetie factory in Skegness, two years with a recruitment company in Derby and two and a half months and counting accounting for various learning services in Burton-on-Trent. Or Burton-upon-Trent, different people and signposts seem to call it different things. I must find out what the town is actually called some day.

4 films I watch again and again Hmm, more difficult. First ones that come to mind are Grease, Transformers: The Movie, Reservoir Dogs and 12 Angry Men. Don't ask me why they particularly appeal to me, but I never get tired of watching them.

4 places I’ve lived I do have a bit more choice with this list than with the jobs, but only a bit. My life has been so... settled. A little house in Tumby Woodside, a tiny village in Lincolnshire, about ten miles from Boston (and just a mile down the road from New York. No, really. Look it up on a map if you don't believe me!) is where I spent my formative years. For a few months I lived in Kingston Bridge House, which was then a brand-new hall of residence in Hampton Wick, just over the river from Kingston Uni. My favourite ever home was my lovely little flat in Boston where I lived from 1998 to 2003. And just for a change, I lived for a month in a rented room in Cambridge while I was taking my TEFL qualification. That was quite nice too.

4 TV shows I love Pocket Dragon Adventures, Maggie and the Ferocious Beast, Thundercats and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

4 places I’ve been on holiday Butlins in Skegness, when it was still a great place to go on holiday. Center Parcs in Sherwood Forest. Las Vegas (can't beat it). Butlins in Filey, the year before it closed down.

4 websites you visit daily Sam's blog, the memory sports forum, Neopets (I'm a stock market millionaire) and Virtual Pooh Sticks (which I don't visit daily just at the moment, but I will when it's back online. If it ever is.)

4 favourite foods Spaghetti bolognese. I've heard it said that Italians don't eat spaghetti bolognese, and that therefore only stupid people would eat it, but I disagree quite violently with that. When I eat spag bog (as my dad likes to call it), I'm not thinking "wow, I'm eating what people in Bologna eat!", I'm thinking "mmm, this stuff tastes good!" Chicken pie and chips from the chip shop. Mint humbugs. Death By Chocolate. There are many, many other favourite foods that should be on the list too. I'm a gourmet. Or a gannet, I can't remember which it is.

4 places I’d rather be right now Hmm. Very difficult. Maybe I'm happy with my current situation after all? The Gold Coast casino and hotel, Las Vegas. At the final day of the World Memory Championships. In a cartoon. In bed.

That's all, folks. I'm not going to "tag" anyone else, but anyone reading this can feel free to list their own fours if they want to. I'm not going to stop you. And for those keen on following my television career, by the way, the BBC people emailed me today (maybe they've been reading my blog?) to tell me that my Child Of Our Time appearance will indeed be on programme four, Sunday 5th February. I must repeat that I don't think I come across very well. I'm certainly not telling anyone at work about it, but you blog readers are privileged.

Pygmies, budgies, Kuala Lumpur

It's been officially confirmed that the World Memory Championships will be in Malaysia again this year. Well, as official as these things get, anyway - last-minute drastic changes of plan are part of the tradition, and you can't really start making travel arrangements based on what has been announced as early as January, because it might all fall through yet. Still, presumably someone there is offering money to someone in order to get the championship there, which is always a good sign.

The problem with Malaysia is that all the best memorisers are German or Austrian, and several of them are young and not particularly wealthy. Being old, and rich enough to buy my own plane tickets if need be, I'd hate to win the WMC because someone else couldn't afford to go there, so I hope everyone important will get their flights paid for them one way or another. We'll have to see what develops.

This, in conjunction with New York, will mean I'll be visiting three continents in 2006. That's really very cool and jetsetterish, isn't it? And yes, I'm counting a trip to Germany as a trip to a different continent. We're not in a continent, we're on an island floating next to one. I'm pretty sure I haven't done this before - the previous time I went to Malaysia, in 2003, I didn't go anywhere else that year, mainly because I was unemployed for most of the year and financed it with horrifically huge loans that I'm only two-fifths of the way through paying off now. Ah, the follies of youth.

Still, it makes me wonder if I can get an Australian holiday into my schedule somehow. They do have a memory championship over there, and I could always drop by and watch. Nah, that would just be silly.

He's in the best selling show

I'm really enjoying Life On Mars. It's a TV series with a really weird and complicated premise, which it mostly ignores as much as possible. John Simm plays Sam Tyler, a police officer who finds himself back in 1973 after a near-fatal accident in 2006. He's a police officer in 1973 too, and nobody believes he's from the future. Occasionally, TVs and radios talk to him, he hears voices talking about him as if he's in hospital in a coma and he has nightmares where the girl from the TV test card chants ominous cryptic rhymes at him while he screams and hides in the corner.

But for the most part, it's a 1970s cop show, with Sam as the by-the-book copper, horrified by his boss's willingness to break the rules if it gets the job done. The combination of genres and themes shouldn't work, but it really does. John Simm never quite looks like a policeman to me, but that really just adds to the weirdness and makes it work better. He was also great in that fantastic drama series from a few years ago, The Lakes, so it's good to see him with another starring role in a well-written show.

Avengers Assemble!

I've just realised that I passed the 150-posts mark a few days ago - the 150th was the brief ramble about the memory test on the BBC website. So hardly a highlight of this thing, but never mind. I wonder how much of my life I've wasted typing unimportant gibberish like this so far? But rather than worry about that, I'll do something I haven't done for a while - talk about the superhero comics I've bought lately.

Just one book, actually - Essential Avengers, volume 5. The 'Essential' giant paperbacks are wonderful for fans of old comics. They compile around 25 old comics from the sixties and seventies, printed in black and white on cheap paper, and sell for somewhere in the region of £10.99 - not bad for 500+ pages of reading, really. Okay, you could get a novel with probably more words in it for less money, but that's not the point. In a world where the American publishers can justify charging the equivalent of £2 or more for a 20 page comic, it's nice to get a bigger volume of story on the cheap.

If you don't know who the Avengers are (or if you're thinking Steed and Peel), a quick history lesson is in order. In 1961, after years of publishing nothing of interest, Marvel Comics released a new superhero comic called The Fantastic Four, written by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby. It caught on. It had something that those mainstays of superheroics, Superman and Batman, didn't have - fairly realistic characters who argued among themselves and were a lot more human and flawed than godlike and wonderful. Stan Lee put his thinking cap on, and over the next couple of years dreamed up a lot more superheroes, all with their own unique twists on the established formula, and Marvel Comics was suddenly a major rival for DC (whose Superman-Batman-Wonder Woman-Flash-Green Lantern based dominance looked like taking over the universe of comics until then). Stan Lee followed up FF with the likes of Thor, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, Ant-Man, Daredevil, the X-Men and so on, and they were all very big. Except Ant-Man, who was very small, and also very unpopular.

So in 1963, Stan Lee was told by his bosses that since DC's Justice League of America (in which Superman and co formed a super-team to battle bad guys) was so popular, he should do something similar and make a team out of Marvel's popular characters. And thus were born the Avengers - Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Ant-Man and his sidekick the Wasp. They hadn't realised just yet that nobody liked Ant-Man and the Wasp. The Hulk was just there to show how different this was from the Justice League - he didn't like his teammates, walked out on them after the second issue and fought them on and off after that whenever he was in a bad mood.

