Lazy Sunday Book

If anyone's keenly following my othello progress, I came 11th out of 24 in last night's tournament, which could have been a lot worse, and didn't play all that badly. So who knows, I might not lose all my games on Saturday.

Anyway, I've done nothing at all today. I didn't get out of bed till gone twelve, and I've spent the whole afternoon lounging around lethargically. I think I've got sleeping sickness. Or ME. Or clinical depression. Hmm, I need to get a medical encyclopaedia so I can look up more possible ailments - I'd quite like to be a hypochondriac, it sounds like a fun hobby.

Still, no work tomorrow so I can do things then. This is, of course, the root of my laziness problem - why do anything today when it can be safely put off until the extra Sunday tomorrow?

Hey, I was going to talk about comics last night, wasn't I? I went into Nottingham yesterday for a change, where there's a really cool comic shop called Page 45. They stock a really wide range of comics and comic-related junk, and the people who work there are really nice and friendly too. They charge 60p more for a $2.99 comic than Forbidden Planet just round the corner, so they obviously either need the support or have commendable levels of cheek. I always buy stuff there, anyway - there should be more comic shops like that.

As well as the usual week's supply of superhero action (including She-Hulk #8, that makes me go oo, isn't Dan Slott the best writer in the world, not for the first time) I bought volume 28 of Ranma½, which I would urge anyone who hasn't heard of it before to check out. There are actually 30 volumes out now, I've just got a bit behind with buying them. It's a hilarious martial arts comedy saga from Japan, by Rumiko Takahashi about a young martial artist called Ranma who turns into a girl when he comes into contact with cold water. He has a huge range of friends and enemies, most of whom also turn into something else when exposed to cold water, three fiancées and countless rivals for their affection, and a mother who will force him to commit ritual suicide if she finds out he's a girl part of the time. This volume features a girl who trains sumo wrestling pigs, a cure for Ranma's father's baldness, Ranma's teacher harnessing the battle energy created by fighting fish to make her a better teacher, Kuno being posessed by a tree in such a way that only a date with Ranma will cure him, a fever providing a temporary cure for cold-water-related transformations and a cursed kitchen spatula. I don't think there's another comic series in the world that stays so inventive after such a long time.

Since I've got no money at the moment and that always makes me splash out on things, I also bought Babymouse - Queen Of The World! by Jennifer L Holm and Matthew Holm, which is somehow also a lot of fun. It's the adventures of a young mouse girl who wanders off into pink-coloured fantasy sequences at the slightest provocation. The characters and plot are a string of overused clichés, but in this case it still works. It's funny. You should buy this, too.

Better things to do

I'm in the middle of an othello tournament on kurnik, trying to remember how to play the game before next Saturday's London regional, and I haven't got the time tonight to write what I was planning to (it's about comics, and I know nobody reading this likes those posts anyway, so you're not missing much). So, sorry, this is all you get tonight. No refunds.

Memory gossip

While I've been rambling about Chaucer, Channel 5 and Charlie Fox, it's been quite a busy week for the world of 'memory sports', or at least my little corner of it. It just turned out today that the German Championship has been postponed until some time in the autumn, which is a real annoyance. Also, the World Championship has been confirmed as taking place at Imperial College, London - not very glamorous, but there are worse places it could be - on August 19-21.

What I need, though, is a competition before then to get me properly in memory-championship-winning mood. For the last couple of years that role's been performed by the German championship, and the year before that it was the MSO. This year there's only the Speed Cards Challenge (which is a completely different kind of affair), unless I can engineer something else to fill the gap.

There is a vague possibility, though, from two sources. Firstly, James Jorasch and Chris Harwood have been talking about holding a memory championship in Manhattan some time in August. Just cards and numbers, James speculated, which sounds familiar. I've also spoken this week to one of the six billion TV producers trying to sell a memory documentary to Channel 4, and he's spoken to Andi Bell (quite a feat, these days). Andi, it seems, hasn't been training, doesn't think he'll come to the WMC this year, but is still talking about organising a championship of his own. Like the Memory World Cup in 2004, which was just cards and numbers, and a lot of fun.

There must be a way to get these people together and use their business sense and passion for memory competitions to benefit me in some way. I would love to see another World Cup - it would be great to have that on the regular schedule of competitions every year (that, and Gunther's reaction would keep me amused). July would be better than August, obviously, now that there's a void left by the German Championship. But would anyone come to a World Cup in America? Probably not. Well, Americans would, and I would, but I'd want to get some Germans over there too to make it a proper competition. We'd need to find a big sponsor or eccentric millionaire to throw money at it, but that kind of thing's possible for the likes of Andi or James if they put their minds to it.

I haven't got a phone number for Andi, of course, and I'm not sure I've got a current email address either, but I'm sure I could track him down...

In other news, thanks to the Metro free-on-trains newspaper, I've just discovered the pop group with the coolest name ever: Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. With full stops in the name and everything. Classic. Their music is pretty good too - check them out.

While I'm talking about the Metro, I should also mention that it has a rather cool comic strip - Nemi. Which according to my research is a popular Norwegian strip that's quite rightly gathering a cult following here in Britain. Although the British translation, given where it appears, is understandably toned down a bit from the Norwegian original - granted that I only speak one word of Norwegian, I'm almost certain Nemi's first word in the third panel of this strip isn't 'sod' like it is in the Metro version...

It's cool that they're still happy to show Nemi smoking and drinking and having casual sex, though. I hate excessive censorship.

Testing, testing, one two three...

My internet connection is a bit dodgy tonight, so I'm hoping this goes through and doesn't get lost in cyberspace. Because I'm not typing it again, I'll tell you that.

Anyway, a couple of days ago I bought myself a new copy of the complete works of Geoffrey Chaucer. My brother borrowed my old one and lost it, somehow. It's about 1500 pages and the size of a house, so it seems to me you'd have to be pretty creative to lose something like that, but never mind. I also really shouldn't be spending twenty-something quid on a book until I get paid next week, since the Cambridge memory competition seriously drained my bank account, but never mind. I can always rob a bank or something.

Anyway, I've been into Chaucer for a long time, ever since stumbling across the Miller's Tale when I was somewhere in the region of 14 years old. I'm not sure exactly what the appeal is - I don't mind a bit of poetry from time to time, but Chaucer's the only great poet I could do the life and works of on Mastermind. The Middle English is something to do with it, I'm sure - reading his works is like a puzzle, you need to translate it into modern words and still appreciate the poetic effects he manages to achieve with a horribly cumbersome language. There's a reason all the poets before the 14th century wrote in Latin or French, they're much easier to make something beautiful from than the English of Chaucer's time.

Then there's the fun of trying to establish exactly what Chaucer originally wrote, since he came from a time before the printing press was invented and no two manuscripts are quite the same. What I'd really like to do some day is discover a lost 14th/15th century manuscript of one of his more obscure poems and keep it to myself until I've transcribed it and compared it to the other existing ones. That would show all those professor types and book-losing English-literature-PhDs how cool I am!

Pesky copycatting Channel 5

I've just noticed there was a programme on tonight called "The Mystery of the Mary Celeste: Revealed". Now everyone will think that that exciting story I wrote last Tuesday was inspired by flicking through this week's Radio Times (which came out that day) rather than by whatever did inspire it. I can't remember what it was. Still, I won't let it discourage me, I know how much my loyal readers enjoy reading my occasional attempts to be funny rather than writing about something interesting or enlightening (actual quote - "I even liked that thing with Sunderland and the Prime Minister...")

I see there's a programme on Channel 4 later tonight about the Pet Shop Boys. I used to be a big fan of them back in the 80s, and I think it's cool that they're still going strong, even if they can't write good songs any more or persuade anyone to buy the ones they do release. They still seem to be nice guys.

Would you, could you, with a fox?

I keep seeing foxes out the window of the train as it's coming into Derby station. Or maybe it's the same fox every time, I'm not sure. But I never used to see them when I was living in rural Lincolnshire, it's only since moving to the big city, which is strange. Admittedly my old boss Andrew and his gang went out shooting foxes back there on a regular basis, but they never seemed to run out of innocent creatures to slaughter so you'd think I would have seen them around a bit more. Maybe Derby's just the fox capital of the world. Or maybe this one fox is following me around with nefarious intent. If I had a wallet, I'd keep a close eye on it.

Auditors, yuck.

Yes, it's the highlight of every accountant's year, having auditors coming around and poking their nose into the accounts to make sure you're not siphoning the company's money into a Swiss bank account and buying Ferraris and helicopters. This lot today weren't too bad, I thought, although other people were saying they were more rigorous than the last bunch. But they were entirely cool with me providing backing information that didn't come close to showing the kind of figures that it should have done for all the little bits and pieces they decided to investigate (due to administrative errors and things that date back to before I started, of course). Secretly, auditors really don't want to find problems with the accounts. Oh sure, they dream of uncovering a multi-billion dollar fraud some time and exposing corruption at the highest levels, but when it comes to bread-and-butter stuff like the little subsidiary company of ours that they were auditing today they just want to be reassured that we more or less know what we're doing, so they can sign it off and get home on time. Still, it keeps a lot of people in unnecessary employment, which is probably good for the world, economically speaking.

Who let the bunnies out?

It must be at least a few days since I last devoted a blog entry to wittering on about a cartoon rather than anything my devoted readers might be interested in reading about, so let's talk about Loonatics Unleashed, shall we?

It's a futuristic superhero action-comedy series featuring heroes based on the Looney Tunes characters, and it's not as good as that makes it sound. It has its moments, but with that kind of premise it should be really quite cool. It also should be funny occasionally, but it really isn't. It bugs me that the Daffy Duck analogue is used almost entirely for comic relief while the others are the cool, useful heroes. Actually, in today's episode he did pitch in in the big fight scenes and pull his weight, but that's a rarity. The plots are generic superhero stuff, which I'm fine with, but there's no character interaction between the heroes, so you can't really connect with the stories.

