Runners and riders

Limited time tonight - I've gone into an internet cafe and realised I've only got enough money on me for half an hour. Rather than look like a pauper and go out for more money (I can just see everyone in the building looking at me in these circumstances and thinking "he's going out to the pawnshop or to beg money on street corners), I'm pretending that was what I was going to use in the first place, rather than an hour like I was intending.

Anyway, having wasted all my time writing the above, let's talk about the weekend ahead. Just been to the competitors' briefing, delivered by Phil (who for all his good points isn't a natural speaker and was almost as incoherent as me at Cambridge when explaining the rules and regulations) because Tony's busy doing interviews. And a drink afterwards with some of the other guys, of course, to discuss what we think is going to happen. So I thought it would be good for the benefit of my non-memory readers to know who to look out for while they're following the scores on the internet over the next three days.

Assuming they're updated on the internet. They usually aren't, but the official website always promises to.

So let's look at the top ten in the world ranking list, with brief notes. Omitting the world number one for obvious reasons, we start with:

2) Astrid Plessl (Austria, age 22) (or thereabouts. Most of these ages are rough guesses, and I probably shouldn't be including them at all)

WMC history: 12th, 2001; 6th, 2002; 2nd, 2003; 2nd, 2004

Astrid wasn't there tonight, and the probability is that she won't be competing this year. Which would be a crying shame. She came very, very close to winning the world championship two years in a row, and if she retires from competitions now without winning it it would be a great injustice. She started out famous for her natural memory (high scores in the poem and words, the disciplines that you don't use artificial systems for so much), but between 2002 and 2003 got really good at the systems too. If she's kept in training, she'd be my top rival this year. Hoping she defies expectations and shows up.

3) Clemens Mayer (Germany, age 21-ish)

WMC history: 4th, 2004; 1st, 2005

The reigning champion is obviously the man to beat. He hasn't failed to win a competition he's entered since November 2004, and he's committed to keeping that up. He's burst onto the scene in only a couple of years, and although it's been said that he's never beaten the likes of me or Andi or Astrid when we were at the top of our games, he can hardly be blamed for that. He did all that was necessary to win, and it's possible he's capable of much more when he's pushed.

4) Dr Gunther Karsten (Germany, mid-40s)

WMC history: 3rd, 1998; 5th, 1999; 3rd, 2000; 2nd, 2001; 3rd, 2002; 4th, 2003; 8th, 2004; 2nd, 2005

Ever-present in the top ranks at the world championships for many, many years, but never quite as winner. Last year's performance for second place was his best ever, so he's still improving. His seven-year run as German champion was ended by his protegé Clemens in 2005, but he's a good outside bet for the world title this year. Never write him off.

5) Andi Bell (England, 37?)

WMC history: 3rd, 1995; 2nd, 1996; 2nd, 1997; 1st, 1998; 3rd, 1999; 2nd, 2000; 3rd, 2001; 1st, 2002; 1st, 2003; 7th, 2004; 26th, 2005

Andi also wasn't there tonight, but he never came to the briefings even when he was a serious competitor. He's said he won't compete this year, but I'd actually be more surprised if he doesn't show up tomorrow morning to take part, however half-heartedly. Arguably the best competitor ever, he put in his apprenticeship for many years coming second to Dominic O'Brien (his 1998 win was the year Dom didn't take part) before finally blowing him away and setting new standards for the "sport" in 2002, his participation has been half-hearted for the last couple of years. But if he's been training on the sly, anything's possible. His nine consecutive years of top-three finishes might never be beaten.

6) Dominic O'Brien (England, getting on for 50? Or am I being unkind?)

WMC history: 1st, 1991; 1st, 1993; 2nd, 1994; 1st, 1995; 1st, 1996; 1st, 1997; 1st, 1999; 1st, 2000; 1st, 2001; 2nd, 2002; 6th, 2003

The legendary eight-times champion definitely won't be competing this year, unless there's something we haven't been told. He keeps saying he isn't completely retired, but it's looking more and more like he is. Conventional wisdom is that he couldn't keep up with the much higher level of performance from the top competitors over the past few years, but that might not be the case at all. He never had to stretch himself to his limits in his glory days, perhaps he's capable of another win yet.

7) Joachim Thaler(Austria, 18)

WMC history: 15th, 2002; 3rd, 2004; 3rd, 2005

Still very young, and still improving, Joachim is the only person to finish in the top three in each of the last two years. He beat me last time round, and Clemens the year before, and although he's pessimistic about his chances for a podium place this time round, it's certainly not impossible.

8) Jan Formann (Denmark, late-50s)

WMC history: 16th, 1999; 4th, 2001; 4th, 2002; 5th, 2003

Not much has been heard from the super-eccentric Dane for the last couple of years. His last competition was the World Cup (not to be confused with the World Championship) in 2004, when he finished a close second behind me. He used to be the undisputed world's best at the number-disciplines, although Gunther seems to have taken over that mantle now. I hope Jan also makes a surprise return, because he adds a lot of colour and fun to the championships.

9) Boris Nikolai Konrad (Germany, 22)

WMC history: 6th, 2004; 5th, 2005

Boris has been leader of the chasing pack at a lot of competitions over the last couple of years. I would certainly back him to make that final leap into one of the absolute top-level if he keeps up with it - he's very enthusiastic and deeply involved in the politics of German memory. This year he's got a good chance of making the top five.

10) Lukas Amsüss (Austria, early 20s)

WMC history: 17th, 2001; 14th, 2002; 7th, 2003; 9th, 2004

Sadly, Lukas definitely can't make it this year, due to work. But his previous WMC positions do him a disservice, he's another major chasing-pack guy, with a particular talent for speed cards. Also a lot of fun.

I don't have time to mention anyone else, but watch out for the likes of Ed Cooke, Josh Foer and Yip Swe Chooi too!

Your fifteen minutes start now

There's a song from years ago with the refrain "Your fifteen minutes start now..." that always comes to my mind when I'm starting my stopwatch going for a period of time for memorising or recall. Even the ones that aren't fifteen minutes long. I don't remember which song it was, or what the rest of the words were, but that bit's very memorable.

I'm free from work for the next four days, yay, and going down to London tomorrow morning - meeting the Alzheimer's people, with accompanying interview by Women's Weekly magazine. I've had more publictity-heavy buildups to the world championships. Then it's just a case of finding the hotel, finding the competition site, going to the 6pm competitors' briefing that's never really worth going to, and getting a good night's sleep. This might be my last blog entry until the competition's over - I'm not taking my laptop, and I probably won't have the time to find an internet cafe. But you never know - if I get bored tomorrow night I might give my last-minute opinions about the weekend ahead. I'll get off to a bad start with the images, but then hopefully do something special in the binary and hour numbers to show the others who's boss.

Sniffles and Bimbo are constantly pestering me to write about them like I promised, so I'll do that next week. Maybe with screenshots!

Packing

And more than 24 hours before it's strictly necessary, too! But don't worry, all I've been doing tonight is finding boxes to put my cards in, putting my cards in them, and putting the boxes into a larger box. Which makes me giggle, because in writing it like that I've reminded myself of an excellent webcomic called Living In Greytown, that I used to read years ago (it's finished now, as has its sequel, Lizard).