It wasn't the best of Marvel's 1960s comics, but it was still a lot of fun. The adventures were a bit more traditional than most superhero comics, until Stan Lee, who I get the impression had never liked putting the stars all together in one team like that when they had their own comics too, wrote out the other founding members and replaced them with heroes without their own titles (Ant-Man's own title had been cancelled by then, but few people cared when he was written out of Avengers too).

Anyway, back to Essential Volume 5, we're now in the early seventies. The collection starts with the 98th issue of Avengers. The spell of creativity that launched the company ten years previously has pretty much come to an end, and Avengers is more concerned with keeping the stories ticking along and celebrating the upcoming 100th issue. The previous issue was the end of the acclaimed Kree/Skrull War story, about the Avengers caught up in an intergalactic war, and it was a hard act to follow. Roy Thomas, who had replaced Stan Lee as writer a few years previously, fills time in this issue with an unexceptional story about Ares, the Greek god of war, stirring up violence in ordinary people and causing chaos in the city. This is just to give the Avengers something to fight until the final two pages, when their missing member Hawkeye reappears in an awful new costume (which seems to include a miniskirt), accompanied by former member Hercules, who's lost his memory and is uttering rhyming prophecies of doom. With Thor and Iron Man having rejoined the team to help out with the Kree/Skrull war, we're gathering everyone who's ever been an Avenger together, slowly but surely. The artwork, from Barry Smith (now known as Barry Windsor-Smith - presumably he didn't want to sound too posh back then) is excellent, like the art throughout this collection. Nowadays, an ability to draw a coherent story doesn't seem to be a requirement for Marvel's artists, but back then there were lots of talented artists out there who could produce a good story in the house style to a monthly deadline. And most of them, like Smith, could do it very well.

Issue 99, then, is unashamed setup for something big to happen in issue 100. Hawkeye explains where he's been and how he hooked up with Hercules, the Vision calls up a couple of other former members, the Black Panther and good old Ant-Man, to ask them if they can help (they're both all-purpose scientists, so it's not too much of a stretch to think they might be able to help someone with amnesia), and then we get the requisite couple of pages of soap opera (Hawkeye tries to chat up the Scarlet Witch, who's in love with the Vision, Quicksilver (SW's brother) interrogates her about it (the Vision's a robot, and Quicksilver wouldn't want his sister to marry one) and the Vision agonises to Jarvis the butler about his feelings). Then two bad guys attack, to provide the requisite fight scene, grab Hercules and escape. It's all by-the-numbers stuff, but very nicely done.

So then we're into the Big Hundredth Issue! Everyone who's ever been an Avenger converges at the Black Knight's castle in England (because everyone in England owns a castle, everyone knows that), including, for no adequately explored reason, the Hulk, who doesn't like them but decides to help them out anyway, and the Swordsman, the bad guy who joined the team under false pretences back in issue #20 only to betray them and try to kill them all. But now he's decided to give them a hand, just for the heck of it. This is typical Roy Thomas thoroughness - he's going to put every Avenger ever in the story, by hook or by crook, whether it makes sense or not. Barry Smith provides some unbelievably beautiful artwork showing all the heroes arriving - it really is a delight to behold, and somehow even better in the black-and-white Essential format than in the original colours. The rest of the story is unexceptional, though - the Black Knight has seen in his magic cauldron that Hercules has been kidnapped by Ares in Olympus, the heroes go there and sort things out. The end. Oh, after a bit of merry banter with a policeman back in England - Thor: "A moment, now... for silence." Policeman: "And I'd like to respect that moment, yank, but I'm afraid I got me a sergeant down at the station who'll be wantin' a report on what happened here. So if you'll just be tellin' me where that hole-in-the-air led to... or what all the to-do was about..." Thor: "My badge-wielding friend... in the words of an armor-clad philosopher... don't ask!" That's the punchline.

Issue 101 is a bit of filler while Roy Thomas works out what to do with his heroes next. It's adapted from a Harlan Ellison story, and it's not very good at all. All the ongoing plotlines are dropped to fit in the somewhat complex but repetitive plot, and the pacing is all wrong - it drags at the start and is very rushed at the end. Rich Buckler takes over as artist, and he's perfectly acceptable, but a step down from Barry Smith. The story, for what it's worth, is about an ordinary man who develops amazing powers and is told by a horribly out-of-character Watcher that he has to kill five people to prevent a future disaster. This ordinary man concocts a ludicrously convoluted plan to kill the first one - a Russian chess player who the entire Avengers team happen to be working for as bodyguards (not the kind of thing they normally do) by putting poison on a pawn and rigging the chess computer he's playing against so that he will touch the pawn at precisely the moment when this strange poison becomes deadly. How he does this we can only guess, since the rest of the story portrays him as a man of normal intelligence without access to rare poisons or anything like that. But then he races around the world and just zaps the other four with laser beams from his hands, with the Avengers getting there just too late to stop him each time. Then the Watcher shows up, with an explanation that doesn't really make sense, and takes the bad guy away for good.

Back to normality, the next few issues give full rein to the soap opera that made the comic so cool - the Vision and the Scarlet Witch continue to agonise about their feelings for each other, Hawkeye begins to get the idea that SW doesn't fancy him after all, and the Vision meets up with his supervillain "brother" the Grim Reaper. The Reaper is the brother of Wonder Man, the dead superhero whose brain patterns are the basis for the Vision's artificial intelligence. It turns out that the Reaper is keeping his brother's corpse (he's been dead since #9) in a frozen food locker, and he offers to put the Vision's mind in that human body, if the Vision refrains from stopping the Reaper killing the other Avengers. The Vision promises to think about it, and leaves the looney to whatever he does with his brother's dead body in a freezer. Then the giant robots called the Sentinels come flying out of the sun and cause troubles for the Avengers. They kidnap the Scarlet Witch and take her to their base in Australia, where they're using her 'mutant energy' to power a weapon that makes solar flares.

This is all a sequel to an X-Men story that Roy Thomas wrote a couple of years previously, and it would have fitted better in X-Men if the title hadn't been cancelled. Mutants in the Marvel Universe are people who are born with superpowers, and the Sentinels are robots whose mission in life is to rid the world of mutants. But most of the Avengers, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch excepted, aren't mutants - they got their powers by other means - and so there isn't really the personal touch that there should be in this story. But it's a good one, and the Sentinels' plot is wonderful - they're not allowed to harm non-mutant humans, so they've developed a plan to render everyone in the world sterile and then, when the human race has died out from natural causes, genetically create new humans, only without the mutants. Brilliant. Needless to say the Avengers beat them, but it's worth mentioning the strategy Quicksilver uses to beat one of the giant robots. Knowing that it can match his super-speed exactly, he runs headlong towards a wall. The Sentinel taunts him, noting that if Quicksilver can stop in time, so can it, but it turns out that Quicksilver can't, and deliberately crashes into the wall, breaking several bones and nearly killing himself, so that the Sentinel will do the same. I worry for the guy's sanity. He then disappears under mysterious circumstances, to provide a sub-plot for future issues and to write him out of the series (he goes on to show up in Fantastic Four).

That brings us up to the end of Roy Thomas's run as writer. It was never worse than bland, and usually excellent. Steve Englehart takes over after this, and soon launches into that epic storyline, the Avengers/Defenders War, which I might write about some other time. But Roy Thomas's work is a major reason why Marvel comics continue to be so popular today - Stan Lee started it off, but it's from Thomas that we get the traditions of referencing old stories, recurring characters from the past and tight continuity between the many different titles. Stan Lee could have passed his characters onto any old hack when he got bored with writing them, but instead he gave them to a fan who loved the superheroes he was writing about, and cared about making the comics great. It's a shame the current writer of Avengers is so terrible, but these things go in cycles, and I'm sure some day we'll get another Lee, Thomas, Englehart, Busiek etc chronicling their adventures. 42 years and they're still going strong!