And the voice acting could be a lot better, particularly Charlie Schlatter as Ace Bunny. I'd never heard of him before this, although looking him up on IMDB, he's done additional voices on quite a few series I've watched in the past. But he really doesn't get this voice right, and I'm not sure whether that's his fault or the director's - he's not trying to sound like Bugs, but the script has him saying 'oi' instead of 'er' sounds, and that just doesn't go with the accent he delivers every other word in. It sounds really weird. And Jason Marsden, who's really quite a good voice actor, doesn't really impress me as Danger Duck. They should have got Joe Alaskey. Rob Paulsen's as good as usual, though.

I always worry about saying bad things about people on here in case they read it. So nobody show this to the cast or producers of Loonatics, please.

On the other hand, the latest batch of Codename: Kids Next Door episodes is brilliant. When I saw the first couple without Mo Willems credited as writer I thought it had lost its touch, but then they came out with a couple of all-time classics (Caked-Five, Daddy) so I'm not worried. And this weekend's Doctor Who was really cool too, one of the best yet.

It's terrible

They've changed the Eurovision Song Contest so the representative of each country at the end doesn't read out all ten scores, just the top three. That stops the results taking quite so many hours, but it's still a terrible break with tradition. On the other hand, the coolest song (Finland) are winning for a change, so it's okay.

Yes, there are more interesting things I could write about than the Eurovision Song Contest. I bet the internet is full of blogs talking about it, and this is meant to be a "different" kind of blog. But hey, it's only once a year. I won't do it again. And Britain have scored double figures for the first time in years!

Planning it is half the fun

Yes, two posts in one night. I'm as prolific as Enid Blyton, and only 90% as contemptuous of the working classes. But I've just noticed that the MSO schedule is on the website. This is always a highlight of my year. Planning out a timetable that will give me something fun to do all day, every day is a challenge - how much othello should I play? Should I play the last weekend or go to the othello nationals in Crawley? I want to do the mental calculations on Wednesday morning, so what to do in the afternoon? Can I cope with two solid days of Chinese Chess? Why is Chinese Chess before Chess in the alphabetical list? Can I remember how to play stratego? Can I fit azacru into the schedule and still have something to do for the rest of the first weekend?

After nobody came to last year's event, they're really going out of their way to persuade people to come back this time round, so maybe it won't be a complete disaster after all. I'm pretty sure I'll go along this time, anyway.

Who is Sandie Thom sleeping with at Virgin Radio? They're plugging "I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker" like nobody's business at the moment. Okay, it's a very good song, but every DJ is urging us to listen to it, predicting it will be a chart-topper and telling us it will grow on us. In identical words. There's some sinister conspiracy behind it. Really great song, though, so I don't mind.

And while I'm talking about radio, I really should have mentioned tonight that Radio 4 want to do a show about me as part of an all-summer theme of memory. Riveting as usual, Radio 4. But this really sounds like it would be fun, somehow, so I really want to get involved with it. It's only a 15-minute slot and it's on radio, so it seems to me there'd be a bare minimum of people following me around and talking to me, and probably no cameras being pointed in my face.

Oo, gotta get up, gotta get out

Sainsbury's have changed their opening hours without telling me, so that they now close an hour earlier at 7pm. This forces me to go to Spar if I notice I've run out of bread after that time, which generally forces me to buy that horrible "seven days fresh" stuff, because they generally sell out of the edible kinds of bread by that time of night.

Now, I'm not like Delia Smith, who won't eat any bread that she hasn't made from flour she's ground herself and yeast she's cultivated between her own toes, but that seven-days-fresh bread is horrifically nasty. I'm not sure by what definition of 'fresh' they're working, but it looks, feels and tastes past its sell-by date even when it's brand new. And a loaf of normal bread usually lasts me seven days without going off. Who buys this product, and in the name of sanity, why?

In other news, there's a solid gold pack of cards as the prize at the Speed Cards Challenge next month! I'm definitely going to win it. This is the kind of prize that all memory championships should have, rather than stupid trophies that don't fit in your rucksack for the journey home (always catches me out, that does. And I can't bring an empty bag to the competition with me because that would jinx the whole thing). This whole event is going to be fantastic, I can tell. Better by far than my Cambridge thing. Hattingen's limited supply of hotels seem to all be fully booked, but rather than trawl around for B&Bs and phone Germany to ask if they've got a room, I think I'll get a hotel in Essen - it's twenty minutes away on the train and that way I get to look around the big city on the Friday before the competition.

Mister Boss

I'm not, as a rule, good at being a boss. I can't tell people to do things because I'm scared they'll say no, and besides, I'd much rather do everything myself than get someone else to do it. But today I noticed that I and my underlings were working really well, getting stuff done and I was all telling them what to do and how to do it and everything. I'm not sure how that happened, but it was fun.

Although in between that, I was getting in an argument with someone non work-related over email, and I was going to blog about that at length tonight, but we sorted it out, more or less, and it was all the result of a misunderstanding, mostly, so I won't go into it here after all. Although I'm still quite annoyed with this person's attitude, so maybe I will if I can't think of anything better to write about tomorrow. It's the kind of thing I should sleep on, I think.

I'm watching the Eurovision Song Contest semi-final at the moment. It's kind of irresistible.

Fallen at the last fence

Drat, I was hoping to say tonight that I should have had a bet on Chelsea to win the league, Liverpool the FA Cup and Arsenal the Champions League, as I predicted a while ago, but it didn't quite work out.

Instead, I suppose I should record that I'm thrilled with the World Memory Championship being moved to London and mid-August, meaning that a) I don't have to take time off work in our busiest period of the year (and might even have escaped the newspapers and things before I have to get on with work), and b) I get to play in the othello nationals after all! Now all I have to do is learn how to play the game properly and I have a very slim chance to get a trip to Japan out of it. That's assuming an unprecedented number of flukey wins, better players not wanting to compete in the worlds and people being abducted by aliens at convenient (for me) times.

It's a shame to miss out on visiting Malaysia again, though - I was really looking forward to it. I suppose I could go there anyway some time and not compete in a memory competition, but that would just be silly.

Another TV company emailed me today, adding to the long, long list of people who are trying to develop a documentary about memory for Channel 4. One of these days, I'm sure one of them is going to actually make one, just on the law of averages.

The Bermuda Triangle

"Everybody shut up and pay attention," said Douglas, bursting through the front door with a two-foot-long model ship in his arms. "I've solved the mystery of what happened to the Mary Celeste."

Everyone turned their gaze from Noel Edmonds on the TV to look at Douglas. When he showed no signs of wanting to elaborate on his pronouncement, Davina asked "So what did happen to the Mary Celeste?"

"Technically," said Hortense, "we know what happened to the Mary Celeste. It was the crew whose fates are a mystery. The ship itself was just fine."

"Shut up, Davina," said Douglas, rather unfairly. "I'll be able to tell you what happened to it if you'll let me use your bath. I've only got a shower at my place and that's no use."

Everyone stayed silent this time to see if Douglas would explain what he was talking about without prompting, but he put the model ship down on the table, wandered into the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea. Roger threw a brick at him and narrowly missed, breaking the sugar bowl and two salt cellars. Luckily, the salt fell on the floor in such a way that it seemed to spell the words "What do you mean, Douglas?", so Douglas continued his explanation.

"You see," he said, inaccurately, "I've made a perfect scale model of the Mary Celeste. I just need to set it afloat in your bathtub and watch what happens, and the greatest mystery of the human race will be solved!"

Davina doubtfully interjected, "Douglas, it's a very good scale model, but..."

"I got a better scale model out of a Kinder egg last week!" shouted Spike from the corner.

"...But I'm not sure you can deduce what happened to the original ship by what happens to a model in a bathtub," continued Davina undeterred.

"And it was supposed to be an ostrich, I just put the pieces together the wrong way!" Spike screamed.

"Ah, but I've made scale models of the crew as well, look," said Douglas, as if that put an end to any and all criticism of his theory. "Now come on, let's go to the bathroom.

"I could do a computer simulation of what happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste..." started Hortense, safe in the knowledge that everyone told her to shut up every time she mentioned computers and thus she wouldn't have to reveal that she hadn't the first idea how one would go about creating such a simulation. Roger threw a brick at her head, which missed and shattered a ming vase, three windows and an antique crystal radio set.

So, ignoring Noel Edmonds's increasingly frantic attention-seeking, the gang trooped upstairs. The bathroom door turned out to be locked, so Davina and Spike kicked it down. They discovered an elderly man in the bath.

"For crying out loud, Uncle Herbert," sighed Davina, "I've told you before about breaking into my house to use my bath."

"Yes, but your bath is slightly smaller than mine, so it reduces the risk of drowning," said Uncle Herbert, climbing out. "I'll be off, then."

"No you bleeding well won't!" yelled Spike. "You're staying here to help us solve the mystery of the Mary Celeste!"

"Can I at least put some clothes on first?" asked Uncle Herbert. "I left mine at home, and it's surprisingly cold in here, considering there are six of us standing around a tub of hot water in a six-foot-square bathroom on a hot afternoon in the middle of August."

"There's no time for that kind of nonsense," said Douglas airily. He put the model of the Mary Celeste into the bath and took out his camera to record the goings-on.



Several theories have been advanced as to what happened after that. We will never know for certain, as at that moment the batteries ran out in the security camera in the bathroom. When the man came to read the gas meter three weeks later, he found the scale model of the Mary Celeste still floating in the bath, Noel Edmonds still on the television, but no sign of any of the six former occupants of the house. Some things we are just not meant to understand.