But I was talking about cards. I don't normally keep them in the boxes, they sit on my desk in teetering towers with a rubber band around each pack. So I had to dig up the flattened, crumpled boxes from the depths of my desk's drawers where all kinds of strange things lurk. The reason for this is that for the first time I'm taking my own cards to the WMC this time round. Competitors are allowed to bring their own or to use the ones provided, and I normally choose the latter option, but last year they didn't bother to shuffle them before giving them out, so I got a couple that were in sequence. I thought of pretending to memorise them and hoping nobody noticed, but got replacements instead. I'll also bring my own recall sheets for the cards, which I may or may not use, depending on what the provided sheets look like (if they're plain paper, I'll use my own, but if they're the normal kind with a column for each suit where you just fill in the number, I'll go with those). Some competitors have their own extremely fancy recall sheets for numbers as well as cards, with the spaces to fill in numbers divided into sections, but I don't go in for that kind of thing. I prefer a recall page as blank as possible, and if I can't remember a sequence I'll count out the appropriate number of empty spaces and mark it with little dots. I'm a minimalist.

Good grief, that was close. Just before posting that, I selected the whole text to copy it in case the computer or Blogger crashes while I'm posting (I always do this, I'm paranoid), and pressed ctrl-V instead of ctrl-C, replacing the text with some rubbish that was on the clipboard. Luckily, it turns out you can do ctrl-Z to undo here. You really do learn something new every day!

Almost forgot

I nearly went to bed without writing anything tonight. But it's okay, I've deliberately put my memory on ice this week in the buildup to the WMC. I did have a try at abstract images using a clever new system I thought up, which turns out not to work at all. I still have no idea how I'm going to approach that one in the competition, which could be a problem, but it's not one I'm hugely worried about. It's a silly thing anyway, that they'll hopefully get rid of or change before next year (if I keep pestering them).

The follies of men's youth

I've been reading my old blog posts tonight, and I can be quite fascinating at times, can't I? Makes me think that I need to start doing interesting things so I can write about them in more detail. And yes, I did hand my notice in at work today. I was going to think about it a bit more, but I got butterflies in my tummy every time I thought about it, and I didn't want that getting in the way of the world memory championship, so I decided to just get on with it and resign. It felt pretty good, all in all. So now I'm resolved not to think about it or anything else for the next week, and just relax, clear my brain and do a bit of last-minute practice with abstract images because I'm not nearly prepared enough for them. Everything else, though, I'm pretty sure I can make a decent stab at. I'm not as match-fit as I'd like to be, but I'm better than last year, and I didn't lose by much last year. Fingers crossed, eh?

Things that need to be clarified

1) That Frosties advert that everyone thinks is so terrible? It's brilliant! I mean, what's all the hostility about? It's singalongable and catchy and funny, and it raises public awareness of Frosties, which can only be a good thing.

2) Also, Airplane II: The Sequel, which I saw for the first time tonight, is really funny too. I've never bothered to watch it before because everyone says it's not much good, but it turns out that everyone in the world has been lying to me all these years.

3) These clarifications are not just my opinions, they're the objective truth. I'm automatically right about everything. It's quite a burden sometimes.

4) I'm still not sure about the whole handing-in-my-notice thing. I'm tempted to leave the decision until after the WMC, although that might not be the best idea because I'm always at my most I-hate-my-job-ish immediately after a big competition. I'll see what I feel like when I wake up tomorrow.

5) Butter.

World Twister Champion 2006

Title suggested by Vicky, although in fact I didn't win at Twister. I shouldn't really have been playing at all, with my knees being what they are, but you know what it's like at these parties. Crispy and Sleepy couldn't come at the last moment because Crisp's not well (possibly infected with lethal bacteria from her new job, so I think we should all send get-well-soon-type happy thoughts to her and hope she's okay), so I had to go to the scary almost-strangers' barbecue by myself. But it turned out to be fun after all. I'd write more about it, only I've had too much to drink considering I need to be practicing memorising cards tomorrow, and it's late, and I've just cycled home in the pouring rain so I'll probably get hypothermia if I don't go to bed rather than sitting around in my undies typing incoherently.

I've got sixpence, jolly jolly sixpence

Remember that thing I wanted to talk about but couldn't in case talking about it jinxed the whole thing? Well, now the official secrets act has been repealed and I can go ahead. I'm wealthy! I've just had £16,631.04 paid into my bank account, courtesy of my dad's pension scheme. Which certainly came as a surprise to me - my mum and brother have the same amount each too. Add that to the money in my bank account, and it comes to just over £20,000. Does that sound familiar? I got the letter telling me about it last Saturday, exactly a month after writing this about what I'd do if I had £20,000 or so.

So should I do it? Hand in my notice at work, take a year off, write those books, do those college courses, join that hypothetical gym? I'm inclining towards yes, I should. The universe quite clearly wants me to. I can't quite delude myself into thinking it's what my dad would have wanted me to do with the money (he really wouldn't have). I've given myself the weekend to think about it - I'd want to give two months' notice at work (rather than the one that I'm obliged to give) so as not to leave anyone in the lurch, and if I did it on Monday it would neatly round off my career at Nord Anglia the day before my birthday. I could be a wage slave until the age of 29 years and 364 days, and embark on a whole new phase of my life in my thirties. I won't be able to splash out on anything extravagant, but I can just about live for a year with those kind of expenses for twenty grand.

The only thing that worries me is whether I would be able to motivate myself to do cool things if I didn't have to get up in the morning every day. I'm thinking if I structure things around college courses and routines I'd be okay - from past experience I really do need something like that so that I can fit the fun things around it - if I don't have a day job, I don't do extracurricular things either and just spend my time lounging around doing nothing.

This kind of earth-shattering decision isn't the kind of thing I should be doing on the last weekend before the world memory championship. Crispy and Sleepy are coming round on Saturday night, so I can drunkenly discuss the pros and cons with them and see how much I can remember of the conversation the next morning. The plan is to do a 30-minute binary practice tomorrow morning, hour numbers after lunch, then we'll go round to Vicky's barbecue and have a good time, then on Sunday night when I've recovered a bit, do an hour cards. Hope I can stick to it.

Another thing that worries me - everyone is going to say "Yes, you should quit your job and become a gentleman of leisure! That sounds cool!", because it does sound cool. But I'm quite aware that it's not the right thing for me to do on any kind of long-term or intellectual level. On the other hand, though, my decision is pretty much a foregone conclusion. When have I ever chosen the option marked "leave things the way they are and do the sensible thing"?

And feeling guilty about spending it all on myself when the world is full of people suffering? I think I can get used to it. I've never claimed to be a saint. I squandered my redundancy money from Parkhouse on good causes, after all, and if I write a bestseller or become a professional snooker player, I can pay the money back to my conscience.

I don't break rules, I just bend them... a lot

I normally have a rule about not commenting on news items in this blog (mainly because that's what everyone else does on their blogs, and besides, who wants to hear my opinions about current events when they could read me rambling on about cartoon characters for pages? That reminds me, I never did get round to writing that promised essay about Sniffles, did I? And I'm also in the mood to try and get Bimbo, the unusually-named male dog cartoon character from the 30s, the public attention he's been deprived of for so long. But not tonight. I was going somewhere before I got into this parenthetical profusion of purple prose, wasn't I?), but I seriously hope this latest mess involving planes isn't going to stop people getting to the WMC next weekend. Last year the strike at Heathrow stopped some competitors from attending, and the timing of this thing is majorly annoying.