These vagabond shoes

Booked my tickets to and hotel in New York today - two months before going somewhere is probably a record for me. I worry sometimes that I'm growing up. I'll arrive on the Thursday afternoon, spend Friday seeing the sights, Saturday seeing the memory competition, then go home on Sunday evening, which thanks to the miracle of time differences gets me back into England early on Monday morning. Then I can spend the rest of Monday and all of Tuesday in bed to get over the jet lag before going back to work on the Wednesday. I can't sleep on planes, and I always have a terrible time adjusting to moving a few time zones east and skipping a few hours of the day. I'm fine going the other way - an extra five hours in the day won't be a problem at all. I have a feeling that the solution is to go home in the opposite direction and arrive before I left, but there's probably a technical difficulty or two with that somewhere.

The view from the train

On Central Trains, the space for bicycle storage is right next to the toilet. So more often than not when I take the train, I end up sitting on a seat in the corner of the differently-shaped carriage, with a limited view out the window and a difficult job avoiding watching people going into the toilet and looking around trying to find the button that closes the door. I'm starting to get into the habit of trying to guess from the person's face how long it'll take them to find the button - I've yet to see anyone who knows where it is before they go in, strangely enough. Maybe the embarrassment of standing around in a train toilet cubicle trying to work out how to shut the door means that nobody ever uses those toilets more than once in their life?

Moving on to slightly more interesting subjects, what I need is someone to shuffle cards for me. I've just spent ages shuffling them in preparation for some practice tomorrow, and I've still only got twenty done. If I just do it quickly, you see, the cards are still in a similar kind of order to when I memorised them last time round, and that's horribly confusing. So I have to do a really thorough job of it, which takes ages.

Oh, and speaking of memory, the new series of Child Of Our Time starts this weekend, or some time soon anyway, it might be Monday. Don't know when (or if) my bit's on, but I'd appreciate it if nobody watched it, because I'm pretty sure I come across as a useless idiot, and not in a good way. They might have decided to drop the whole bit, of course - I would have if I was the producer.

Welcome, Benjamin.

I've just been looking into plane ticket prices, and I noticed that Expedia call me Benjamin. I don't know how that happened - I practically never put my full name into forms, even the ones that say 'full name' on them. Maybe I'm a bit of a rebel, or maybe it's just that nobody has ever called me Benjamin in my life. Even the bank have got my name down as Ben George Pridmore, which just sounds a bit silly to me (if you're going to use your middle name, you might as well use your full first name too).

I'd legally change my name to just Zoomy, but it seems like a lot of hassle. Imagine having to explain to people why you haven't filled in the first and last name boxes properly.

Bending the rules

I have a self-imposed asbo against talking about politics, or news in general, on this blog. Firstly because it's what everybody else does with their blogs all the time and I want to be a bit more original than that. And secondly, because I think the world would be a much better place if everyone kept their political leanings to themselves. Imagine all the arguments and conflicts we could avoid that way!

But despite that, I feel obliged to say something vaguely political in nature tonight. So, for the avoidance of doubt before we start, I'm a Lib Dem. The upcoming leadership contest is therefore a subject of some interest to me, not that I think it'll make a great difference to the party or the world in general whoever wins, but ignoring my usual scepticism, there's one guy who'd be the obvious choice of winner, if not for one insuperable difficulty - his name.

Now I'm the last person to judge someone because of their name (or if not quite the last, I did do it just five minutes ago when I saw a post on a message board by someone called Supreme Convoy, and automatically assumed he'd be a great guy), but Sir Menzies Campbell. No, it just doesn't work for a leader of a political party in the 21st century. The name just screams "old, posh bloke, eccentric upper-class Englishman who dabbles in politics in his spare time". That's not the kind of image we need as a leader. With the alternatives being yuppie prat Tony Blair and carbon-copy-of-Yuppie-prat-Tony-Blair David Cameron, what the Lib Dems need is a man-of-the-people kind of leader - the kind of guy who gives the impression of being more or less like real people (something Blair and Cameron are totally lacking). Sir Menzies could maybe do that, if he wasn't called Sir Menzies. But change his name to John Smith and he'd be a future PM.

Incidentally, apologies to Tom Holt for stealing his last-person joke in the previous paragraph immediately after saying I want to be original in the paragraph before. I'm a hypocrite. Maybe I should become a politician.

Anyway, enough of this. I've made up my mind about New York, and I'm definitely going. Woohoo! Now I just have to decide how much time to spend over there. How long does it take to see New York, anyway? Is it a case of looking at the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building and then going home, or are there hidden delights? Actually, I'm the world's worst tourist - whenever I go to exotic cities I spend most of my time in bookshops. I just get bored with museums and breathtaking natural wonders too quickly - I can always watch them on telly if I ever feel so inclined, and not have to get up out of my chair...

So good they named it twice

I'm still not sure whether or not to go to the US Memory Championship, or the US Memoriad, whatever they're calling it at the moment, in New York in March. I might go there just to watch and help out, rather than competing. I'd feel like I was showing off if I went all the way there just to do better than everyone else. But then I feel bad about thinking like that, because it doesn't show much respect to the American competitors. But I've been thinking, since it's three days before Pi Day, that I could recite pi to 10,000 places or so there, as a sort of sideshow, if they'd let me. It wouldn't take that long to refresh my memory of that much, hopefully, and only take an hour and a bit to reel them off. I'll make up my mind this week.

I've never properly been to New York before. I've sort of been through it, and hung out around Penn Station for a couple of hours on the way from Boston to Washington back in 2000, but that doesn't really count as a visit. I need to broaden my horizons a bit - I tend to go to one place, like it, and then keep going back, rather than trying anywhere else. It would probably do me good to experience something new and exciting from time to time, as opposed to just going to Las Vegas...

Counting sheep

I've just been playing the 'face memory' test here at the 'sleep' section of the BBC website (thanks to the Mule for the link to the general area). I got a below average score on the number of faces remembered, but above average on identifying whether they came in the first batch or the second. I really need to practice names and faces more. Or at all.

I'm not really interested in the connection between memory and sleep, although it would be interesting to analyse what difference it made at the 2003 world championship when I didn't wake up until five minutes after the final day's competition was supposed to start. I did the same kind of thing this morning - I vaguely remember my alarm going off, but I didn't do anything about it and went back to sleep. Woke up again critically analysing some cartoon I'd been watching in a dream (which I remember nothing about now except my waking thought that it was pretty good and, at 23 minutes in length, not too long). Looked at the clock to see what time it was, expecting something like 23 minutes after it went off, and found it had actually been 40, and I had to leave the house in five minutes to catch the train. I made it on time, too - I'm quite an expert at racing around in the morning when I need to.

I got the 5:20 train home tonight, rather than the 5:43, because it was about 35 minutes late. Nothing too unusual there, but the excuse was one I hadn't heard before - a medical emergency on the train earlier on. I think they've issued a new book of reasons for delays to the station staff. A couple of weeks ago the poor guy who works there was updating passengers on the delays to two trains, with three different reasons, and could never keep straight what each one was delayed for.