I want a mini-me

It occurs to me that of the newcomers who took part at the Cambridge memory competition, Rich Bowdler is very much in the mould of Ed Cooke, wild-haired life-and-soul-of-the-party Oxford types; Dave Turner is along the same lines as David Thomas, both professional corporate memory trainers as well as the eerily similar names; Guy Griffiths has been taught everything he knows by his fellow student Boris Konrad; and James Paterson at least shares a name and initial with James Ponder, even if I can't think of a good way to keep the analogy going. There was also Philip Peters who joined in for the afternoon, but I didn't get much chance to talk with him and I can't think of anyone to compare him to, so I'm ignoring him for the sake of this argument.

The important thing was that there wasn't anyone there sporting a silly hat, unflattering beard and strategically shaved head, nor emulating my own approach to memory contests. (Unlike in the othello-playing world, where hats are fast becoming the essential fashion accessory). I do have plenty of people who ask my advice and act on it, so I shouldn't complain. But I'm going to anyway, because I'm just in the mood for it tonight. Not that I want to devote my time and energy to training or inspiring people, but if there was a way to have hordes of dedicated fans and protegés without having to actually do anything, I'd take it.

Until I got tired of the attention and ran away, obviously. And if I've offended anyone reading this by characterising them as a mini-me, I'm very sorry.

Practice makes you tired

Haven't done as much as I was planning, but I did a 30-minute binary this morning, and 30-minute cards tonight. And I'm toying with the dangerous idea of trying 18 packs in Germany. I did that tonight and think I got 14 right, which would be great, but I didn't get the last three, which kind of suggests that I should just stick with 15. That's the safe option (relatively - there's still a sporting chance that I could mess it up completely), but 18 is the tantalising target that I've felt for years like I should be able to do.

I could always attempt a number of packs that isn't a multiple of three, there's no law against it, but I just prefer to do these things in complete routes (three packs to a route). If I did 16, maybe I'd get them all right. Or maybe I'd just be confused by the whole thing. I really like strategising like this.

Short attention span

If you're just watching TV in order to see a particular trailer, does that automatically make you one of those hyperactive types who can't focus on anything that lasts more than thirty seconds? Or is it a valid excuse that I half-saw a trailer on BBC1 today for some programme about global warming that has at least two rather obscure cartoon clips on it? The trailer was a rather strange montage of weather-related snippets (Michael Fish saying there isn't going to be a hurricane, that kind of thing, although without sound and with music in the background. It's The End Of The World As We Know It, I think it was), including a clip that I think was from Jack Frost, the cartoon I acquired on the Betty Boop collection I wrote about a couple of weeks ago (but it took me by surprise and went by too quickly for me to properly register it) and a couple of seconds of Felix the Cat mopping his brow in a 1920s cartoon I don't recognise. So now I really have to see the trailer again to properly identify the clips. And possibly find out when this show is going to be on and what it's called so I can maybe watch it, but that's a secondary concern.

Anyway, I've done no memory training again today. The Cup Final is a sort of excuse (amazing game by the way, real Roy of the Rovers stuff, I'm getting suspicious that someone is scripting big games to make them exciting enough to get a big audience), but I do need to keep on top of this thing if I'm going to win the WMC, and I still do really want to do that. I've also eaten a whole bag of Haribo tangfastics and feel a bit sick. But Smiths are selling them half price.

Oo, and also, I bought a lottery ticket for the first time in yonks, and won a tenner!

Dirty Dusting

There are posters up around the Derby area for a comedy at the Playhouse, proudly boasting that it stars Pearl out of Last Of The Summer Wine, Helga out of 'Allo 'Allo and Robbie Jackson out of EastEnders. And while I personally think those are three great actors, I've seen parodies of that kind of poster with less F-list stars than that. I might have to go and see it.

And while I'm in the mood to poke fun at people, let's all point and laugh at the artist who forgot to draw Spotty's spots throughout the extended story in this week's Beano. I mean, did the character's name not give anyone a clue as to what he's supposed to look like? Also, I'm pretty sure a Beano from my day wouldn't have included the line "eats shoots and leaves". It's shocking, what is the world coming to and so on. Which reminds me, for the benefit of regular readers who'll know I'm still complaining about Ken H Harrison not drawing the Broons any more, Big Brad Wolf is a much better fit for his artistic talents than Robbie Rebel was. So I shouldn't complain too much.

I'll Be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You

Don't worry, I'm not talking to you.

I have a habit of whistling or even singing quietly to myself if I'm under stress at work, just to keep myself sane, you know. Which is fine as long as I choose an appropriate song, but the one that was running through my head on a particularly stressful and hectic work day today was Louis Armstrong singing the above song from the Betty Boop cartoon of the same name (which I watched last night). I had to be careful not to sound like I was telling my colleagues essentially that I would dance on their graves.

The last bag of rhubarb and custards that I bought from Sainsbury's were mostly roughly three-quarters custard-bit, but this latest bag I've got are the other way round. As someone who used to work in a sweet factory, I wonder if this was the result of cost-cutting measures, or running out of certain ingredients, or problems with the machine.

I'm busy typing up my transcripts from the othello tournament on Saturday. I normally like to play through my games to see where I went wrong or right, but since I was playing so dreadfully on Saturday I think I'll skip that exercise so as not to depress myself unduly. I remember playing a couple of absolutely terrible moves because I missed something really obvious. The worst thing about Saturday was losing my 100% win record against at least two players, maybe as many as four (pick whichever of Joel Blackmur, Steve MacGuire, Aidan Robison and George Ortiz haven't beaten me in a live tournament game before - I can't remember exactly which of them have, but I've only played them one or two times each). This kind of statistic is important to me. That's why I've assiduously avoided Takuji Kashiwabara for the last three years - I think I might feign a heart attack or hide under the table (whichever seems easiest at the time) if I end up drawn against him again.

Incommunicado

My phone doesn't seem to be working. Actually, it hasn't been working at least since I got back from Cambridge, but it's just now that I'm deciding to do something about it. I don't use the thing very much, and indeed unplug it quite regularly if I'm doing something that I don't want to be interrupted, but I don't like not having a means to be contacted in an emergency. The thing's completely dead, and it's not a problem with the phone itself - I've got a spare one that I acquired a few years ago by way of a funny story that I probably shouldn't fit in the middle of this sentence, and I've tried plugging that one in, to no avail - which means I'll have to call Ntl out to come and look at it. Which is a drag.

Anyway, that other telephone apparatus came about because I thought my original one (a stylish one made of transparent plastic with flashing LEDs) was broken, because it was just flashing and not making any noise when someone called me. Only after I'd bought another one and been using it for a week or so did I notice the switch on the side of my original phone that turns off the ringer. Casting my mind back, I remembered that I had deliberately set it to 'off' mode to see what would happen, and then forgot about it. So I ended up with two perfectly good phones, and went back to using the stylish one.

My dad also promised to buy me a fancy new phone from the mail-order catalogue he was so obsessed with, the last time I saw him, now I come to think of it.

The first-day-back-at-work-after-a-competition blues

Turns out that going back to work after organising a memory competition has exactly the same effect as going back after competing in one. I get in the kind of mood where I figure if I can make it through the day without handing in my notice, it's a very good day. Getting any work done really isn't going to happen. The problem, I think, is that my brain's still working, and it takes a while to get back into the frame of mind where I can turn it off and get on with the accounting. I was coming back down to earth by the afternoon, though, and managed not to run off and join the circus, so now tomorrow I've just got to work a long day to catch up with everything.

Anyway, I'll write a bit more about the weekend when I get round to it. Right now I want to get in a bit of training of my own for the competitions coming up. I'm listening to a really cool song right now, called "I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker". I think it's going to be a hit.

Chance meetings with everyone I know in the world

Going home to Derby this morning I got to Cambridge station at quarter past ten, to find that the trains up to the midlands leave at four minutes past the hour. So rather than sitting around for fifty minutes, I decided to go back into town and hang around there for a while. But on my way out of the station I bumped into Ed Cooke, on his way home too, and Paul Smith, on his way to London on business. They don't know each other and just both happened to be in the same place at the same time. So we chatted about memory and MSOs for a few minutes until they went in to catch their trains, and since by then it was starting to rain and there was only half an hour to wait I went back into the station too, and ran into Jenny, on her way into work having overslept! I can only conclude that everyone in the universe passes through Cambridge at some point around 10:30 on a Monday morning.

A success!

Contrary to expectations, the Cambridge Memory Championship went really quite well. No major disasters at all, and hardly any minor ones either. My fears about it overrunning horribly weren't entirely unfounded (in fact, Mystic Meg's fears have never been so founded), but that didn't turn out to be a problem in the sense of us getting thrown out of the building - when we were finally leaving at about 7pm, a caretaker turned up to say he'd have to hurry us. Nothing went seriously wrong - my laptop proved incapable of playing the spoken numbers loud enough, but we fixed that by some clever technological means, I didn't think to bring stopwatches but enough people did that we managed okay, I had a dispute with Clemens about him wanting to use a pack of cards that was made up out of two different packs, so some had red backs and some had blue, but we sorted it out amicably in the end.

And we had the best Germans, the US Champion and lots of new British competitors! Clemens won, to nobody's huge surprise - he's now won the last five competitions he's entered, in a run stretching back to Vienna 2004. I really have to do something about that some time. Gunther came second and despite what I said yesterday in a competition-organiser-stress kind of mood took the whole thing entirely in the right spirit. Johannes Mallow came third with a very impressive performance including a huge 720 digits in 5-minute binary, Boris had a bad day but came fourth. So the Germans dominated much as expected, with me and Ed marking papers instead of challenging them. But the newcomers all seemed to have a great time, and hopefully will all be coming back to future competitions. There's definitely going to be one more in Britain this year, it seems - either a British championship or the worlds after all, Malaysia might not happen.

Nobody beat any of my records, which I was pleased about. Boris was shocked to hear that the Speed Cards Challenge will coincide with a Germany v England world cup football game if Germany win their group and England come second - he'd scheduled it specifically to avoid the days Germany might be playing. Aubrey joined the memory crowd for lunch at the Robin Hood and Little John and everyone had a lot of fun. The TV people interviewed me and a few others and seemed to like the look of the competitions after all. Everybody was able to get to the venue despite the lack of buses and to get home again without any major disasters, assuming Ferdinand Krause managed to catch his plane (he cut it a bit fine, with the competition running so late).