There's been a decided lack of publicity about the WMC this time round. Last year we got quite a bit of press coverage by playing up the England v Germany angle, but this time the people who run the event seem to have decided on a policy of doing nothing at all and hoping someone notices it. I also have no idea how many people are going to be there. Word has it that the German contingent will be smaller than last year, although it will include Clemens, Gunther, Boris, Alisa(?), the usual gang, so I'll have someone to make a contest of it. From Austria there's definitely Joachim and hopefully Astrid, I'm sure Andi won't be able to stay away despite what he says even if he doesn't properly compete, so I can't moan about a shortage of top-level competition.

And then there'll be a reasonably large British contingent. Me, Ed and at least three Jameses would break all recent records for sheer numbers, even if nobody else comes along. It seems we won't be getting a Brazilian team after all, Globo having decided to spend their money on a Brazilian championship next year instead, which is a shame. And there'll only be the one Norwegian, it seems. I have no idea about Malaysians, or Indians, or Jan (the one and only Dane who's ever competed in these things). There'll be Josh from the USA and Tansel from Australia and Pierre from France and HaiZhan from China who hasn't competed before but has been exchanging emails with me lately. It should be fun, anyway.

I'm more interested at the moment in researching Irish history. Talking with my assistant Patrick at work today I realised that I don't actually know anything about the country - it's only just next door, after all, and I know we have a proud history of going over there and subjugating and killing people, so I think I should know a bit more. I want to get a book out of the library or something - I'm suspicious of most websites.

Scheduled outage at 4:00PM PDT

According to the little toolbar thing on the top of this create-new-post thing. It's three minutes to ten here, and I have no idea what PDT is, so I'm hoping it's not six hours behind real time.

Anyway, I'm feeling a sense of achievement tonight, because I've replied to a bunch of emails (I'm kind of a recluse, but I still manage to get into no end of correspondence and if I let it build up for a couple of days it becomes quite a task to reply to everyone), done a load of memory practice (got 385 in speed numbers, which would have been 425 if I hadn't transposed two images - 468 is definitely possible on a good day, now I just have to decide whether to attempt it first time at the WMC, or go for something safer and then go for the big score on the second trial), watched Liverpool play football badly but still win (they're still playing but they've just gone 2-1 up with a minute or two left), and watched some Battle of the Planets and Betty Boop cartoons all in the four hours since getting home.

It's The Mind

I've finally got round to sending off my entry form for the Mind Sports Olympiad. Longtime fans will remember that I didn't go to last year's, for the first time since it started in 1997, and I did feel guilty about it. But this year I'm going for the classic MSO experience - staying in a student hall of residence like I used to in the early years when I didn't have any money, competing in lots of games that I don't even particularly like just so as to have something to do, late night poker, no TV for a week (got to dig out my little clock radio so I can have the pleasure of listening to slightly out-of-tune London radio stations all night), lots of unhealthy food, it'll be great.

I'm also almost certainly going to skip the last couple of days in order to go to the othello nationals in Crawley. Now that the WMC has been moved and I only have two major mind sports competitions clashing that weekend, it's only fair to go along to the othello after a week's MSOing. Especially since I'll have to do the treasurer's report at the AGM before the competition starts. Besides, there's still the outside possibility of qualifying for the British team at the Worlds in Japan in October, which I would really love to do. And although 'outside possibility' here means 'no chance whatsoever because I'm not nearly a good enough player even when I've been practicing rather than barely playing at all for months now', it's still enough to give me a gleam of hope in the eyes.

So come along to the Mind Sports Olympiad if you want to play me at azacru, stratego, pacru, acquire, othello, twixt, mental calculations, decamentathlon, entropy, abalone, boku and lots of poker, and to the British Othello Championship if you're British and want to play me at othello more than you can do at the MSO.

Incidentally, I still haven't written the memory tips that the Alzheimer's people asked me for. It should just be a matter of churning out a few bullet points of the usual waffle that everybody says in this kind of situation, but I want it to be actually profound and useful and meaningful. Which, as you might have noticed, isn't something I'm very good at.

(I do have something important and earth-shatteringly significant to write about, but I'm not going to just yet until it's all sorted out for fear of jinxing it. Updates shortly, hopefully. Now that's a cliffhanger worthy of Doctor Who, isn't it!)

War of the worlds

Vole-like aliens invaded Earth in the year 1937. They arrived en masse in about thirty-seven flying saucers equipped with death-ray devices and small gerbils and set about slaughtering humans with the intention of subjugating the human race and forcing them to design new card games for the vole-like aliens' entertainment.

However, since the people of Earth at that time were also rather vole-like, nobody believed that the aliens were in fact alien invaders at all, and just assumed it was some kind of practical joke organised by the new television service. Even when the aliens barged into Downing Street, cut off the Prime Minister's head with pinking shears and declared that Earth was now under their rule, nobody took them seriously and just laughed about it. The aliens got back into their spaceships and left, disappointed with the reception they'd had.

Having assumed that his horrible demise was a practical joke, Neville Chamberlain was none the worse for wear and carried on with his business. But the incident had made him consider the possibility of contact with extraterrestrial lifeforms, and one night at a party he wrote the snappily-titled "What is to be done should real aliens ever invade and assassinate the Prime Minister with pinking shears or some such device" essay, which was published (due to a misunderstanding) in the Dandy the following week.

The essay detailed the process by which aliens would be repelled, and hinged around three people who would be required to do the entirety of the fighting while the rest of the world's population hid in underground shelters. Although a good plan, it didn't consider the ravages of time, and somebody really should have updated it by the time the vole-like aliens returned in 1993. By now immediately recognisable as aliens, they were taken seriously, and everyone immediately dropped what they were doing and dived into the shelters. Global warming having caused them to be flooded in the meantime, of course, the entire world's population were drowned.

The three people, chosen at random from the phone book in 1937, were by a happy coincidence still alive, and after several days' fighting, came to an agreement with the vole-like aliens which satisfied everyone except Bertram Cox. The aliens departed happily and left the three surviving humans a small cat made of green electricity in return for Bertram's underpants and left kidney. Today, on the thirteenth anniversary of that epic and anticlimactic settlement, we celebrate the memory of Earth's three saviours, Bertram and the other two whose names I don't recall, and take the day off work in order to throw bricks at sheep in a ceremony instituted last year in Belgium.

Retail therapy

I went to Birmingham today, rather than practicing memorising things like I was supposed to. But I've got an excuse, sort of - my mother phoned me in the morning to blame me for pretty much everything she's ever done, which put me in a bad mood and feeling like I wanted to go out and take my mind off things. I much preferred it when she forgot I existed for years on end. Anyway, I'm not what you'd call a great shopper. I tend to cave in to high-pressure salespeople asking tough questions like "Can I help you?". If I don't say "Yes, please sell me everything in your shop," I feel guilty about wasting their time and cluttering up the store unnecessarily. But sometimes I can't help going into shops I have no intention of buying from or even any interest in the things they're selling, just because they're playing cool music. There was a clothes shop today blasting out "All These Things That I've Done" by the Killers at top volume, which is the kind of song you just have to sing along to if you're me. I wouldn't be seen dead in the kind of clothes they were selling (you know, the kind of normal clothes that everyone else wears, horrific things like that), but I think I did a pretty good job of feigning interest in the things for five minutes until the song finished and I could beat a hasty retreat.