Howay the lads

It's quite unfortunate that me starting to work in Burton has coincided with their football team's greatest moment. If I started supporting Albion now, it would look like I was only doing it because they're suddenly cool. To be fair, it's not such an amazing achievement. There's a long-standing sort-of-tradition of good clubs drawing away at bad clubs and thrashing them at home in the replay - it gets a bit of extra money and TV coverage for everyone concerned, and while that's a much bigger deal for Burton Albion than it is for Man U, I don't think they're too upset that their reserve team didn't manage to win today.

Anyway, I probably should be writing about the party I went to this weekend - it seems terribly ungrateful not to, and to just sit here writing about the football match I saw brief highlights of this afternoon. It was great (the party, not the football), and so was Crispy's mum's house - it's a picturesque little stone cottage in a picturesque little stone village, and the inside is so clean and pretty that I can't quite get to grips mentally with it. Not having grown up in a house where cleaning was a regular activity (and currently living in a flat where it never happens at all), it always flabbergasts me to come to a house where someone hoovers, polishes, dusts, tidies things away and so on on a daily basis. I don't know how anyone can do it.

They've even got an Aga, for crying out loud! I've never seen a real one before! I was quite overawed by the whole thing.

Party time

It's Crispy's 21st birthday party tomorrow. This is both a good and bad thing, I think. Good not only because she's my best friend and we always have fun when we get together, but also because it's got to be a good thing to be invited to 21st birthday parties of trendy young women when you get to my advanced age - this is the second one in less than a year, after Shahin's last May or whenever it was.

The bad bit is the mental arithmetic the existence of this 21st birthday makes me do. When I first met Crisp, she was 14 and I'd just turned 23. So any reminiscences along the lines of "wow, how many years have we known each other now?" lead inexorably to the horrific milestone that's lying in wait for me in October.

But enough of that kind of thinking. An impending party leads to more mundane thought processes, like should I have a haircut tomorrow morning? It's been two or three months since the last one, and it's getting a bit on the long side, even with my famously non-growing, sparse hair. But on the other side, it's not really as long and ugly-looking as I usually let it grow before getting it cut. Maybe I'll leave it. I definitely need to trim my beard, though - it doesn't look nearly as good when I grow it long as it used to, because the white hairs seem to grow much longer than the others. Sigh, I'm definitely too old.

Not in a blogging mood tonight

I'm sitting here thinking "Oh, I haven't put anything in my blog yet today, I'd better do that," and feeling completely devoid of inspiration. That hasn't happened to me very much over the nearly six months I've been doing this (must have a half-anniversary party!), which surprises me a bit. I've tried keeping a diary several times in the past, but it's never lasted this long. I think there's something about putting it online where anyone can read it (even if nobody does actually read this because I don't tell anyone it exists).

I considered posting a bit of nonsense that I wrote years ago and have on this computer, but that seems like cheating to me. I think there's an unwritten rule that everything I put on here has to be fresh and new and original - not that anyone would notice the difference if I put some old stuff on, but it's the principle of the thing.

So anyway, as you can see, I've devoted three paragraphs to saying that I don't feel like saying anything - that's concise by my standards. Now I'm off to memorise some binary digits before bed. Thanks for reading!

Wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully pretty artwork

I have a real mental block when it comes to drawing. It's a deep-seated childhood trauma caused by the fact that my brother was always so much better at it than me. I wish there was something I could do about this, because I think I've got the soul of an artist trapped inside the body of this accountant somewhere. Every now and then, I think of something that I would really like to draw a picture of. Occasionally I even manage to put pen to paper and actually try to draw it, but the results aren't generally very encouraging.

Anyway, around Christmas time I found myself thinking "What I should do, is draw a picture of Nigel and Alistair from Newshounds kissing under the mistletoe, with Nigel standing on a box or something so he can reach." It didn't get any further than that, but then another Nigel-fan on the Newshounds forum the other day observed that we've never seen the lovecats kissing before, so I took that as a good excuse to draw this:



Now, I'm not claiming it's a work of art comparable to Van Gogh's best, or for that matter that it meets even the most basic standards of acceptability for a quick pencil sketch, but I like it. It looks more or less like I thought it would look before I started, it's kind of cute, and it's not even a complete swipe. And it's about three or four years since I tried drawing anything but stick-figures, so I was already feeling quite happy with my artistic outpourings even before Thomas K Dye, the writer/artist of Newshounds, said it was 'adorable'. That just made my day completely. It's so cool when someone you admire pays you a compliment.

Weirdly enough, a day or so after the Newshounds forum inspired me to draw something I'd been thinking about drawing, today someone posted a link to something he'd written, and it's something that I've been meaning to write for a couple of months now - An interview with Daffy Duck by Rory O'Bannion. The general tone of the thing is freakily similar to the thing that's been bouncing around my head, although the Daffy in my interview would have been as youthful as ever and full of enthusiasm about his latest Duck Dodgers series. And I can't believe Daffy wouldn't have got on with Chuck Jones, considering he directed The Scarlet Pumpernickel, the cartoon in which Daffy gets to expand his acting range and cast all his friends in an epic dramatic production. Still, I love this interview.

Time off for good behaviour

Left work two hours early today, not because of any special occasion, strike or communist revolution, but because the flipping accountancy software package has blown a fuse and we weren't able to use it all day. It's one thing after another there - ever since I started working there two months ago there's been an endless series of computer problems getting in the way of work. And going home early isn't much of a treat, because I know I'll have to make up the time and more over the next few days to get everything done.

In fact, I'm going to have to work quite excessively hard over the next couple of weeks, because having told my boss that her deadline to get the monthly accounts completed was too short and got an extra day to do it, I now feel obliged to get everything finished well before the original deadline, to confirm my reputation as a miracle worker. That's something I've missed at this new job - my strategy is normally to come into a new workplace and do the job much more quickly and accurately than whoever was doing it before, and have everyone think I'm great. But because everyone is new at Nord Anglia, they haven't got anything to compare me to, and so just assume that all the brilliant things I'm doing are normal. I tell you, it's tough being a genius. And having such an inflated opinion of my own abilities is a real handicap, too.

Still, it's not all bad. Getting home early gave me a chance to do something I was too lazy to do all this time I've been off work - practice hour numbers. It went really well, too, I got a score of 1940, a personal best and 9 digits short of Gunther's world record. I'm really feeling confident about the world championships at the moment, if I can keep up the training. It's a while since I've gone into a competition knowing that I've achieved really big scores in practice in lots of the disciplines.

It's funny really how I've snapped back into hard-working, dedicated, super-accountant, super-memory-guy mode after a week and a half of unmitigated accidie. All it took was being forced to get out of bed at half past seven after not nearly enough sleep, and now I'm all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (I'm a squirrel when I'm not a dragon, did you know?) and looking around for more useful, productive things to do with my time. It's great.

Writing books is hard

Or at least, sitting down to write them is difficult. I'm normally okay once I get started, but I keep finding better things to do with my time. I was only trying to write a synopsis to send to publishers, but I just can't be bothered. I think it's because I'm trying to persuade someone to give me money for writing this thing, and that turns it into work, and therefore not fun. I'm not sure how to circumvent this problem, really. I could get it published and give all the money to charity, but then that kind of defeats the object of writing the thing in the first place. Perhaps I could say I'm going to give the money to charity and then actually keep it? Conning my subconscious in that way would be pretty clever stuff, I'll give it a try.

Anyway, I've got to go back to real work tomorrow. What a drag. Never mind, at least it'll get me a bit of exercise, cycling there and back. I think I've put on about three stone over Christmas, what with all the sweets and cake lying around the place and no more physical movement than necessary to change the TV channel occasionally.