I've got the day off tomorrow, so I get to spend a lot of time in bed recovering from the mental stress. It turns out that running a competition is just as tiring as taking part in one. Who'd'a thunk it?

Woo!

Wireless internet access in my hotel room! A laptop with the ability to connect to wireless internet access in my hotel room! I'm not used to such technology. Actually, I didn't see anything in the hotel information about this, so possibly I'm hacking into a neighbour's bandwidth, but never mind. Anyway, for those hanging on my every word, I did find a hotel (you've probably worked that out by now by yourselves, I suppose). It's literally miles away from the venue - four and a half miles to be precise, but it was the only one not fully booked and with online booking facilities. Also, the buses don't run early on Sunday mornings, so I'll have to either walk with an EXTREMELY heavy bag full of laptop, cards and papers, or get a taxi. And I hate getting taxis, it's so non-working-class, I feel bad about it.

Anyway, I did unbelievably badly at the othello tournament today. I did win one game out of seven, but that wasn't exactly my greatest performance ever. I'm out of practice and steadily getting worse, which annoys me. Imre won, various interesting things happened, but even though I know a lot of othello players actually read this thing and I'd hate to disappoint them, I haven't got the time to write about it right now. I've got lots of packs of German cards to shuffle in preparation for tomorrow. And I'm all nervous now - I'm thinking of the competition in terms of a friendly get-together in the spirit of fun, and certain German doctors who will remain nameless are clearly taking the whole thing very seriously indeed and will look down his nose at the unprofessional organisation of the whole thing. Ah well.

Laugh about it, shout about it, when you've got to choose...

Local council election day, and despite my self-imposed ban on talking politics, I just wanted to record that I'm pleased with myself for remembering to vote, considering how busy I've been both at work and sorting out all the things for Sunday that I forgot to sort out earlier (little details like the spreadsheet for calculating scores, vitally important things like that...) So I can rest safe in the knowledge that I've contributed towards making the not-as-pretty-as-it-sounds Arboretum ward of Derby the democratic paradise that it is.

And it's hot! I'm not used to this kind of temperature. But apparently it's not going to last, so that's okay. I wouldn't want to be outside a building made predominantly of glass during our occasional outbreaks of nice weather, after all. It was seriously uncomfortable in the office today.

No time to go on at length, still haven't found a hotel so might be sleeping on the streets of Cambridge over the weekend.

Oh yes, and...

Well, I did say tonight's blogging would be long and boring. I just remembered something else I was going to talk about that I feel the need to record for posterity. Since I was talking the other night about dream analysis, I felt it worth mentioning that I had a dream about Daffy Duck last night. It occurs to me that this is the first time I can remember him making an appearance in my dreams, although Sylvester's popped up two or three times that I can recall. What this might mean, I couldn't say, but I just thought it was interesting.

Butterscotchy Goodness

Looking through a file of old invoices at work today, I flicked past one for the nurseries that said 'Butterscotch, Dry Goods', among other things. I misread it as 'butterscotchy goodness' and had to go back and see what it really said. It set my brain spiralling off on a spirally train of thought, and reminded me in turn that Bart Simpson is allergic to butterscotch and imitation butterscotch; that butterscotch flavour angel delight is quite nice; that butterscotch is a really weird word and I have no idea how it originated; and that the first time I had a butterscotch flavoured sweet was at Tumby Woodside Primary School when I was four or five years old at most (it closed down in 1982).

This kind of thing fascinates me. I'm pretty sure I've thought about butterscotch before without dredging up this early childhood memory, so what caused me to unlock that particular filing cabinet in the back of my brain today? I'm fond of talking about filing cabinets when people ask me technical questions about memory - my theory is that we remember everything we've ever experienced, but it's filed away very bady, associated with other things we were experienced at the same time and cross-referenced randomly so we can't dig it out easily. And the trick to memory skills is to file away information efficiently so that it can all be dug out of the filing cabinet in order and neatly stapled together with colourful dividers and everything.

I'm wondering if it's something to do with the big windows in reception at Nord House - I was coming downstairs at the moment that I recalled that twenty-something-years-ago boiled sweet. Our building was a car showroom at some point in its history, and has a lot of glass. The reception area has a very, very high roof (something like 30 feet) with windows all the way up. This made it unbearably hot, so they've recently put opaque plastic over the glass above head height. It doesn't look nearly as pretty, but then I don't have to sit there. Anyway, the point of this rambling is that Tumby Woodside school also had high ceilings (granted, I was nearer to the ground in those days, but even so) and big tall windows. Maybe the similarity there combined with the thought of butterscotch to dig up that useless chunk of memory.

While I'm talking memory, I had a call from another TV researcher who's interested in filming Cambridge today. (Yes, I'm still giving my number freely to these people! Aren't I good? Although I've just remembered now that I never replied to that Mexican. Oops. Tomorrow.) Anyway, I think I've put her off the idea of filming memory competitions for life - you could just hear her getting less and less enthusiastic about the project as I told her what actually happens there. She was thinking in terms of people standing up and reciting exciting and lengthy speeches.

And I know I'm vain, but I much prefer the kind of media person who says it's really great that I was the world champion and stuff (even if they're transparently just saying that so I'll do what they want) to the kind who ask me 'do you ever compete in these things yourself, or just organise them?' It's hard to lament about being a semi-celebrity when nobody in the world has heard of you.

Tomorrow night I've got to pack everything for the weekend - I'll need to dash off fairly promptly on Friday night to get to Cambridge at a reasonable time of night, assuming I've found a hotel (had a look at lunchtime, but they're all either miles away from the venue or fully booked, or both. Or else don't have an online booking facility. I hate phone calls, but I'm going to have to make some, I can tell.) So for those of you who hang on my every word, tomorrow will be my last blog entry until Monday night. I'm sure you'll survive.

I have nothing to say

I've been waiting for inspiration to strike, but it's time for bed and I can't think of anything interesting to write about, so I won't. Tell you what, to make up for it I'll do a really long and boring blog entry tomorrow night.

Mike Teevee

Okay, we've got sound files for spoken numbers, historic events translated acceptably into German, abstract images, sheets of numbers coming out of the wazoo, everything you could possibly need for a memory competition! Now all I have to do is find a place to stay in Cambridge and remember to take everything with me when I go.

Not bad, considering Boomerang have been showing nothing but Warner Bros cartoons all day. From Kitty Kornered to Catty Cornered, I've had at least one square eye on the screen pretty much non-stop. Apart from the occasional trip out for essentials like sweets. I spent a long time racked with indecision over whether to get murray mints or mintoes. I'm pretty sure they're the same thing, but I normally have murray mints, so I thought I should probably get mintoes to see if they're noticeably different after all. But I chickened out in the end in case they were nasty. I fear change, you see.

Heavy workload

Who would have thought organising a memory competition was so much hassle? Still, it's nearly all finished now, so assuming I can find a hotel in Cambridge, everything should go all right. I've been trying to think of all the worst-case scenarios that could happen and prepare for them, but I bet something drastic and unexpected happens, like a shark attack, and everyone blames me for not having provided shark-proof cards to memorise.

I had a weird dream last night where I was a newspaper reporter (except for one sequence where I was Archduke Ferdinand) travelling by taxi to cover some distant news story, but in order to get there I'd told the taxi driver that I was going to cover the taxi drivers' convention in a town slightly further away in the same direction.

And another dream in which I was a football player for Burton Albion, which is quite cool - I quite often dream that I play for Boston United, but this is the first time my subconscious has caught up with where I'm living nowadays. That dream also involved travelling to a distant game, come to think of it. There's probably a deeper meaning behind the whole long-journey motif there, maybe I should see a psychiatrist about it. Or about my many, many other mental problems, perhaps.

I've got soul but I'm not a soldier

I was walking through town today, and the Socialist Worker people were out in force with petitions. I'd gone past without looking and was round the corner before it occurred to me - I always used to sign those things. When did I stop? It's not like I ever had the idea that it would make any difference, but it doesn't hurt to put your name on a list in a good cause, right? And it's years since I went to an anti-war protest march. I think the last one was the big one in early 2003, in fact. And it's not as if the world is such a happy, peaceful place nowadays that I don't feel the need to do anything. I've just got out of the habit. I still criticise people at every opportunity for their apathy, but when did I last do anything constructive to protest the state of things? Long, long ago.

And thinking about it, I seem to have dropped the anti-war stuff at exactly the same time I started getting seriously into memory training. I'm sure there are other factors involved too - that was also the time I came down from my six-month lost weekend and got a horrible new accountancy job - but it's rather worrying now that I come to think of it. So anyway, I turned round, signed the petition and resolved to go to the next event that comes along. World, get ready for the return of Activist Zoomy.

Although the standard of protests seems to have gone down since my day - the only march on the Stop The War Coalition's calendar for the next few months is an anti-Israel thing, and that segment of the Stop The War crowd always got on my nerves. Okay, there's a don't-attack-Iran day next Saturday which I just can't get involved in because I have to be in Cambridge for the competition, but it's May Day on Monday, for crying out loud! What kind of socialists don't hold mass protests on May Day?

Damn, I should have titled this post "Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?" Oh well, I'll save that for the next time I want to agonise about being a semi-celebrity. I'm sure it'll happen again. Anyway, I bought the Killers album "Hot Fuss" today, I'd been meaning to for ages because I love "All These Things That I've Done" so much, but I don't like buying an album based on one song. But the rest of the tracks are okay, if not all that exceptional, so it was probably worth it. I should get in to downloading music, but that just seems a bit technological for an activist hippy like me.

Oh, and tonight's Doctor Who (the one with Sarah Jane and K-9) was brilliant.