I did do an hour cards practice this evening after getting home, so I'm not too worried about letting the memory stuff slide. Attempted 30 packs, possibly got as many as 27 right although I haven't checked yet and there are probably several mistakes. That would probably be enough to beat everyone at the WMC.

It's official, I'm fat and lazy

I started today with a couple of firm resolutions. Lots of memory training, and since I'd run out of sweets in the house, no going out and buying more. No training whatsoever and a metric buttload of sugar later, I'm feeling slightly guilty. It is, for those not keeping track, two weeks to the world championships. My standard of preparation is much better than last year's, but much worse than the year before's. I did do a full weekend's workout the weekend before last, and if I do a load tomorrow I'll still be happy with the day's work. I've rather unwisely accepted an invitation to a barbecue next Saturday night, so I'm not sure how much training I'll manage to fit in around that. Theoretically I could do lots and lots, but theoretically doesn't generally cut much ice with me.

I'm sounding like a stuck record here. I should be talking about something new and original. Hey, "Come On Eileen" is just coming on the radio. How long have I had it on? Not more than an hour or so, and that's the second time this song's come along. Same DJ too - it's Suggs on Saturday nights from six till ten. Perhaps he forgot. Or perhaps he just likes the song a lot. It is a good one.

I was thinking of telling an extremely tasteless joke about an advert on the radio, but I don't think I will. People expect certain standards from this blog.

My boomerang won't come back

The TV channel Boomerang is in its annoying "Scooby Summer" mode at the moment. This means that it quite literally shows nothing but Scooby Doo cartoons every single day from 6am to 9pm. I'm all in favour of a bit of Scooby every now and then (I even like Scrappy), but I can't imagine what makes them think people want to watch it constantly every single day. It's just plain silly. Hopefully they'll revert to normal again when it stops being summer.

There's also a free plastic boomerang with this week's Beano. I'd rather like to be able to throw a boomerang (in the sense of throwing the thing in such a way that it comes back, I mean), but I have a feeling that it would take a bit of practice, and practice of the kind that has to be done in wide open spaces. And I'm not self-confident enough to do that kind of thing somewhere where people can see me. So barring a trip to the Sahara desert or Antarctica, I suppose boomeranging is just not a skill I'm ever going to acquire. It's a darn shame, because imagine how cool it would be to be out in the park, nonchalently pick up a boomerang that someone's left lying around and throw it in a perfect curve. Then wander off while everyone goes ooh and aah and who was that handsome boomerangist?

Rail Rage Redux

My train this morning was sitting in the middle of nowhere for twenty minutes because of a cow on the line. I really have nothing to add to that.

Rail rage

Remember me saying yesterday that I was going to go into work early today? Well, that was the plan, but then when it came to getting out of bed in the morning I decided to snooze for another five minutes and woke up just in time to get up, get dressed and dash down to the station to catch the 8:38. Only to get there and find it had been cancelled due to a technical fault. So I was half an hour late, and had to stay late tonight to get things done.

I really hate working late. I don't get paid extra for it, even if I manage to get in on time in the morning, it's just out of professional committment or possibly just not wanting to get told off for missing deadlines.

Enough work-talk. I've done too much of that lately. I still haven't written that 150-word memory for the Alzheimer's people. Having decided to write about my dad and his clown costume from the first Red Nose Day (he got on the school bus with me and demanded that everyone give him money), I find that I'm really struggling to put it into words. It's just because it's going up on the internet, with my name on it, with people to read, so I want it to be just right. And I know that that description also applies to this blog and I don't have a problem with writing this, but you know... it's different, somehow.

Butterscotch Angel Delight

Isn't nearly as nice as I remember it being. Once again nostalgia can't stand up to harsh reality.

I was going to write about something slightly more lengthy and interesting (well, maybe not interesting - an essay about why I love the hugely underappreciated cartoon character Sniffles - but certainly lengthy), but I think I'll go to bed instead. I need to be in work early tomorrow because some fool's scheduled a three-hour meeting of minimal use or interest to me in the middle of the day and I've got lots of real work to do. These things are sent to try us. And when I moan about something like this, the audience have to ask me whether I've written those books yet. Keep me on my toes, please.

Just for you, Mike

Seeing as Mike Carroll, who if I had a fan club would be not only the president but also the person who does the fiddly jobs of printing and stapling the newsletter and sending it out to everyone, is always on at me to get some more photos taken of myself and shown to the world, here's me and my brother drunkenly but passionately singing at his party last month.

I'm still not going to get a camera - they're just too much hassle all round, and besides, I'm camera-shy. Except when it comes to VPS get-togethers, and those photos can stay restricted to VPS people, thank you very much. I don't think the world needs to see me in Lursa's dress.

Normal service

As I've mentioned before, I don't like posting on here while I've got my brother staying with me over the weekend. I don't know why exactly, since he reads this anyway, but that's just the way my mind works. Anyway, I haven't got anything too exciting to say, so I've probably spared you loyal readers a couple of days' worth of tedium by not forcing you to read me droning on about nothing in particular.

It's going to be all work and a strictly minimal amount of play for the next couple of weeks - not just work in the accountancy sense, although that's been a bit of a drag lately, but work on winning the WMC, which has luckily still been fun. But evenings and weekends of the next 14 days are hopefully going to be taken up by memorising cards and numbers, followed by a week's break before the competition. I'm definitely committed to winning it this year (and hopefully by a huge margin too, if I'm at my best and nobody else has got all that much better since last time).

As for the day job, I don't seem to have been firing on anything close to all cylinders for the last couple of weeks. There's been a load of stuff that I'm finding it impossible to get excited about, and I've just generally felt that I'd much rather be somewhere else. I think it's the time of year. Ever since 2002, my life has tended to start a new adventure of some kind in November, and it worries me that there's nothing on the horizon this time round. November 2002 was when I left my job at Adams, I started at Parkhouse in November 2003, in November 2004 I changed jobs and offices at Parkhouse and started working with a different set of people, and in November 2005 I started at Nord Anglia. But I am seriously thinking in terms of handing in my notice and wandering off into the wilderness again, and I need more people to tell me that that isn't a good idea at all, please. Because believe me, it isn't.

I've broken my TV aerial

I don't use the thing, because I've got cable, but it sits on my telly to look decorative. Or at least it did until I knocked it on the floor and broke it. I suppose I could sellotape it together, but it wouldn't look as cool. Or would it? Maybe it would look cooler, actually. Yes, I will sellotape it. Forget I said anything.

I'm mentally writing a novel at the moment. It's been floating around my head in various little threads for years, but now the thing's coalescing into plots and paragraphs of purple prose. I think I'm going to have to write it down and see if anyone will publish it. I know I said I was going to write that stupid memory book, but you try telling my brain that. Maybe I'll write both. And then publish them, together with "Jayce and Alex" as a three-pack. It'd be different, anyway. I don't want to say what this novel's about in case someone steals or derides the idea (I'm very sensitive). But I think it's going to be pretty good.

Something I missed

It's now a year and five days since I started this blog. Not counting the false start in October 2004. Hooray!