One person I sympathise with is Sharon off EastEnders. I've been trying to get hooked on it again lately, but I keep forgetting it's on. I've watched a couple of recent episodes, though, and she's gone and had another fiancé killed in shocking circumstances just when they thought they were going to be happy forever. It's only been a couple of years since the last one, poor thing, and she's also had her father return to life and be murdered in the meantime. If it was me, I'd want to move away from Albert Square and settle somewhere more peaceful, like Baghdad.

Synapsia

Rather than doing anything constructive today, I've been reading the collected editions of Synapsia magazine that all the competitors at the world memory championships this year were given free. It was the magazine of the Brain Club, which is Tony Buzan and his gang of mind-map enthusiasts, also discussing other brain-related things like chess and memory and the like. Like these things generally do, it started out with wild enthusiasm in 1988, was published regularly for a few years, then gradually dwindled away through lack of interest (whether from the writers or readers, I'm not sure) until it was coming out once a year before finally disappearing in 1997.

If I'd known about Synapsia back then, I would have been one of its biggest fans. I was a terribly nerdy teenager, and I can just see me and Noddy poring excitedly over every new issue. Who knows, maybe I would have got into the whole memory thing much earlier, and competed in the first world championships back in 1991? Probably not, though - it took actually talking to memory people at the MSO in 2000 before I believed the memory techniques described in Synapsia and such publications could really work.

The funniest bit is reading about the MSO in Synapsia. The first mention comes back in 1991, when Ray Keene confidently announces that not only will the first MSO happen in 1992, but that it's reasonable to expect at least five hundred competitors in each mind sport, that well over ten thousand people, plus their spouses and friends, will converge on the event from all over the world, and that TV and press coverage will be huge, turning mind sports into the most popular thing in the universe. And these estimates might have to be revised upwards closer to the time.

The MSO was quite big for the first few years (when it finally started up in 1997), but it never got more than 2000 or so competitors at its peak, and international participation was always pretty minimal. But it's not really nice to laugh at over-optimistic predictions, and I do like the MSO and Synapsia. Just not as much as I know I would have liked it when I was 14, that's all. I'm not sure whether that means I'm less nerdy now, or just nerdy in a different way.

And a happy new year

I feel a bit embarrassed about staying at home tonight and not celebrating the new year in some kind of alcoholic way, with people around. Not that I normally go to a wild party on December 31st, but now that I'm writing about my everyday life on a daily basis, I feel like I'm under some kind of obligation to do interesting things every now and then, and I've probably not lived up to that standard just lately.

Also, because I spent the day before my birthday two and a half months ago looking back on the past year and wondering what the future will hold, I can't really do what everyone else is doing right now in their blogs. I'm just going to go and memorise some packs of cards and then watch the football. And I wonder why nobody reads this thing! Ah well, I hope anybody who does end up reading this has an absolutely wonderful 2006. Peace on earth and goodwill to all!

Goody Goody Yum Yum

I know I normally try to avoid writing about whatever's on telly at any given moment (otherwise it's too easy to use it as an excuse to run out of imagination and not think about what to put in this thing), but I'm watching something at the moment that makes me think "My god, this is awful!"

It should be good, too - it's a 90-minute special about the Goodies, the long-running, popular and very funny TV show from the seventies. They produced somewhere in the region of 40 hours of material over the course of the series, so there should be just about enough reasonably entertaining stuff to fill this special by itself. What they've done instead, though, is show a barrage of two-second clips that would have been funny if they were shown in the context of the 30 seconds either side of them, mingled with new footage of the Goodies themselves reminiscing in painfully unfunny style (worse even than the Two Ronnies in their recent series) and the usual list of celebrities all saying in identical words that they liked watching the Goodies when they were younger.

There isn't even enough of THAT to fill an hour and a half, so they've resorted to showing everything twice, padding out the show with "Later on, Rolf Harris will be saying this about the time the Goodies mentioned him on their show..."

Just repeat the flaming episodes, for crying out loud! It wasn't the highlight of British comedy history that everyone seems to be saying it was, but it was still usually funny enough to be worth watching, and every now and then it was hilarious. This, on the other hand, is rotten. I wonder if they're doing it on purpose, in line with the usual BBC policy of not repeating Goodies episodes? They're trying to convince people it wasn't worth watching in the first place.

Honestly, I'd stop watching it if only I could be bothered to get up and change the channel. I need to get over this laziness thing. I'm not planning anything for the new year, I'll do a whole load of memory training over the long weekend. Then, I suppose, I've got to go back to work. Ah well, could be worse.

As Time Goes By

It really bugs me how quickly this year seems to have gone. I'm going to have to go to great lengths to make 2006 really drag. I should make the year as boring and uninspiring as possible, to make sure it feels like it goes on forever. I feel inspired to make resolutions, but I've already done that a couple of months ago on my birthday, so I won't. If I achieve too much next year, it won't leave anything for the rest of the world to accomplish.

I've just come 6th out of 23 in an othello tournament on Kurnik, mainly because of two walkovers against absent opponents, but it's still good. It drags my tournament rating up above 1200, which is cool, but not quite cool enough to get into the 1250+ tournaments they have from time to time. More hard work or sabotaging people's internet connections at crucial moments, whichever is most convenient, I think.

Meanwhile, I need to arrange a holiday - the US Memory Championship is on Saturday March 11th, and I've just about definitely decided to go there, just for a bit of competition practice. It's only a little competition, just five short disciplines, and I wouldn't be allowed to win it, because it's meant to be for US citizens only, they just let foreigners take part occasionally without their scores being counted. But it'd be nice to see New York properly. I've only ever had one flying visit, on my way by train from Boston to Washington back in 2000, and I don't think an hour and a half is enough time to do the city full justice.

Oh, and as a footnote to last night's entry, Everton lost 3-1, and West Brom beat Spurs. Hooray!

Schadenfreude

The midweek football matches that haven't been called off because of the weather are kicking off round about now. I hope Boston's match was postponed in good time before the poor Carlisle players had to trek all the way down there - we've had a history of waiting till the last minute to call a game off in the past.

Anyway, at the moment I'm not as enthralled by Boston's hypothetical chance of making the playoffs as I am by the significantly more possible chance of Everton getting relegated. I do feel a bit guilty about hoping a team will fail so spectacularly, though. Admittedly it's normal to hope that one particular team will win any given game (very few people go to a football game hoping for a draw), and this does naturally extend to hoping that the other team will lose, but there seems something rather more malicious about desiring Everton to lose a sufficient number of games that they end up somewhere in the bottom three places of the league table at the end of the season.

On the other hand, three teams do have to finish in those positions every year, and thus drop down to the level below for the next year, and I think it's very much in the spirit of cheering for the underdog if I hope that the lesser teams manage to avoid the drop at the expense of Everton, a normally very successful team currently in their 52nd consecutive year in the top flight. So it's entirely reasonable of me to be wishing for them to follow up their two consecutive 4-0 thrashings with another heavy loss to Liverpool tonight.

They're currently 16th out of 20, coming up to the half-way point of the season, and with Sunderland dead last by a mile and seeming to have no hope at all of survival, and Birmingham also struggling so much that you wouldn't want to bet against them being relegated, we need Portsmouth and West Brom to rally sufficiently to drop Everton down to 18th. It could happen tonight, if they both win (unlikely, since they've both got difficult games), and it would certainly cheer me up unreasonably if it did. Of course, Everton's game on Saturday is against Sunderland, who ANYONE can beat, so they'd have to be even more terrible than they currently are to stay in the bottom three into the new year. Fingers crossed, though.