With a boulder on my shoulder, feelin' kinda older

I've decided not to send any more emails to people about abstract images. I was getting way too caught up in the whole argument today. I think the whole thing's been more or less settled now, anyway, probably. Not to my satisfaction, but there are many more important things in life to get worked up about.

Anyway, while I wasn't reading and writing emails at work today, I had my six-monthly appraisal, which went very well. I came across as all professional and efficient and accountanty, which is quite a trick considering I'm not at all. What was more fun was appraising my own underlings a couple of days ago - I've never done that before, but I quite enjoyed it. Luckily I have good underlings who know what they're doing and get on with it without me having to do boss things, so it's not too difficult. I should remember not to call them underlings in the office, though, it sounds kind of rude.

Ah, and a three day weekend! The first of two in a row, since I've also got the next Monday off to recover from Cambridge. And speaking of Cambridge, I had an email from Boris today asking me if I knew of any accommodation there that wasn't fully booked, which reminded me I haven't booked a room myself for the weekend either. This could be a problem - I'll have to find somewhere tomorrow. I phoned Sleeperz tonight, but they're full on the Saturday.

I need to trim my beard and get a haircut. It's at times like this that I wish I had the option of changing my hairstyle and doing something new, but short of shaving it all off, that's genetically impossible. I'd like to have long hair, but I can't even do that - it gets to roughly collar length and then just won't go any longer than that. I miss the days when I could toy with a side or centre parting.

Un-be-freaking-lievable!

They did it! In exactly the same way as against Basle! Maccarone scored in the last minute to win the game! Good grief, if this was fiction nobody would like it because it takes far-fetched to the point of absurdity...

Little bits of memory

There's a Mexican journalist who's sent me an email wanting to do an interview, who's apparently 'like 80% English speaker', which automatically makes me feel bad about asking to do it in writing rather than talking on the phone, in case she thinks I'm saying I don't think she speaks good enough English to do a spoken interview. Even though I ALWAYS ask journalists if we can do the interview in writing, yes. I worry about these things.

I also worry for the laws of nature - there's an ongoing debate about the new 'abstract images', and I'm agreeing with Gunther about absolutely everything! We're normally diametrically opposed on every subject vaguely related to memory. The problem is, we feel (and Clemens, Astrid and Joachim back us up on this), that if the random shapes Phil's fancy new random shape generator produces are coloured in, it makes it much easier to memorise them, because you only need to look at the colours. To be fair, it's not like they're primary colours, it's patterns and textures, but the point still stands.

Phil, Mind Map fanatic that he is, thinks that colours are essential to 'stimulate creativity', but I think that's nonsense. Memory competitions should be about giving the competitors things that are DIFFICULT to remember, and making them come up with creative ways to memorise them. Giving them things that make it easier to remember defeats the whole object. But it looks like the united front of the top competitors isn't going to get us anywhere again. Shocking. I'd complain and boycott things if I was the type to give a monkey's.

I'm watching the most amazing football match while I'm typing this - I know I've written about footy a lot on here lately, but this is something special. Middlesbrough came into the second leg of the Uefa Cup semi-final against Steaua Bucharest 1-0 down, played terribly for the first twenty minutes and conceded two more goals. With the away goals rule, that meant they had to score four to stay in the competition.

Now, for those of you unfamiliar with football, coming back from 3-0 down is a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of thing. But it's something that Middlesbrough actually did in the previous round of the Uefa Cup, against FC Basle, and somehow that statistic has inspired them to stage another amazing recovery. And everyone in the crowd is right behind them too - somehow, from the moment they went three down, they were hot favourites to win the game! As I write this, there's five minutes left and they've scored three of the required four. Unbelievable.

A bit more useless trivia - I've had the song 'Cool For Cats' stuck in my head all day.

Horses for Courses

It occurred to me that I should write something about eating horses, and call it 'Horses for Courses'. But then I realised that that would just be silly.

What would be better would be to write about a funeral director who decided to give away all his vehicles to the people who swore at him in the most creative way, and call it 'Hearses for Curses'. But that would essentially be the joke right there, and I've already given away the punchline, so I won't.

Fate mocks me once again

I had a plan tonight - get a snack on the way home, do some memory training once I got in, then cook tea in time for the football.

Got to Burton station in ample time to buy a bite to eat from the shop if the train was a couple of minutes late like it always is, but it was bang on time, so I didn't get a chance. And then it trundled out of the station a little way and stopped dead. The 'senior conductor' (I'm pretty sure there's only one conductor on these trains, but that's how he introduced himself) apologised over the tannoy and explained that the points were broken up ahead. So we sat around in the middle of nowhere for quite some time until the tracks were clear enough for us to back up to the previous set of points and move onto another track to continue towards Derby.

Also, it was the train with the display that says the train will be calling at 'Derby, Long Eaton, Long Eaton, Attenborough and Nottingham'. There should be one less stop at Long Eaton and one more at Beeston in between Attenborough and Nottingham.

Lehmann just saved a penalty!

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, so by the time I got home I judged that there wasn't time for any memory stuff. I've not been in the mood for it just lately, and I don't want to push things and force myself to do it. I'm still in good shape, mentally speaking, so I could give things a rest for a while until I'm more excited about it. Cambridge will probably have that effect on me.

Woohoo, Arsenal are in the final!

Snookered

I've just been watching a very entertaining snooker match between Ronnie O'Sullivan and Ryan Day. Day was 9-7 up going into the evening session, lost the first frame but was about to win the 18th when he had one of those complete nightmare moments - taking aim to pot a straight pink with just the colours left on the table he miscued horribly, bounced the cue ball right over the pink and straight into the pocket. And from that point on, everything that could possibly go wrong for him, did. You had to feel sorry for the guy. Ronnie won 13-10 in the end.

Talking of Snooker, I saw in HMV yesterday that there's a DVD of Maid Marian and her Merry Men, which I was sorely tempted to buy. In fact, I was tempted to buy about a dozen diverse DVDs, and the only reason I didn't was that I knew I'd just spend all my time sitting watching them and not doing anything useful. I still haven't written that book, after all, and I haven't done any memory training for the last few days either. But on the other hand, I'd like to experiment a bit more with my laptop's amazing DVD-playing abilities, and to see the entire run of Allo Allo in one sitting, intermingled with a few obscure old episodes of Doctor Who...

Cloth cap and whippet

I've spent a lot of today sorting out the things people are going to memorise at Cambridge. The random words was fun, if horribly time-consuming. I have an Excel spreadsheet that picks random words from a list of about 50,000 English words, but for the competition I had to pick out the reasonably common ones - I like to think I've got a pretty cromulent vocabulary, but there are plenty of big words that thing comes up with that I've never heard of.

Having done that, then they need to be translated into German. Which means rejecting another bunch of words if the dictionary can't find them or can't provide a one-word synonym (had to lose 'whippet', because the best translation I could find online was 'kleiner Rennhund'). And then there's agonising over whether it's more or less difficult in the two different languages. In my considered opinion, based as it is on my imperfect grasp of German, the two versions are about as equal as it's possible to get in terms of how commonly used the words are, how easy it is to confuse a word with a similar one, and so on. And they're all spelt right, I can promise that much at least.

I've also finished off the names and faces papers - roughly one third English names, one third German and one third international. Again, with the same difficulty level whichever of the two main languages is your first, scrupulously measured. That just leaves the spoken numbers to generate and record (on my laptop and on cassette in case of technological disaster - no translations here because there isn't the time or the technology, but I need at least two different sets of 100 and 200 digits in case something goes wrong) and the historic dates to do (relatively easy, although again the German translations are a headache).

Organisers of memory competitions always get blamed for everything that goes wrong, and get no credit for everything that goes right. It's like being a football referee.

Chewing gum for the eyes

I haven't done much but watch TV today. I did go to the trouble of shuffling 33 packs of cards with the intention of memorising them, then remembered that my printer's still broken and I'd run out of my card recall sheets. So I went to Curry's and got a new printer, and printed some out, but by then I hadn't got a three-hour gap anywhere in between all the things I wanted to watch on telly, so I didn't do anything.

Still, today's Ben 10 was very good, the football was quite a fun game and Chelsea lost (always a good thing). Doctor Who wasn't as good as usual - you'd think after 40 years they'd know that the show doesn't work when it's based around some rather dodgy special effects, and the werewolf just didn't look like it was there, I'm afraid. You'd see the characters reacting in horror and then a cut to what looked like an advert for a video game. It wasn't Skarasen levels of badness, but it was in the same ballpark.

St George's Day tomorrow, and I've noticed that some optimistic card-manufacturers are trying to sell St George's Day cards. And I bet nobody gets me one, either.

tweezers continuous

The lastest strategy of those dedicated people who bring you automated spam emails to confound the evil schemes of anti-spam programs is to put random words into the subject lines. I've had a couple over the last week with only a single random word, but today I had one with two - "tweezers continuous". I just love the phrase "tweezers continuous". It sounds like it should be part of a surreal poem, about a beautician with arms long and sinuous, plucking infinite eyebrows with tweezers continuous.

I'm going to find a way to work those words into every conversation I can.

Funny coincidences are great

I just turned off the snooker on BBCi when the match finished, which took me back to BBC2, where Mastermind was on. And the woman in the big black chair was answering on her specialist subject of Antonia Forest's books about the Marlow family. Which I absolutely love! I haven't watched Mastermind for years, and I practically never see a specialist subject that I can answer nearly as many questions as the contestant on.

The next guy's subject is the Indian cricket team, and I didn't get any of them. Hmm, and the next one is British Dreadnoughts 1906-1957. I think I'll change channels.

I've just had a horrible thought!

In three days' time, it will be the tenth anniversary of me starting my first job. Ten years as a wage slave! It doesn't bear thinking about. Perhaps it really is time to give the whole normal-job thing a rest and do something different.