I wrote to all the memory people I was meaning to write to (except one who I just realised I forgot, darn it), and put in a good bit of practice tonight. Did a pack of cards in 27.20, a new personal best - it was the kind of recall that took the full five minutes of hard thought and finished with a bit of guesswork, but they all count. I seem to do my best times when I haven't tried speed cards for a week or so, so I should be good for the world championship if I stick with the plan of doing a final mega training session on the weekend before. With my brother coming round this weekend, I've only got two more after that. Ooh, nerves building up. I'll admit I had a slightly anxiety-based dream about doing abstract images at the WMC last night. But a bit of nerves is good for you.

Hi, fans

I have a huge pile of "fan mail" (by which I mean emails from people involved in memory competitions, who aren't actually fans of mine so much as rivals) to answer, and I was planning to go through it all tonight and get it out of my inbox. But in the end I decided to sit around doing nothing instead. I get like that sometimes. So if you're expecting an email from me, it'll be tomorrow, probably.

It's getting to be the silly season when everyone goes crazy about "memory sports". Well, the vast majority of the world's population still hasn't heard about it, but a few more people than usual realise that the World Memory Championship exists, and it maybe gets a mention in a couple of newspapers and things. This is the height of fame and fortune for us mnemonic types. I'm actually quite looking forward to it at the moment, and hoping I get the local paper tracking me down and interviewing me again. I'll get over it.

Also, I've blown a fuse, in the more literal than usual sense of the phrase. I need to get a new one and I have no idea where to get one from in Burton during my lunch break. But the current situation involves either having the kitchen plug sockets working, or the living room ones. And yes, I haven't got a real kitchen so the kitchen sockets are about six feet away from the living room ones, but it's still an inconvenience. Why can't this house have the kind of fuses I can deal with, that you put new wire in like my old place? I've never had to cope with these cylindrical things before.

Hanging out with the impaler

I dreamt last night that my best friend was a man called Ethan, known to his friends as Vlad. He was a really nice guy, and it was kind of disappointing to wake up and remember that he doesn't exist. The dream didn't see fit to narrate how he acquired the unusual nickname, so we can only speculate. As to why my subconscious mind came up with the name in the first place, I can only assume it's because one of my neopets (the one I adopted and didn't name myself) is called 0_Vladimir_0, Vlad for short. And the name Ethan must be because I was thinking about the Transformers comic storyline featuring a character called Ethan Zachary recently, although why anyone would want to be friends with the man who killed Optimus Prime, I can't imagine.

Meanwhile, in the waking world, I'm trying to think of a memory. Any memory from my life will do, as long as it can be expressed in 150 words (so I can see this is going to be a problem for me, I can't say good morning without launching into a rambling three-volume epic). It's for the Alzheimer's Society Million Memories campaign, which will be launching in a couple of months with interviews and top tips on how to keep your memory sharp from some guy called Ben Pridmore. What, couldn't they find any real celebrities to do this kind of thing?

Anyway, my mind's a blank. So far they've got "Lynda Bellingham's special family Christmases; AA Gill's unforgettable trip to Paris; Richard Briers and his first home on a struggling actor's wage in 1960s; and Jo Brand's first and dangerous driving lesson", so I need something along those lines. But now I can't think of anything that's ever happened to me prior to sitting down and typing this latest paragraph.

Roundheads and Cavaliers

Since I haven't talked about comics for a while, I thought it would be fun to express my opinions of "Civil War", the epic storyline consuming Marvel comics at the moment. For the benefit of readers who aren't into American superhero comics, the two main publishers (Marvel and DC) have taken to doing this kind of mega-crossover to excess in the last couple of years. It has the effect of temporarily boosting sales when an individual issue of any superhero comic is part of a wider crossover, so the logic is that if they do it all the time, sales will go on getting higher forever. Last time they went down this road, the bubble burst in spectacular fashion and Marvel went bankrupt - the problem is that what people buy comics for in the long term is the characters and their ongoing storylines, and when they're being constantly derailed by a story being part 274 of an epic that expects you to pay hundreds of dollars to read the whole thing, it gets old pretty fast. On the other hand, Marvel nowadays have lots of money because their movies have been so successful, so that's not such a big deal now. And, more importantly, Civil War is actually really good. Unlike "House of M" last year, which was diabolical.

The idea is that a major tragedy caused by second-string superheroes the New Warriors, which kills hundreds of children in small-town America, sparks a huge public reaction and finally persuades the government to put through a law forcing people with superpowers to register with the authorities, get proper training and work under government supervision. Which is actually quite sensible, but it goes against the superhero tradition of anyone just being able to put on a mask and go out and fight crime. So all the world's superheroes pick a side and end up fighting each other. It's an interesting idea that hasn't been done before on this kind of scale. The individual heroes' storylines have mostly been well done, especially She-Hulk (which gives the New Warriors the kind of serious treatment they've been lacking for years now) and Thunderbolts (which is always great and seamlessly incorporates this storyline into its many ongoing plots). The only ones I haven't bought after reading them in the shops are Wolverine (which has atrocious art) and X-Factor (which gives a token acknowledgement to the Civil War background and carries on with its own impenetrable plots).

We automatically sympathise with the rebel anti-registration superheroes, but they're making an effort to give coverage to the other side too - Spider-Man, at least for the moment, is firmly pro-registration, even revealing his secret identity to the world, and in the latest Civil War issue Captain America and his rebels are decidedly out of line, starting a big fight when Iron Man and his join-the-government-team gang just want to talk. I'm enjoying the whole thing, and looking forward to seeing where it goes (although you just know that it'll end with the whole thing being swept under the carpet and the status quo restored, like they always do. Maybe with Spider-Man's wife written out somehow because the idiot in charge of Marvel doesn't like her).

DC are also doing an epic storyline in a rather different way at the moment - instead of crossing over into their regular comics, they're doing an additional weekly series called '52', on account of it runs for 52 weeks. I don't normally read DC, but I'm getting this because I think weekly comics should be encouraged - I hate waiting a month or more for the next issue. The gimmick here is that it's in real time - each issue covers a week in the life of the DC universe, while all their other comics have jumped ahead a year in the lives of their heroes. So in '52', we get to see a world where Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are all missing, without it getting in the way of the other comics. We're eleven weeks into it now, and it's been very entertaining. Although the latest issue is focusing on the least compelling of the various interconnecting storylines, so it isn't as good.

If you want to get into the world of superhero comics, either of these is a good place to start. Try "Civil War" especially - see if your comic shop can get you all the comics so far, it's worth giving it a try.

My new favourite golfer is Ben Bunny

Isn't that a brilliant name? Although I mainly answer to 'Zoomy' nowadays, I still like to be called Benjamin Bunny as a term of endearment, and I can't imagine how cool it must be to be really called that. Actually, it's probably not all that cool at all, and he's probably tired of all the jokes by now. He didn't make the cut (by a long way), so it's obviously better in golf to be a Tiger than a rabbit.

Anyway, I don't suck even slightly today. I've done a half-hour binary, hour numbers and spoken numbers practice run, bought all the little household bits and bobs I've run out of in the past week or seven, ironed a shirt and pair of work trousers, done at least one other significant thing that I was going to mention but have forgotten, and made a half-hearted stab at cleaning my kitchen sink. I'm great. Now I'm going to play an othello tournament on Kurnik, and see if I can win a game for a change.