I've had a very lazy day today. Did a very little bit of memory training this morning, but not the several hours I was planning to put in while I'm off work with nothing better to do. I keep finding good reasons not to - along the lines of "Hey, Virgin Radio are playing their top 500 songs all this week, I'll have to listen to that..."

I think part of it is dietary. I'm no expert on what you should and shouldn't eat, but I'm pretty sure that stuffing yourself all day with leftover Christmas chocolate, biscuits and cake (home made cake, and delicious it is too) isn't good for you. Likewise, having no exercise whatsoever for the last week or so possibly contributes to my general lethargy. Never mind, I'll snap out of it tomorrow, do lots of healthy things, eat vegetables, run a marathon or two, that kind of thing. Or I might do the same again and sit around all day reading and listening to the radio. It's the holidays!

It's the longest possible time till more Christmas

But apart from that, everything is good in the world of Zoomy. I hope all my loyal readers had a great festive season too! Apologies for not posting here over the last few days, but as I mentioned, my brother was round, and although I've officially told him I've got a blog now, I think there's a fundamental difference between writing an online diary in the full knowledge that someone will read it, and writing an online diary while there's someone in the room with you who could look over your shoulder. But maybe I'm just weird.

Lots of snow today, on and off. There's quite a carpet of it out there now. Hopefully it'll carry on for the next week, making everything look shiny and pretty, and then go away before I have to go back to work next Tuesday. Hearing a lot of birds chirping outside this morning, I decided to put some food out for them, but after the Christmas gorging of the last few days, didn't have anything left in my food cupboard except some boil-in-the-bag rice. So I put an uncooked bagful out on the windowsill, then an hour or so later started worrying that if birds ate it, it would expand in their stomachs and kill them. Thinking that it was probably better to kill birds by neglect than by actively giving them lethal food, I took the rice back in and resolved to give them some bread when I get round to buying some tomorrow.

I have no idea whether these concerns of mine have any kind of medical validity. I'd look it up somewhere, but I can't be bothered. This also makes me feel guilty, but I suppose that's what the Christmas season is all about.

Target: 2006

I can't believe it's 2006 in a week and a bit. This year is to a lot of British people more or less my age even more significant than when 2000 came along with its unprecedented amount of noughts. Because next year will be the year that a whole generation look at the calendar and think "it surely can't really be 2006? That's the future! The distant future, with Galvatron and Unicron and Death's Head and all those lads!"

For the benefit of those readers who are too young or too foreign or had too deprived childhoods to know what I'm talking about, I should point you in the direction of Transformers: The Movie. The normal Transformers cartoon was set in the present day, you see, but for the big feature-length special cinema version, they did a story set twenty years in the future, with lots of new giant transforming robots, lots of the ones we knew and loved being killed (and only partly in order to force children to buy the new toys - there was genuine drama there too) and a really great soundtrack. Americans will tell you that the movie was set in 2005, so I should have been saying all this last year, but in the eighties there was a real time-lag for things like that to cross the Atlantic, and by the time we got the movie over here, it was 1986.

Also, Americans wouldn't understand about the British Transformers comic. In the USA, the cartoon series was super-cool, and the comic book was okay. Over here, the cartoon suffered from being chopped into five-minute instalments and shown on the otherwise unexciting Wide-Awake Club show on Saturday mornings. But the comic was something else.

Transformers were really, really, REALLY, popular, you see. People tend to forget that now, but EVERY child loved Transformers. So naturally, everyone wanted to read a Transformers comic. This left the publishers, Marvel UK, with a problem. They normally just reprinted American Marvel comics, and while there was an American Transformers comic, it was monthly, like comics all are over there. British kids couldn't be kept waiting a month for each issue, we were used to weekly comics. At first, Marvel UK compromised, and produced a fortnightly British comic, each issue containing half an American issue with some of the usual British filler (letters pages, reprints of three or four other American comics with vaguely robot themes, dull text pages about robots in the real world, one-page or half-page comic strips in the more traditional British style, competitions, fact files, readers' drawings, all that crap). That way as few as six pages of Transformers could still fill a whole comic. And kids would have bought (and indeed did buy) any old rubbish with that shiny logo on it.

But then the American comic stopped publishing for a couple of months after the first four issues. In desperation, Marvel UK decided to create their own Transformers material - it was that or put out a Transformers comic with no actual Transformers comic strip. And one of the writers they called on was a guy called Simon Furman. Furman's stuff was GOOD. Much better, in fact, than the 'real' American comic ever was. Rather than losing interest, the British comic-buying hordes got more into Transformers than ever. The British comic went weekly, dropped most of the backup strips and alternated between American issues chopped in half to spread over two weeks, and Simon Furman originals brilliantly fitting in between American stories so well that you couldn't see the join.

Which brings us to 1986. The American comic, for some mad reason, hadn't done anything to cash in on the movie's success, so Furman was told to come up with something. He came up with an epic called Target:2006, in which the characters from the movie travelled back in time and messed with the present-day characters. It was a masterpiece, and the talk of the playground every week (I was nine years old at the time). It led to a lot more stories set twenty years in the future (a lot easier than slotting them in between the American issues, which continued to drag down the quality of the UK comic every now and then), and fixed the year 2006 in the minds of British youngsters as 'the future'.

I just never thought it would actually happen. I could just about see the year 2000 coming to pass, I'd worked out how old I would be with an amazing BBC computer program that only took two or three days to type in out of a book, but I never considered that one day it would actually be 2006. I'm going to have to get hold of a time machine next year and go back to 1986 (for some reason you could only ever travel back in time exactly twenty years - apart from that time something went wrong with Unicron's time portal, but that's another story). I still just can't believe that it's going to be the future next year. My mind can't get to grips with the idea.

No more teachers' dirty looks

Hooray for the holidays! Now all I have to do is buy cards and presents for everyone...

But enough about Christmas. On the yahoo memory group, there's some discussion about 'the Ben system', that technique for memorising numbers and playing cards that I dreamed up a couple of years ago. You might have noticed the name attached to it - it's a little-known fact that I was the one who thought it up, and played a large part in popularising it, because I did it in a very subtle kind of way. I've spent a lot of time in the past explaining at length that it's only a modification of the Major system, rather than a real system in its own right, and that in any case 'the Ben system' is a silly name and I wish people wouldn't use it. I tend to emphasise this so loudly and frequently that nobody could be left in any doubt that 'the Ben system' is the accepted name for it, even if they didn't know that beforehand.

I've got a bit of a reputation in memory circles for modesty, which I've acquired essentially by going around saying "I'm modest! Look at how modest I am!" Frankly, it's kind of surprising that it's worked as well as it has. There are very few things in the world I like more than having someone say I'm great, and any time I say otherwise it's only because I know it will prompt even more adulation and praise. Does this make me a terrible person? And should I care if it does?

Also, should I make a Christmas cake? I've got half the ingredients sitting aroundthe place. Or I could try my hand at a home-made Christmas pudding, so that I could get one without nuts in for a change. Nasty things. Or on the other hand, I could just do that extensive Christmas shopping like I really need to, and stop coming up with more exciting things to do. Why is it so difficult to find appropriate presents for relatives? Even cards are difficult - I have to find one that matches the person it's being sent to, because there's nothing worse than getting a generic Christmas card with a robin on it.