But where did the time go? Ten years ago I was all excited about starting as a trainee accountant, six and a half grand a year, at an exciting meat factory a couple of miles outside Boston. Getting a lift from my dad while saving up for a scooter. Full head of hair, more or less. Never used the internet, and had only the vaguest idea of what it was. Never heard of the world memory championship, or othello tournaments, or the MSO. Granted, the latter didn't exist yet so I can be forgiven for that, but still.

I'd never met any of the people I hang out with nowadays, family excepted. If you'd told me I'd be calling myself Zoomy and writing every evening about my everyday life for a potential audience of millions and an actual audience of at least two or three, I would have looked at you as if you were mad. Which, let's face it, you would have been. Unless you were somehow armed with knowledge of the future, in which case you could still have used it a lot more productively than alarming an innocent nineteen-year-old when he should have been concentrating on his new job.

Memory ramblings

A few months ago I started on a new memory training regimen, which I've stuck with very impressively by my standards - every night I memorise 750 binary digits, 234 decimal digits and three packs of cards, as quickly as possible. The intention is to do 234 spoken digits after that, too, but by the time I get to that point I'm a bit bored with the whole thing, and turning my computer on is too much of a temptation to waste time on the internet. Then the plan is to do hour numbers, hour cards and 30-minute binaries at the weekends.

The logic behind this is that I've previously not done much practice for the five-minute disciplines and need to put a bit more work into them, and that getting faster and more accurate in the short term will improve my performance in the longer disciplines too.

I don't know why, but I've always had the idea that I'm better at the longer disciplines than the shorter one. I think I hold the world record in just about every single five-minute discipline, and neither of the hour-long ones, but my gut beliefs about myself are never based on facts.

Anyway, I've been doing this for quite a while now, and it's going well. I'm certainly faster than I have been before. But I'm letting the longer discipline training slide a bit lately, and when I tried a half-hour binary yesterday, it went pretty terribly. I did a half-hour cards afterwards to make myself feel better, and that went more or less okay (attempting 15 packs, and got eleven or twelve right). But I think I need to work on stamina, so the new plan is to do a half-hour binary, numbers or cards every other night, alternating with the speed training.

This increases the time I spend memorising in a night to 90 minutes, including recall time, which is quite a lot. Not that I spend my evenings doing productive and important things of great benefit to the world, but I do like to spend time staring vacantly at the television for hours on end, or chatting on the internet. Still, while I'm still enjoying the memory stuff, I'm going to keep at it.

Why am I not left-handed?

I know lots of cool people who are lefties, and it makes me feel depressingly normal to be right-handed. It has been pointed out that my handwriting is bad enough that I could write with my left hand and nobody would notice the difference, but that's not the point.

And while I'm in the mood to be annoyed by things, I've got to go back to work tomorrow. I'm really not in the mood.

Motion picture funnies

I was going to write in more detail about all those great cartoon videos I found yesterday, but I've noticed that whenever I've written about cartoons here in the past I always seem to sound strangely humourless, like I'm trying to come across as scholarly and not succeeding. I have no idea why, since the last thing I want in life is for people to think I know what I'm talking about.

On the other hand, I've got nothing better to write about tonight, and I'm still fascinated by the choice of cartoons to put on each tape. Not that I think 'choice' really came into it, it was obviously more a case of digging out the first public domain cartoons that came to hand from the pile, compiling them into a video, chopping off the copyright notices and title cards in some cases (I don't know if that makes them more or less legal, but a lot of these video collections do it), slapping a cheaply drawn cover on and selling it to people so excited by these new VCR things that they'll buy anything.

Although of course all the cartoons on these tapes are good ones, and some are really excellent. So I shouldn't be too scathing. The cover to the 'Betty Boop Noveltoon One' video [Noveltoons were the series that produced 'Tarts And Flowers', but not any of the other five much earlier cartoons on the tape] is in fact drawn by "Marc", an artist I admire greatly. If you're the kind of strange person who collects 80s/90s cheap cartoon videos, you might have encountered Marc without noticing it. I mainly know him as the artist responsible for the covers of 'Krypton Force' releases of the Japanese cartoons known in the USA as 'Force Five'.

These cartoons are five sci-fi series: Dangard Ace/Wakusei Robo Dangard A; Grandizer/UFO Robot Grandizer; Gaiking/Daiku Maryu; Spaceketeers/SF Saiyuki Starzinger; and Starvengers/Getta Robo G. They're all quite fun if you like that kind of thing, especially Gaiking and Starvengers, involving teams of heroes piloting giant robots to fight aliens [my brother will tell you that Spaceketeers is the technically superior and most entertaining one of the collection, so it's each to his own, obviously]. The American translations are mostly very good, although the voice acting is sometimes pretty bad, and the dialogue occasionally quite stupid.

In the UK, these never made it to television, but Krypton Force the video company got their hands on at least some episodes. Their policy for selling them was to give gullible children the impression they were buying Transformers videos (this was when anything with the Transformers logo, or something similar, on it was selling like hot robot cakes). So they retitled the series with names like 'Formators' and 'Sci-Bots', and had Marc draw the covers. I don't know how Marc got this job. Although he was proud enough of his work to sign every cover with his first name or pseudonym, he isn't a great artist. His drawings are collages of swipes from the episodes, drawn with minimal grasp of perspective and none of scale, and pictures of Transformers and other robots. Sometimes they would just cut pictures of Transformers out of books and stick them on the cover, sometimes Marc would professionally disguise them a bit, for instance by keeping the body unchanged but drawing the head of one of the characters from the video on top.

His cover for the Betty Boop collection is one of his most ambitious - it even has a background! I would date this from his later period, when he'd started to get almost experimental. Rather than drawing Betty Boop on the cover (perhaps they hadn't decided on the title when they commissioned him), he opted to draw the setting of Cakeland from the Little Audrey cartoon. It turns out kind of like Cakeland would have looked if Picasso had drawn it, but it does look quite pretty. In the foreground, we have renditions of Little Audrey, plus Porky Pig and the cat from 'Notes To You'. They're direct swipes of poses from the cartoons, of course, but he's gone to the trouble of drawing a slice of cake in Porky's hand, which is a nice touch. Audrey is twice Porky's height, which is a little strange.

On the back cover are three frames from the actual cartoons, again with no actual Betty Boop (the three Betty cartoons on the tape are black and white, and the other three are colour, so they probably wanted to give the impression that purchasers were getting a full-colour extravaganza for their money) and a list of the cartoon titles, with an impressive four out of six spelt correctly.

Bonus drunken post about a giant spider

I'm at Crispy's house, after a barbecue and watching of Buck Rogers (1953 compilation of the 1930s series). Dialogue during setting up folding chairs in the garden:

Crispy: Here's the chairs, they're a bit cobwebby.
Me: Well, the spiders seem to like them if they've been sitting on them.
Crispy: But they're not sitting on them any more...
Me: That's true, maybe they AARGH! [as a spider roughly the size of a small cat crawled out from the folds and glared at me.]

I should go there more often

I went to Burton today to get a new bike, since that was as quick as walking to Halfords in Derby, and while I was waiting for it to be ready I had a wander around the shops. And found a really great haul of old cartoons on video in the charity shops and on the market - four of them, costing a total of £3.47!

They're from various video producers of the eighties, and all seem to be made up of basically whichever old cartoons they could lay their hands on when they wanted to make a bit of extra cash - the four tapes claim to be collections of Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and jointly Woody Woodpecker and Felix the Cat, but the first one, which I've just watched over dinner, has three Betty cartoons (Musical Mountaineers, Betty Boop and Grampy and Betty In Blunderland) from the 30s, the Porky Pig cartoon Notes To You from 1941, a Little Audrey cartoon, of all things, from 1950 (Tarts And Flowers), and a great Ub Iwerks toon from 1934, Jack Frost.

And having peeled off the sticker that the charity shop stuck on top of the list of cartoons on the Daffy Duck video to find a title I didn't recognise, it turns out that it's Reducing Creme, another Iwerks from 1934, this time starring Willie Whopper. It's also got Daffy The Commando. I love finds like this!

Good weather this Friday

What a lovely, sunny day! It was even quite warm if you were in the direct sunlight - too hot to go around in a leather jacket, if not quite hot enough to be entirely comfortable in a T-shirt. Which was a shame, because a T-shirt and jacket was all I had with me today. Well, there was probably something on the lower half of my body too, since nobody was running away screaming, but you know what I mean.

Went round to see my grandma today, and it occurred to me that I should write something about her on this blog, as I seem to have failed to do that ever since I started the thing, and she's really a great person. Although I haven't got the time or inclination right now for a big long post. Suffice to say she's just turned 86, is one of the world's great talkers and has a lot of life experience to talk about. And a really great mind - the good parts of my brain definitely owe a lot to her.

I've got a great job

My boss bought everyone in the department a Cadbury's creme egg! It's the little things that impress me, you see. I'd rather have a creme egg every now and then than a pay rise and more responsibility.

One thing that does bug me, though - our accounting system allocates a sequential number to each journal entry processed, and I really wanted to be the one to post batch number 300000, but I just missed it. Ah well, I'll aim for 333333 in however many months it will take to get up to that number...

In the world of memory, we've just got the dates confirmed for the German championship - July 14-15, in a place I've never heard of called Heilbronn. If memory serves, last year's championship was the first thing of note that I wrote about in this here blog, so maybe I can celebrate my first anniversary by winning it. Well, maybe I won't win it, since they don't do translations of the words and things, but I want to put in a good performance this time round - the last two years I've done very badly in Germany, and I'd hate it to become a tradition. And this is the major preparation for the world championship as a rule, although there might be a British championship this year in August if we're lucky. But the German championship is where I get to see how much the likes of Clemens and Gunther have improved since last year, and start to formulate strategies for how good I'll have to be to beat them.