News in brief

In what has been hailed as a remarkable scientific advance, technology has been developed enabling horses to communicate with chickens. The device, which looks like a cross between a gramophone and an unusually hairy woodlouse, translates the horse's whinnies and body language into a combination of clucks, foot-scratches, pecking and so forth easily comprehended by a chicken. The scientists responsible for the new invention are now working on their next project - a similar apparatus which will allow the chickens to reply. After that, they might work on a way for humans to work out what the horses and chickens are saying.

Another scandal has engulfed the world of athletics after an Olympic gold-medal-winner tested positive for spinach. American runner Jack Mercer had been hailed as a hero after setting a new world-record time for the 100m sprint of three and a half seconds, a feat made even more remarkable by the fact that his feet had been glued to the starting blocks by an unknown miscreant, but has now been stripped of his medal and banned for life. "I yam disgustipated wit' myself," he told reporters.

A mass murderer has been unexpectedly acquitted due to some legal technicality. Raymond Roland had cheerfully confessed to killing upwards of three thousand people over a busy six-week period in 2005, and had been expecting a life sentence. But for some reason it became legally necessary for the judge to dismiss the case and set Roland free. "It was some kind of thing to do with some old law, I think," observed Mr Justice Puckles. "It's unfortunate, seeing as the man in question has every intention of going out and killing more people, but that's the law."

And finally, the fire brigade were called out to the village hall in Manchester this morning - not because of a fire, but because the town clerk had dialled the wrong number when ordering a pizza. Because the fire brigade are not allowed to leave a building without extinguishing a fire, the entire Blue Watch had to sit in reception for three hours while the staff searched for a match or cigarette lighter. During this time, six million people perished in a major conflagration in the building next door.

It's not good when...

...you can't think of a single thing to blog about apart from work. Well, I'm not going to bore you with tales of thrilling budget preparation or complaints about the purchase ledger department. What might be more interesting is that I'm going to one of the nurseries tomorrow afternoon - part of a scheme to make everyone in the company more aware of what goes on in the other parts of it. I'd rather be working, to be honest. I like children in principle, they're the best way of perpetuating the species that I know of, but when I come into close contact with actual ones, they tend to get annoying very quickly.

For some reason, though, children invariably like me. It must just be because I'm so sweet and loveable.

Run away and join the circus

It occurs to me that I've spent most of my life moaning about my job and never done anything constructive about finding an alternative. I keep resolving to actually write a memory book and get it published, and then I always find something better to do with my time. Well, no more. I'm fed up of hearing myself whinging mentally about how cool it would be to really be a semi-celebrity. I'm going to really, definitely do it, and if I don't everyone reading this is entitled to make jeering comments about me at every opportunity.

None of which will save me from a day of budget meetings tomorrow, of course, but at least it will give me some kind of sense of achievement in the long run. Probably.

Be Not Proud

It occurred to me that I haven't written anything surreal and nonsensical for much too long, but I don't seem to be in quite the right mood. I just started writing something about a spy, but it wasn't even remotely funny, so I abandoned it. Instead, I'll hope I haven't done so already and talk about the fact that the Brazilian TV people all thought my name was Pridemore instead of Pridmore. This happens to me a lot, and not just with Brazilians. Admittedly, Pridemore sounds more like it should be a name than Pridmore does, but that's not the point. The Pridmore family has a long and distinguished history, probably, and just because nobody with the surname has ever become world-famous doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it.

The name Pridmore seems to have confounded all those people who compile books of surname meanings. Most of them omit it altogether, and even the most exhaustive websites can only speculate that it probably started out as a place-name, although nobody knows where the original prid-more might have been. Perhaps one of my ancestors just decided to make up the name by stringing random letters together. There's a proud tradition of illiteracy in the family, so maybe someone called Pridemore just forgot how to spell their name one day and it stuck.

It's an anagram of Ripe Dorm. Or More Drip. Or 'orrid MEP.

And when I'm drunk I dance like me dad

I've recently developed a habit of going around in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the neck wide open, and whenever I see myself in a mirror I think "Wow, I look cool like this!" I'm quite consciously aware that I only think this because that's how my dad always used to dress, but the way I see it if I'm happy with the way I look, that's the only thing that matters. It's not like any objective observer is going to think I look cool or stylish or handsome whatever I'm wearing.

Anyway, today I had lots of time to go around like that, because getting home from work was more of a hassle than usual. Because of the usual three or four different and contradictory excuses, there were no trains running at all tonight - the guy in the little room at Burton station who gives announcements on the tannoy eventually just said that he had no idea when the next train would be arriving, and recommended that we all get the bus instead. And the bus from Burton to Derby goes all round the houses through Tutbury and Hatton and Hilton and anywhere else you can think of and takes an hour to cover the ten-miles-as-the-crow-flies. All of which meant that I left my bike at the train station so I'll have to walk down to Derby station tomorrow. My life is one earth-shattering disaster after another, isn't it?

I did contemplate cycling home all the way from Burton - it would possibly be good for me, and it would be fun to see if I can still cycle ten miles without dropping dead (I used to do it twice a day at one time). But eventually sanity prevailed - I don't actually know the way, I always get lost when I try to follow road signs, it's all A-roads where I'd get knocked down by speeding cars or back roads where I'd get knocked down by wild farm animals, and the sun was blazing away like nobody's business on the hottest day of the year, and me without a hat. I also contemplated getting a taxi, but thought better of that kind of extravagance.

I Suck

I have done absolutely nothing all day today. Quite literally nothing, just sat around watching TV or reading. Couldn't even be bothered to cook a meal tonight, so I went out to McDonald's. It's hotter than a really hot place and just not the weather for being industrious and hard-working. Or that's my excuse, anyway.

One thing I've done today is taken another step towards the end of my rather strange project that I started a few months ago - to watch an episode of Baby Looney Tunes daily and write a review and analysis of it (just for my own entertainment, you understand, because I don't think anyone else would want to read it - BLT is unjustly despised by most serious cartoon fans). I kind of dropped it during the World Cup and with all my travels, mainly because it was hard to keep the motivation once I'd got onto season 2, which is almost uniformly awful and not a patch on the first season. But having watched "Duck's Reflucks" (a rare misfire from Marlowe Weisman, who's one of the best writers of this kind of cartoon in the world) today, now I've only got two more episodes to watch (both of them dreadful ones), and then I'll need a new similar kind of thing to occupy half an hour of my time in an evening.

Thundercats might be fun (I've got every episode of that on tape too), and that's the kind of thing I could publish on the internet because some people might really enjoy it, but it's a bigger task that takes up more time - episodes are 20 minutes long instead of 11, and there's more plot and continuity to talk about, not to mention an absolute goldmine of nitpicking of plot inconsistencies. Or a comic like Alpha Flight or Defenders, although there's plenty of detailed analysis and criticism of those out there already. I'm making great strides in my effort to collect every Warner Bros cartoon, but still missing a few hundred, so I can't review those from start to finish yet.

I could devote the extra time to training for the world memory championship so as not to make a complete fool of myself there, but then again you can work too hard on things. I'm going to go and lounge around reading comics rather than ironing shirts or making myself a packed lunch for tomorrow.