I had to check the cards I've received so far then, just to make sure there aren't any robins. I'd hate to seem ungrateful to the people who went out of their way to buy me a card. But it's okay, they're all good ones. Ah, the joy of receiving.

Ooh, I could crush a grape!

Aargh! I just typed a long blog entry on my shiny new laptop and accidentally deleted it! Well, I'm not typing it again, I was already getting fed up with this keyboard. In fact, the last line was a decision to stick with the old computer for everyday computering, and just use this thing for CDs, DVDs (when I get round to buying some) and when I'm on the move, like the young go-getter I am.

The rest of the post revolved around saying that while I'm starting to like the new job, and could quite happily stay working there, I don't want to either commute or move to Burton, which seems like an insurmountable problem. None of the solutions I came up with are very practical, although becoming rich and famous and never having to leave this comfortable little rut of mine is always an option. Anyway, I'll go into more detail another time, I'm annoyed with this machine now.

All work and no play

...is not good for zoomies. But that's the last late night I'll have to work for a while, and it's nearly Christmas, and the weather's quite nice at the moment. Possibly I'll have something to talk about tomorrow, who knows?

What a way to make a living

Working nine to eight is no fun at all, even if it is in return for getting the day off on Friday. Which I'm sure a lot of companies would give you anyway, what with it being the 23rd. Still, everything has its good side, and in this case it's that coming home late tonight, I saw a fox crossing the road and skulking into the yard two doors down. This is very cool, because I've never seen a fox around these parts before. I'll have to keep an eye out for him in future.

Still, all this work gets in the way of the other stuff I like to do of an evening. Christmas really gets in the way of memory training, and I was on such a roll with that too. Bah humbug.

Santa came a week early

I've got a new toy! A shiny new laptop, and it's great! I even treated myself to a new scanner/printer/copier thing, seeing as I haven't had a working scanner since I trod on my old one about six months ago. Spending money on myself is fun. I don't seem to have done it for ages. The new laptop is so cool, in fact, that I'm almost considering getting rid of my trusty desktop (which I'm typing this on right now), the only computer I've ever owned. I've had it since June 1999, which makes it really quite elderly by computer standards, and it's fair to say it's not as quick or properly-working as it was. But apart from the sentimental attachment, I'd have to work out how to transfer all the junk on it over to the laptop, which sounds like more work than I'm normally prepared to put into anything.

I still haven't actually bought presents for anyone who isn't me, but never mind. It's late-night shopping all this week, so although I've got to work late tomorrow and Tuesday, I'll still have plenty of time to buy cards and get them in the post at the last minute, maybe buy a few presents on Amazon, seeing as they emailed me to say the 20th is the last day to order things for Christmas delivery, buy a turkey and whatever else people are supposed to eat at Christmas, get some decorations, a tree or two and some kind of dancing reindeer or the like, clean my flat up a bit and get ready to celebrate the birth of our saviour in the appropriate style.

I need fairy lights. I've never had fairy lights before.

Bright Light City

I went to London today to do a bit of Christmas shopping. As it turned out, I didn't do any at all, and just bought things for myself, but that's what I always do on the first shopping trip I make. I never seem to see anything that looks like a suitable gift until the very last minute. I've left it too late to post presents to people now, anyway, because I've got to be in the office Monday to Thursday next week and I won't get a chance to go to the post office.

I nearly spent £120 on a present for my brother - a Japanese boxed set of Predacons from that cool little comic shop on Tottenham Court Road - but decided against it in the end. We don't generally go above a fiver on our presents to each other, the rule is quality and entertainment value rather than material worth, and while that doesn't necessarily preclude buying something that's both cool and expensive, I don't really like to. It might look like I'm saying "Ha ha, I've got more money than you!"

So I need another shopping trip tomorrow to actually buy cards and presents, and maybe that laptop computer for myself that I've been meaning to buy for ages. I bought some CDs today, including a big Christmas compilation that my brother and I are going to spend the whole of Christmas listening to whether we like it or not (I insist, it's not Christmas without Christmas songs), and the CD player on my current computer is increasingly senile and non-working. I'll need a laptop for organising that memory competition anyway, so it's a worthwhile expenditure. I'll do something big and charitable to make up for it.

I need to buy decorations and food for the aforementioned festive fraternal visit - this'll be the first time I've entertained someone at Christmas time, and I'm determined to make a proper turkey dinner, and Christmas pudding and everything. I don't know how it's come round so quickly this year, it still feels like November to me.

But it makes me look like a geek!

I've got one of those luminous reflective jackets (with Parkhouse Recruitment written on it in big letters - I don't pay for my clothes, as a rule) that is very useful for stopping lorries from running me over when I'm cycling home from work in the dark. Or it would be, if I wore the thing. You see, that kind of thing is just so uncool. It screams 'trainspotter' to anyone who sees me wearing it. And because I'm so worried about total strangers' opinions of my sartorial elegance, I'm very reluctant to wear this potentially life-saving item.

"But Zoomy," I hear you say, "you look so cool that no amount of reflective safety gear could harm your image!"

Or, if you're more honest, "But Zoomy, nobody gives a monkeys what you wear anyway, least of all people who catch a fleeting glimpse of you from the pavement as you cycle past. And even if they did, they'd laugh at your normal clothes anyway, so you really don't need to worry."

So okay, I'll wear the nerdy thing. But I'm not wearing a helmet.

Perchance

I don't know why, but I've had really epic dreams for the last couple of nights. Or maybe it's just that I've remembered them better than I usually do, by virtue of waking up half an hour or so before I need to get out of bed and thus having ample time to analyse my subconscious meanderings. But each of them came in three distinct interlinked sections, with a whole host of characters, strange locations and goings-on. This morning I even woke up with a catchy original tune running around my head, but I've forgotten it now, annoyingly enough. I do have another dream-composition from a few months ago that's going to be a hit single some day, or at least a popular jingle for a bacon advert (the lyrics involve getting out of bed and having a bacon sandwich, which was obviously something on my mind at the time).

A guy on an internet message board for idiots who want people to think they're clever (one of my favourites, naturally, although I don't post there much any more) is fond of saying that you only dream if you have unresolved thoughts in your mind when you go to sleep. So, he says, a practicioner of yoga (or whatever he does) doesn't need to dream and is therefore an altogether better person. Being too polite to say so to his face, I'll say here behind his back that this is the most ridiculously, colossally STUPID thing I have ever heard. Why on earth would you want to not have dreams? Letting your subconscious play around and entertain you is something that you should try to do as much as possible! In fact, what the world needs is a way to make people dream much more than they do at the moment. That would make the world a better place.

Last night's dream actually posed me a moral dilemma that I was ruminating about at work today. Going into detail would be long, complicated and incomprehensible, but the basic idea in this dream was that a friend of mine was unhappy, and I came up with a solution that basically involved taking her mind off things for an evening, rather than doing anything about the long-term cause. Indeed, when presented with an opportunity to ask for help from someone who might have been able to do more (but might have made things worse), I deliberately didn't. This, it seems to me, is typical of the way I always go about things. I do go out of my way to make other people happy, but only in the immediate kind of way you can do with a hug or a kind gesture. I generally avoid doing anything to help people deal with serious problems of their own. If someone's upset, my usual solution is to do something silly and keep everyone entertained, leaving someone else to do the comforting. Perhaps I should make more of an effort to do some good in the world. Or possibly I should stop overthinking everything and just carry on the way I am.