They're both coming to Cambridge, of course, and they'll probably be in one of the regional German championships too, but those are too short and throwaway to really give a measure of the kind of form they're in. Besides, Cambridge is sure to be a complete disaster.

Rejoice and Celebrate!

It's a four-day weekend coming up! And I'm really, really looking forward to it. I feel like I could spend the whole of Easter in bed, to be honest.

So what I'm going to do, of course, is run around doing no end of things all weekend. Grandma's on Friday, Crispy and Sleepy's on Saturday, then I feel like shopping in London or Nottingham or somewhere exotic like that. I need to catch up with comics, and Forbidden Planet in Derby's always selling out of things if I skip a week like I did last weekend. Not that there were any really good comics out last week, they're all in this week's shipping list.

My printer's broken!

And the flaming thing's practically brand new, and I have a feeling it came with a guarantee, which I almost certainly threw away along with the packaging. It's just not taking paper into the works like it should, and I bet it's really easy to fix if you know anything about printers. Which I don't. And I need to print out some random numbers because I haven't got any left. Damn it. Maybe I'll sneakily print some out at work when nobody's looking.

In lighter news, James Jorasch has updated his memory website with various videos of me. Scroll down the list and watch the last one, "Ben Pridmore on memory systems", especially. That was meant to be a couple of minutes of me running through a pack of cards and describing the images I associate with them, and it turned into a half-hour interview, completely unplanned! I think I come across unusually well, by my standards. It's funny to watch myself, though - I'm constantly looking around the room, or twiddling my fingers, adjusting my hat, or some other nervous twitch.

The footage on the other video clip of me memorising a pack of cards is fraudulent, by the way. I'd already looked through the pack a couple of times during our earlier conversation, so I was already familiar with it. It actually looks like I could have been cleverly cheating - I slide each card out from the pack before naming it and turning it over, in a way that suggests I might be looking at the reflection in the shiny table. I wasn't, but that would be a really cool way for a stage magician to simulate memorising cards in this kind of interview.

Hmm

My mind's a blank. I was going to write about something specific, too. Well, I'll write about it tomorrow.

If you're going to give yourself food poisoning...

...at least have the sense to do it on a work day. I've been suffering from half a tin of tuna today. I assume it was the tuna, anyway. I eat half a tin and keep the other half in the fridge with the lid sort of balanced on top in order to keep out germs and things. It obviously didn't work so well with last night's portion. What I could do with is a tupperware container of some kind, but I've only got one and it's about the size of a house. And anyway, my brother borrowed it at Christmas and he's still got it.

So that kind of put me off the activities I had planned for today, like visiting my grandma, buying a new bike and memory training. The bike I'll try to arrange during the week - walking to work is not fun, and last week has caused my work shoes to pretty much completely disintegrate (admittedly they weren't in perfect condition to start with, the soles were already more holey than righteous, as Grandma likes to say). There are bike shops in Burton, although the one I tried to call today wasn't answering the phone to tell me when they're open. I wish these places had websites, don't they know I hate talking on the phone?

Grandma I'm going to visit and play bingo with on Friday, seeing as it's the Good kind. Memory training I've been letting slide a little during the past couple of weeks, for obvious reasons, but I need to get back into it now. Still a lot of sorting-out needed for the Cambridge competition, and I need to get back to the woman from the BBC about that programme, and to Phil Chambers with comments on his new abstract image samples so he can unveil them before the competition. And check that he's still going to come and be arbiter, because I'm still short of volunteers. Although I haven't yet asked some of the people who are likely to say yes, so it's just a matter of getting my act together and doing it.

I'll be happy when the whole thing's over and the real memory season gets started. I'm itching to get back into competitions.

It went well

The service was exactly the right kind of thing - non-religious and simple. His preference would have been for us not to bother at all, of course, and just get on with our lives, but this was the best compromise to keep everyone happy. So we had a small gathering - me and my brother, my mum and her partner, uncles Syd (eighty-something) and Cyril (seventy-something) and a couple of cousins (his other six brothers, aged between 66 and 85 and all with the dodgy legs and other ailments that run in the Pridmore family, couldn't make it, but they're all of course shocked to have lost their baby brother like this), plus a couple of good friends and a group of his workmates.

The minister, or whatever you call them when they're a humanist, was excellent, summarising my dad's life very nicely, 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' on the organ and a Don McLean song to finish. Then to the pub over the road for food and drink and a lot of reminiscing. And I got on just fine with my mum all day. Great to see the relatives, too, since I practically never do. He wasn't that close to his army of older brothers, a couple of whom had married and left home before he was old enough to notice they existed, but my latest vague resolution is to catch up with all of them and work out exactly how many first, second and third cousins I've got out there. Talking to Syd and Cyril today was like hanging out with two carbon copies of my dad - exactly the same sense of humour and fun.

My Personal Vision

It's getting round to time for appraisals at work. We've all got a form to fill in and guidelines to the company's Performance Appraisal System. Apparently this is considered a good thing: "Purpose of the appraisal is to achieve a balance between your performance in your current role against your career aspirations and development needs."

I don't have career aspirations and development needs. All I want out of a job is something that gives me money to finance the things I like to do with my spare time. If it involves juggling numbers, so much the better, and since my current job does that, I'm fine. Perfectly happy. I don't want to develop. I'm sick and tired of being given promotions and pay rises, because whenever I am, I end up in management rather than number-crunching, which is what I'm good at and what I enjoy doing.

And the horrible jargon and psychobabble this thing uses gets on my wick no end. Not only do we need to focus on 'development objectives', but they need to be SMART:
 Specific
 Measurable
 Achievable
 Realistic
 Time-bound

With bullet points, for crying out loud. And it gets worse. The form itself has a whole freaking page about Personal Development and Mastery. It seems that 'The purpose of this exercise is to help you identify what personal goals you want to achieve that enable you to deliver your Personal Vision, and to understand how these overlap with the Company Vision and your departments goals.'

Capital letters for Personal Vision and Company Vision, just to stress what big, important concepts these are. And no apostrophe in 'departments'. I've got this from my dad, I know, but people who can't use an apostrophe right irritate me. My boss's grammar and punctuation are just awful, and it makes it hard to respect her like I should (she's not responsible for this appraisal thing, I should make it clear - we pay someone in human resources ridiculous amounts of money to come up with rubbish like this).

And I'm sorry, but I just don't think in terms like that sentence does. Has the rest of the world just gone mad? Does everyone else go around thinking "What can I do to enable me to deliver my Personal Vision?" One of the questions on this form is '2. What do I do, as your manager, that gets in your way' (without a question mark, I notice). I'll tell you anyway, manager. You make me go through stupid appraisal processes like this rather than letting me get on with my work. For Pete's sake.

Sorry, enough ranting for the moment. It's the weekend! Granted, a weekend that's mainly going to be occupied by a funeral, but that's better than worrying about my DEVELOPMENT OBJECTIVES (including Functional Capabilities & Management Skills)...

Legal queries with Horace

Every week, Horace Fish, a man with various fraudulent legal credentials, answers your questions about the law.

Dear Horace

My neighbour recently broke into my house and stole my television set and antique sculpture of Cleopatra fighting Napoleon. I have also seen him shooting dolphins in his back garden, mowing the lawn and eating 'Birmingham confectionery'. Do I have any legal recourse against him?

Gavvvin Trelllllis

Gavvvin - due to a loophole in the law, a person is legally entitled to steal his next-door neighbour's television. And while the consumption of 'Birmingham confectionery' is of course illegal, the police are unlikely to do anything about it unless they've really got nothing better to do. Your best chance of getting your neighbour banged up is with the dolphins - although it is perfectly legal to shoot the things in your own garden, to do so outside the boundary of your home carries a minimum sixty-year prison sentence. I suggest that you go round to his house in the middle of the night and move the garden fence so that the dolphin pond lies on the other side of it.

Dear Horriss

My employer has recently given me the sack, claiming among other things that I 'treat sausages as if they were cuboid rather than cylindrical'. I don't even know what that would involve, and I fail to see how that could have any bearing on my job as a street sweeper. Do I have the right to take my boss to court and/or throw a brick through his window?

Gottfried Wheelbarrow

Gottfried - my name isn't spelt that way, you fat berk. What is wrong with you? Can't you read? What's the point me replying to your stupid letter if you can't even read? Get lost, and don't ever write to me again. In answer to your question, you do have the legal right to take court action, or smash up to three of your boss's windows, whichever would give you more satisfaction. I would recommend court proceedings, because although there is no chance of you being awarded any kind of compensation, your employer might be embarrassed into apologising for the comment about sausages.

It's at times like this that I consider getting Sky Sports

Admittedly that isn't a feeling I have very often - I've got more TV channels than anyone needs already, although I could always do with more cartoons. But there's a really good football match going on at the moment between Arsenal and Juventus, and I can't watch it without going out to the pub, and I can't be bothered to do that.

If I did splash out on Sky, I'd hardly watch the sports. A football match here and there, and maybe a bit of wrestling (I've become quite a WWE fan lately, thanks to Paul O'Brien's previews of every PPV. Paul is one of those people who can write about anything and make it compelling and entertaining. But reading those and then the WWE website to see what happens is as far as my fanhood goes at the moment. It might be good to actually watch a show some time and see what it's like.

And yay, Arsenal are through to the semis! And also yay, a court has thrown out Time Warner's attempts to claim that Smallville doesn't infringe Superboy's copyrights and therefore they don't have to pay Jerry Siegel's estate any money. I know I try to avoid just commenting on news stories here, but I'm very happy with both of those.

Alas, poor bike

A few months ago, the bit that holds the rear wheel in place went missing off my bike. I don't know if someone was trying to steal it but gave up halfway, or if it just fell to pieces the way my bikes generally do, but rather than doing anything about it I kept riding it around in faith that my weight on the saddle would hold the wheel where it should be. And it worked fine up till tonight, when the stress on the axle finally bent it to such an extent that the wheel won't turn round any more. At this point even I have to admit defeat and concede that the bike isn't rideable.