That's better

After spending all yesterday yawning as well as feeling the usual post-memory-performance urge to resign and run away to join the circus, I stayed in bed till after midday today. Now I feel all refreshed and ready for the challenge of sitting down and getting on with training for the WMC. Absolutely have to do at least one hour-long discipline tomorrow, and then next weekend I'll try to do a full practice WMC (ie all the disciplines except things like words and dates that don't need so much work). Then there's three more weekends before the championship - my brother's coming over for one of them and another might be taken up with hanging out with other people, so time is running short. And if I work at it properly, I might still have a chance of winning. Touch wood.

I also need to clean this flat up. I've got a shiny new gas oven (should have titled this post "The New Gas Cooker Sketch") and it looks out of place amongst the filth and clutter of the rest of the living-room-cum-kitchen. It also shows temperatures in celsius, which is irritating when I'm used to gas marks. I like gas marks, they're so completely stupid. Who would invent a scale of cooker temperatures that have nothing to do with any temperature scale? And for reasons I haven't quite figured out yet, it plugs in to the electric mains. It's got one of those buttons that makes an electric spark to light the hob, but then so did the old one and that didn't plug in. I suppose I should read the manual, but I don't really want to know that badly.

Rio: incipit secunda pars

To resolve last night's nailbiting cliffhanger, Alberto phoned me just about the instant I'd stopped writing. Alberto Dell'Isola Rezende Medeiros, is interesting not only for having more names than most people, but also for being at the forefront of Brazil's emerging gang of memory enthusiasts. He's also the person I have to thank for the trip - he persuaded Globo not only to put him on the show and fly him to the world championships next month, but to bring me out there too. As usual with people I've only known through emails, he is in real life absolutely nothing like I'd imagined - I was thinking earnest young student rather than fun mid-twenties maths teacher. It turns out that he likes all the important things in life - cartoons, the Beatles, classic arcade games and so on, and is a really great guy to hang out with.

So, on Tuesday afternoon Globo sent a car again to take us both down to the Village. Verônica, the other person I have to thank for the trip since she made all the arrangements and is also a lot of fun, escorted us to the studio dressing room where my outfit was waiting. Presumably operating on the principle that the less of me is visible, the better I look on TV, they'd got me a big black cloak, complete with hood, to go with the black suit and playing-cards tie. I looked seriously cool. We spent something like three hours hanging around while they recorded another bit of the show (a man won a makeover of his car by conducting an orchestra after minimal training, and I had a really vivid memory of my dad watching a similar show years ago and saying "the orchestra know what they're doing, they don't need to look at him...").

Eventually we went through to the studio where an enthusiastic audience (composed entirely of attractive young women, which surprised me a bit since the show is obviously aimed at all ages and genders) were cheering Luciano and a singer who performed a rather good if Eurovisiony song. Then it was Alberto's turn to go on stage and perform. He did a very cool thing with a gossip magazine he'd memorised, describing what was on any page Luciano, the singer or an audience member asked for. Then he did day-of-the-week calculations rather faster than I can do it as an encore. They had a calendar appear on the screen behind him showing the correct day of the week (or, in a couple of cases, the correct day of the week for a date other than the one he'd been asked, which caused some confusion).

So then it was my turn to come on ominously in cloak and hood (and snazzy headpiece with microphone attached that somehow gave it an even more Star Wars look - Alberto had already been insisting on calling me Master Yoda until I pointed out that Ben Kenobi would be more appropriate and slightly more flattering) and do the card thing. Luciano shuffled the pack, spread it out on the table in front of me and gave me a minute to memorise them (during which he whispered distractingly in Portuguese about what I was doing). I made a complete and total mess of things, so he re-shuffled them and did it again. I messed up in less dramatic fashion that time, but it was still embarrassing. He suggested using that take, but I insisted on doing it again, and luckily got it all right the third time. I think it'll look good on TV - I was trying to be unsmiling, cool and intellectual as the cloak seemed to demand, but I'm not sure I kept that front up the whole time (it's hard not to giggle at moments like this). Still, they're going to send me a tape, and if you're in Brazil you can see the finished product on June 22nd.

Henrique Athayde, a Rio-resident memory guy, had joined us in the dressing room and taken photos (I hadn't brought a camera with me as usual), and the three of us went back to the hotel for dinner before a night out on the town. Alberto had challenged me to a duel at StreetFighter II, but it turned out that the big arcade in Rio didn't have a single Capcom fighting game. Disgraceful. He had to beat me up on Virtua Fighter 2 instead, although I won on Daytona US. Then we went to the bowling alley nearby, played three games and equitably won one apiece. It's fair to say there wasn't a great level of skill on display, although strangely enough the scores got better after we'd started on the tequila.

A certain amount of alcohol later, we hailed a taxi back to the hotel, singing raucously all the way home. Henrique went back home and Alberto and I decided it would be a good idea to end the night by walking along the beach delivering what I think were really quite cool and harmonic renditions of Beatles songs at top volume. As I was still wearing my good black work shoes, I made sure to take them off and put them at a safe distance from the sea before going for a paddle, only for a huge wave to immediately come along and soak them. So now they smell of the sea and are full of sand as well as holes. Twenty degrees celsius at midnight!

Having finally gone to bed at about half past one, I had plenty of time in the morning for a lie-in, although my body didn't seem to agree, waking me up at about five o'clock as it had done all the time I'd been in Brazil. So then it was just a matter of being driven back to the airport (Globo's driver again, at my beck and call all week!) and heading home.

So, in summary, I got a wonderfantabulous three day holiday for free in return for two minutes' work. You've got to admit that makes me pretty damn cool.

Rio: Phase one, in which Doris gets her oats

I'm writing this the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper in my lovely room on the sixth floor of the Royalty Hotel, Rio de Janeiro. It's 5pm on Monday and just starting to get dark. I'm impressed by the cosmic coincidence that in Derby, where it's four hours later but in the other hemisphere, it will also be just getting dark. Anyway, I'm intending to type this up and stick it on my blog, so if you're reading this now it's safe to assume that that's what I've done. It occurred to me that it might save some time when I get home, because this holiday's going to have a lot to write about and I've got a spare moment now - I'm assuming Alberto's going to call at some point since I told him what room I'm in but somehow neglected to ask him his room number in return. I'm improving my Portuguese in the meantime by watching cartoons - Clifford O Cachorrinho is Clifford's Puppy Days, although I'm pretty sure the title translates literally as Clifford The Puppy, possibly with an extra diminutive suffix on the end. See, I'm multilingual!

Anyway, this was meant to be an account of the holiday so far. Let's start with book reviews. I decided to get two new books for the trip - John Banville's "The Sea", which regular readers will recall me saying ages ago that I was going to buy, and while I was in the bookshop and not being entirely confident in the ability of "The Sea" to keep me going all through the four days away from home (it's not all that long), I decided to see if there was anything by Flann O'Brien that I hadn't read (remembering that the first trip I blogged about, I waxed lyrical over O'Brien's work). The only one they had was "Best of Myles", a compilation of the column he wrote for the Irish Times under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. These columns, by the way, are exactly what I would love this blog to be like, if only I was a halfway competent writer. They're hugely clever, witty, inventive and just plain funny.

Having picked my two books in such a random way, I was rather surprised to see that the writer of one had obviously read and enjoyed the other. Not only is there a character in "The Sea" called Myles, but both books include a pun involving a Primus stove and the Latin phrase "primus inter pares", which CAN'T be a coincidence.