See what I mean about Christmas time? I'm getting all introspective and serious. It won't last. Anyway, if anybody was wondering how the new job's coming along, it's not too bad. I don't entirely know what I'm doing, but everyone else there is to a greater or lesser degree in the same situation, so it could be a lot worse. Still don't know if I'll stay there in the long term, but I'll cross that bridge when I either get fired or find out that I've been there for forty years and I'm retiring next week.

Fantastic and Terrific

By way of a belated birthday present, my brother found me a fantastic old comic, in more ways than one. It's issue 78 of Fantastic, the magazine of choice in the late sixties for British children who wanted to read American superhero comics but couldn't get hold of the originals. Or at least I assume it was - I've never heard of it before.

Actually, the title at this point in the comic's history was "Fantastic and Terrific", with the "and Terrific" in very small letters. This used to be a common sight on British comics - an unsuccessful one would be swallowed up by a more popular title, and the names would both be featured prominently on the covers for a while, so as to make sure not to lose the few readers who only liked the failing comic, before the second name, like Terrific, was quietly dropped. The cover also features the logo "A Power Comic", with a picture of a fist just to emphasise how powerful it is, the date (10 August 1968) and a little copyright notice for Odhams Press Ltd.

It was on sale every Monday for 9d - Australia 10c, South Africa 10c, East Africa 1.25, New Zealand 1/- (10c), Rhodesia 1/3, West Africa 1/-. So it's educational too - NZ was obviously in the process of decimalisation at the time, and a shilling went further in West Africa than it did in Rhodesia. The rather uninspired cover illustration is a close-up of the superhero Goliath's head, and a photo of the Fantastic Book of Soccer Stars that could be found inside.

The front and back covers are the only splash of colour in the comic - the British standard at the time was anthology magazines, in black and white, with five or six stories of five or six pages maximum each, with the obligatory crossword puzzles, letters pages, competitions and fun facts to pad out the stuff that people actually wanted to read. So ignoring the fact that the American material being repeated was designed to be read in full colour, in 20-page bursts every month, Fantastic strictly follows the British format. We get a luxurious nine pages of Avengers, Goliath and his friends battling the evil alien Ixar, five pages of Dr Strange in the middle of a longer magical fight scene with Yandroth, five pages of the X-Men thwarting the plans of the Mutant-Master and Factor Three, six pages of Thor exploring Ego the Living Planet, including a glorious double-page spread that must have looked so much better in colour, and eight pages of the Hulk fighting the Sub-Mariner. Plus a full-colour back-page pin-up of Unus the Untouchable, a crossword that you need to know the name of the Beast's girlfriend to solve, a "Spot the Boob" competition which isn't nearly as fun as it sounds (it's a spot-the-deliberate-mistake thing), letters and editorials. All for ninepence!

There's three-quarters of a page of adverts in the entire comic - two little ads for stamp collectors' outfits, and an encouragement to buy Tonibell Miniballs - the ball with the ice cream inside - in order to enter a competition and win £50 of vouchers to spend in London's biggest toy shop. Oh, and rather incongrously in amongst all the superheroes, there's the first of five pull-out profiles of famous footballers, that you can put together to make a little book, just in time for the 1968/69 season. This week it's Bobby Moore (who gets the front page, of course), Billy Bremner, Billy McNeill and Jeff Astle. Bremner's Leeds went on to win the league that year, if anyone's interested, so the Fantastic editors Bart and Alf (whose names replaced Stan Lee's in rewritten footnotes to the superhero comics) obviously knew how to pick the winners.

They really don't make them like that any more.

Seasons in the sun

It occurred to me today that the next few months are going to be comparatively dull reading if you're mainly interested in this blog for the memory or othello talk. Memory competitions are traditionally all crammed into July and August, although there'll be anything up to two of them in March next year, which would be good. And even othello has now stopped until the end of February.

I've sort-of volunteered to organise one of the regional othello tournaments here in Derby next year. I never wanted to do one in Boston, because the place is so impossible to get to by public transport that it would just be inconvenient for everyone, but I've got no such excuse in Derby, so it's about time I did. If I put the tournament on in April, it'll be good practice for the memory competition I'm planning to hold in May - another thing I've been promising to do for years but haven't got round to it.

The othello will be a lot easier than the memory - that'll involve lots of advance preparation and (unless it's unlike every other memory competition ever held) a lot of unexpected problems causing it to run wildly behind schedule until we get pestered by caretakers trying to throw us out of the building. Which comes in handy when you need extra arbiters for the speed cards.

How To Be Friendly

I was wondering today why I don't like a particular person more than I do, when we've got such a lot in common and like most of the same things, and that led me to speculate about what qualities my favourite people have that makes them my friends. I decided in the end that it's not shared interests, so much - most of my friends aren't particularly interested in memory, or cartoons, or board games, or things like that. Likewise, more often than not I don't share their own favourite things and activities either.

I think it's more a shared mindset, or similar sense of humour - the people I like the most are the ones who I can have a really strange conversation with, both of us reacting to and building on the other's comments until the whole discussion is a lot more fun than either of us could hope to produce with anyone else. I also concluded that a special friend needs to be the kind of person who doesn't run away screaming when I mention that I'm in love with Piper O'Possum from Nick Jr.

I seem to have been doing a lot of thinking today. I've also been considering this book I keep talking about writing, and whether I'm going about it the wrong way. What I should maybe have done is taken a month or two off work with my redundancy money and devoted myself to it with some kind of seriousness. What I should also maybe have done is gone about approaching publishers and people like that first, rather than waiting until I've written the thing.

I know I had perfectly good reasons for not doing that - I didn't want to agree to write the book before I'd done it, because that would turn it from a hobby into a job, and thus make it a lot less fun. Also, there was that time a couple of years ago when I was asked to write a book, agreed to do it and then changed my mind and had to tell the company in question that I had (which is the kind of thing I really don't like doing). But now I'm starting to think that exploring the possibility of getting the thing published might be fun in itself, and might also inspire me to get writing.

Incidentally, more than one person has told me exactly that in the past, and I've replied that no, my brain doesn't work that way, so it wouldn't work. So I'm not claiming any originality in this idea, and I give full credit to everyone who's given me such good advice. But that's my plan for the moment - as soon as I get round to it, I'll look into people who publish how-to-be-clever kind of books and see about sending them a synopsis and sample chapters.

log, on, secure, online, free

That's the title of the HSBC personal internet banking web page. Log, on, secure, online, free. It's said that for at least a couple of years, too. It's the kind of thing that makes you think you're logging on to an amateurish phishing attempt instead of an official website of a really big company.

I know that talking about other things I've seen on the internet is meant to be the kind of thing I don't do, but it was that or write a long essay about the things I've removed from and added to my Favourites list today, and I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be anything more boring than that. Except maybe the BBC Sports Review of the Year, which I've just turned off. I don't know why I always start to watch the thing every year, it's never remotely interesting. I might tune in again later to see who wins the award, but it's a foregone conclusion this time round anyway, so I might not.

So, fourteen more sleeps till Santa. Christmas seems to have come round unreasonably quickly this year. I still don't properly feel like the festive season has really started. Which is probably a good thing, because I usually get terminally depressed at this time of year, and I'm only just easing into that mental state now. Still, just two more weeks and it'll all be over, so if you see me in the meantime and I'm manically cheerful or sulky and uncommunicative, bear with me. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible after Boxing Day.