This is a great inconvenience, because it means walking to work from the train station, which means having to get the earlier train so as to arrive on time, which means getting up half an hour earlier. And I don't know when I'm going to have the time to get a new bike, either, what with the funeral on Saturday and everything. It's a real drag, all round, and not just in the literal sense of the only way to move my bike from A to B with a non-working wheel...

Thinking

I'm going about my everyday life, but I still find myself thinking about my dad all the time. Kind of makes it difficult to think of a subject for tonight's blog, so I'll just leave it at that.

Okay, I've been googling myself again

And yes, there are many more useful and productive things I should be doing with my Sunday afternoon. But I was deeply fascinated by this page.

Notice the 'Prime Numbers' section halfway down the page:

Prime numbers

3 – Number of plague-infected mice that a New Jersey biomedical research center says cannot be accounted for

32.13 – Number of seconds required by Ben Pridmore to memorize a shuffled sequence of 52 playing cards without error, a world record

14 – Number of new nuclear power stations China plans to build in the next 28 years

104 – Number of commercial nuclear power plants in United States, the last licensed in 1996

0 – Number of applications pending for new American nuclear plants

So... is there a reason why the writer felt that I fit in with the rest of these statistics? Am I the kind of person you naturally associate with plague-infected mice and nuclear power?

Sheffield Regional

I'm not sure why they still call the othello tournaments 'regionals'. They don't really represent any particular region, except in as much as they're all in different towns randomly scattered around the country. Anyway, I went to the Sheffield one today.

Missed the train I was intending to get because my bike had a flat tyre and I spent too long dithering over whether to go back upstairs, find my pump and fix it, or walk to the station. I walked in the end, but not quickly enough. I still got there before a couple of the other players, though, which was lucky because it gave us a moment to clear up a potentially awkward situation - Rob Stanton, the organiser, had been under the impression that I still live in Boston, and had told the owners of the building we were using to send an invoice to my old address.

The tournament took place in a strange little church-hall-style building called the Heeley Institute, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Sheffield. There were nine of us in all, when Aidan had managed to find the place halfway through the first round. I won my first couple of games against Rob and Aidan, which gave me great aspirations of winning the whole tournament and becoming a worldwide celebrity, but then lost three in a row against Geoff, Phil and Steve Rowe (whose surname wasn't meant to be a pun there), which rather squished those dreams. Phil had meanwhile been kicking every available ass and was winning in a very impressive kind of way.

We went for lunch after the third round, finding on the third attempt a pub that was both open and serving food. The people of Heeley obviously aren't keen on pub lunches. But it was a lovely day - summer's on the way! Apart from the occasional torrential downpour, of course, but they only lasted a few seconds before the sunshine took over again.

Anyway, back at the Institute, my impressive losing streak was enough to get me a bye in round six. Rob beat Phil, which put Phil level with Geoff on five wins, and after the final round they ended up sharing first place. Joel Blackmur (who, in a longstanding othello tradition, I avoided being drawn against) came third, and I survived an extremely complicated endgame to beat Roy 33-31 and end up joint 4th with Steve. So it could have been a lot worse.

If you gave it half a chance, what potato would not DANCE?

Latest thing that I like: Edward Monkton. Actually, it turns out to be one of those things that I discover and then find out that Jenny knows about already (see earlier posts on George Papavgeris and Lady Godiva (who, she informs me, is an ancestor of Boy Howdy, but it's just never come up in our conversations)). She sent me a card ages ago with the hair that wants to be a dragon on it. But my actual 'discovery' comes from the cafe/bookshop in the Eagle Centre, which has a range of brilliant cards in the window.

I'm particularly impressed by the way someone can make money by selling crude sketches of potatoes. There's hope for my artistic career yet!

Skiving

I didn't notice my alarm clock going off at all this morning, and woke up at 8:25, which is the exact moment I need to leave the house in order to catch my train. So rather than get the next one and arrive half an hour late, I took the day off. I'm contractually entitled to five days' bereavement leave after all, although my mum is doing all the work involved with funeral arrangements and things, so I honestly don't need to be off work. And sitting moping around the house is really not a good idea either.

Nonetheless, that's what I've been doing all day. I'm all moped out.

In the living years

My dad was one of those rare people who literally nobody had a bad word to say about. Except his immediate family, and that was only in an affectionate kind of way. But everyone really did like him, and with good reason. He never thought of himself, and spent his whole life helping other people out, just because that was the way he was.

He was a very recognisable kind of guy - short even by my standards (whenever he had to give his height, he always put 5'6", which he readily admitted was a rough guess, because he'd never measured himself. I'd say he was a good couple of inches less than that), always somewhat on the chubby side, bald on top from a very early age, with wild curly hair, big sideburns and a moustache. Which he'd had since he was twenty and never considered changing. His taste in clothing was similarly unchanging through the years - brown suede boots, brown trousers and a white long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up, open at the neck. Yes, even in the middle of winter, outside in a blizzard. He didn't feel the cold, but whenever the temperature got a few degrees above freezing he was horribly uncomfortable. And on those rare occasions when he had to wear a tie (he owned two or three of them, all square, knitted wool ones that might have looked more or less passable in the early 1970s) he always looked like he was on the point of collapse. During his teaching days, he had a photo taken every year (18 of them in all), and they're all exactly the same - the hair a little more sparse every time, turning from jet black to grey to pure white by the time he was fifty, but exactly the same pose, with toothy grin and twinkle in his eyes.

I think I've mentioned his chronic earliness on here before - he'd always arrive somewhere two hours before the time he'd agreed, he didn't like to stay up much past seven o'clock at night and was always up and about by three in the morning. He lived his life in fast-forward, so I suppose it's not all that surprising that he's died (heart disease) at the age of 59.

As a teacher, everyone agrees, he was something truly exceptional. He taught at Clinton Park primary school from 1971 till 1990, teaching and inspiring nine and ten-year-olds for generations. He would walk through town and have dozens of people of all ages say 'hello, Mr Pridmore!' One of his real passions in life was teaching people to spell and punctuate properly - NOBODY left his class without learning how to use an apostrophe. He always said he could teach anyone how to do it right in twenty minutes, and despaired of the way so few people made the effort to teach it. Once a week in the afternoon, he'd get his guitar out and sing to the class - he had a large and eclectic range of songs, from Ilkley Moor Baht 'at to Ellen Vannin to Football Crazy. He was always trying to learn the piano, but never got very far. He used to take me and my brother to the park in Horncastle and spin us around on the roundabout which (by accident or design, I'm not sure) also bounced up and down wildly, and sing "Sons of the sea, bobbing up and down like this"

He was a Sheffield Wednesday fan, having grown up just down the road from Hillsborough, but cricket was his sport of choice. Just a couple of years ago, he finally splashed out on Sky Sports, so he could watch all the Test Matches. It's nice to know that the last one he watched was an England win. He didn't play any sports actively, having the genetic Pridmore dodgy legs, although he was surprisingly agile in short bursts - he still played badminton well enough to teach it to his classes, and he'd occasionally play backstop in rounders games and amaze everyone with his ability to catch the wildest bowl and throw it with pinpoint accuracy. He played snooker in his youth, very well or so he always told me, but gave it up when his eyesight got too bad. He still played pool occasionally, but found it wasn't enough of a challenge.

Steam trains were a major passion of his life. I'll never quite understand what the appeal was, although his own father worked on the railways for his entire life, so it's obviously a lifelong thing. Every Father's Day we went to the steam railway museum at Butterley for a Sunday dinner on the train (booked eight months in advance at least, so we always got the best seats and were the first to be served). A meal and three rides up and down the little line pulled by a steam train - what more could anyone want, he asked without the slightest trace of irony. He was a keen birdwatcher too, used to run the Young Ornithologists Club at the school (I came along on one or two outings and found it horribly boring). He went to various night school classes over the years, learning sculpture, heraldry, calligraphy, all kinds of strange things, and became very gifted at all of them. When he put his mind to it (which wasn't very often, sadly), he could write little funny stories that had everyone in hysterics.

He was a really, really great cook. You hadn't lived until you'd had his rabbit stew and dumplings (seriously, nobody in the world could make suet dumplings like his), or steak and kidney pud, or Sunday roast, or spaghetti bolognese, or chocolate cake. He never ate sweets or desserts himself, but he made a great cake - everyone was always asking for the recipe, but nobody could get it to turn out quite like his. I think it was the ancient oven he cooked in. The secret's died with him, anyway. And everything in huge servings - he had an enormous appetite and assumed everyone else did too.

Above all, he was a decent man who got things done and never once in his life had a thought that was selfish or mean. He raised me and my brother practically singlehandedly without a complaint (and we were really horrible teenagers, I'll tell you), and I think we both turned out okay. I owe a huge amount to him, and it just won't be the same without him around. The world really is poorer for his loss.

Oh, and I can't post a blog entry tonight without recording that Jenny sent me a card and a milk chocolate Happy Duck Lolly to make me feel better. It did, a whole lot.

RIP George Pridmore

My dad's died. I went round to my brother's last night and we spent the evening getting drunk and reminiscing about him. In four or five hours of talk, we barely scratched the surface of all the good memories. I'll write more later, when I'm more in the mood.

Philippe is standing on it

I've spent quite a lot of time today reading my way through the archives of Achewood, a rather strange and often extremely funny webcomic. I'm kind of annoyed that I haven't done this before, actually - I've seen references to and snippets from it for months and thought I should maybe check it out some day. And now I have, it turns out that while the snippets were okay, there are bits in there that I can't see anyone else recommending, but that my particular sense of humour finds absolutely hilarious.

James Kochalka even drew a strip for it back in 2003, for Pete's sake! If anybody had told me that, I would have read the thing straight away! What's the matter with you people, not telling me when there's something by James Kochalka out there on the internet that I don't know about?