And speaking of The Sea, I can see it from my window - the hotel's right on the beach. The smell of sea air, I only realised today when I smelt it, is something I haven't experienced for a good three years. It's lovely, and the beach here is wonderful. You can't really understand how much I love a nice beach without appreciating where I grew up - in and around Boston, Lincolnshire. Firstly, it's thirty miles in any direction from the nearest hill, which makes me admire inclines whenever I see them (and the mountains around here - wow!), and secondly, the nearest beach, where we always went for holidays and days out, is Skegness. Now, I quite genuinely would recommend Skegness to anyone, it's a great place, but if your idea of the seaside is clean, sparkling white sand and pure blue water topped with shiny white wave, gleaming in the sun... you might be disappointed. Skegness is on the North Sea coast, and the sea water is the colour and texture of thick mud (with, by all accounts, a generous quantity of raw sewage mixed in). So I love a good beach, and even the lack of donkey rides here doesn't put me off.

It's also hot! It got up to about 29 degrees here today. I had the morning free (I got in late last night, just in time to see the penalty shoot-out, and was asleep by half seven), and spent it walking around the beach and the bit of this ginormous city within walking distance of the hotel. Globo, the TV company, have paid for me to have three meals a day at the fancy hotel restaurant, but there's only so much posh food a man can take, so I had lunch at Bob's Burgers next door. Delicious!

Then this afternoon Globo's driver came to take me to the studio, which turns out to be a long journey along some terrible roads - they reminded me of the Old Hammond Beck Road in Boston, although that's not a reference anyone reading this will understand, so I don't know why I'm writing it. Suffice to say that they were full of potholes and bumps, and indeed at one point the whole road had collapsed into a huge chasm, so we had to go over into the wrong lane where it wasn't quite so deep or wide, to get over it. Still, we got to the studio in one piece, and it turns out that 'studio' isn't really the word. 'Village' comes closer, but only if Derby is also a village - it reminds me more than anything of the town built by the Globex Corporation in that Simpsons episode - there are lots of big studios (Globo do all the big Brazilian soap operas and things), exterior sets, offices, buildings all over the place, it's fantastic. I met all the people behind the show we're recording tomorrow. I demonstrated my amazing ability to recall the cards in Portuguese and they looked at each other and said "Maybe you can do it in English, and we'll have a translator." I don't blame them.

I memorised another pack in English for the crew (slowly, and with mistakes, but they were still impressed), then the presenter Luciano came in (he's more Ant and Dec than Noel Edmonds, I've decided) and I memorised another one (perfectly) for his benefit, plus a string of numbers he wrote down. Everyone liked it. He took me to meet Scorpio (okay, he isn't actually called Scorpio, he's Marcel I think, although he does have a beard), the big boss, and I did another pack for him. Not perfectly memorised, mainly because he was saying "Wow!" and "Look at that!" all the time I was memorising, as if the fact of me looking at the cards was in itself somehow amazing, but he still thought it was cool when I could recall most of them. My standards of impressiveness in memorising are much higher than everyone else's, I need to remember that and not worry about getting jeered tomorrow if I take 90 seconds to memorise a pack. Anyway, that's filled an hour and two sides of A4, I'll write more tomorrow but now I should go and find Alberto (who I notice I forgot to write about today although I met him for the first time).

It's a fact, I'm back, yeah I'm standing on the rooftops shouting out...

Ah, back in non-sunny England. I'm in an internet cafe in London - I should really be on a train home to Derby to get some sleep, not having had more than four hours or so for the last two days, but after the plane journey I'm fed up of sitting down while being moved from A to B, so I decided to have a walk around the big city while I'm here. Lots and lots and LOTS to write about Rio, which I'll do when I get home, today or tomorrow night (got to work tomorrow, need my beauty sleep). This Wish You Were Here special will come in two parts - I wrote part one of the travelogue with pen and paper on Monday afternoon and I just need to type it up. I could have used the internet access at the hotel, but I like to be completely incommunicado when I go away like this. And nobody's emailed me to say that some disaster happened while I was out of touch, so it's fine. Unless the house has burned down or something.

Well, while I'm here

Coming to you live from Gatwick Airport's internet access! I've been to Gatwick before, but I can't remember when or why, and I don't think I came up to this bit with the shops and restaurants so I was probably in a rush to catch a plane at the time. I'm quite pleased with myself, actually - I worked out that I could get the 3:30 train and arrive here just in time to find a hotel, get a room and sit down to watch Doctor Who, and the whole plan worked perfectly. Great episode too.

So I'm flying out in the early hours of the morning tomorrow, touching down in Rio at around the time the world cup final kicks off. Then on Monday it's planning how the TV show's going to look, Tuesday it's recording it and hopefully having plenty of time for hanging out with Alberto and the rest of the emerging Brazilian memory scene (none of whom I've ever met before) before flying back on Wednesday evening.

It occurred to me on the train that it's winter in Brazil at the moment and I haven't packed a jumper, but I gather it doesn't get too cold there at any time of the year, so I should be okay. So I'm off to practice memorising cards and reciting them in Portuguese before an early night.

Good Omens

I was wondering what to wear on the TV if they didn't specify anything, and I decided to go for something a bit different - black trousers, black shirt and my playing-cards tie. Stylish. And then the TV woman emailed me and asked me to bring some black clothes so they could present me as a kind of man of mystery. Anyway, I'm going down to London tomorrow because the flight's from Gatwick in the early hours of Sunday, so this might be the last bloggery from me for a few days, depending on whether I can get my hands on the internet and whether I can be bothered to use it if I do.

That being the case, you'd think I'd be able to think of something relevant and funny and interesting to talk about, but I really can't. I'm going to go and practice cards a bit more - I'm almost getting to the point where I think I can do it on TV and recite them in Portuguese without it all going wrong. Almost.

"Do you remember that time when Daz..."

I must have heard my dad start a conversation like that dozens of times over the years, but for the life of me I couldn't remember any continuations before the funeral today. Still, it was a good day. "Daz", it seems, was short for Terence Andrew Sadler, and his funeral was suitably eccentric. The hearse especially - it was a motorbike with sidecar big enough to hold a coffin, driven by a man in black leathers and helmet, and with the funeral director (in top hat and suit) riding on the back.

The minister (and this one was a proper minister of some kind, although he was doing the "humanist style" service) delivered his eulogy in a strangely conversational style ("and he was also a fan of that fellow Cat Stevens, the one who became a Muslim, came to Spondon once but I didn't see him...") but he read the poem How Do You Live Your Dash? ("by Linda Ellis, I heard her one time on Radio 3, she's got a nice voice") wonderfully well. The music was "Bridge Over Troubled Water" again - all my dad's gang loved that song.

It absolutely chucked it down during the interment and then cleared up again as soon as we'd moved on to the pub for lunch. Had a good time reminiscing and generally chatting with Daz's daughter Vicky (who I'm told I met several times when we were little, but neither of us remember it) and her friends, plus his Uncle Byron and Aunt Peggy, not to mention it being a good excuse for Grandma (who was essentially a mother to Daz when he was a young man - she's spent her life taking in waifs and strays of one kind or another) to tell parts of her life story, something she can do endlessly and fascinatingly. I seem to come from a family of great storytellers - my brother's the same, and my dad was too, but that gene seems to have skipped my branch of the family tree.

Oh, by the way, if you couldn't see yesterday's entry until a few minutes ago, I do apologise. I did try to upload it last night, but I don't think it worked. And if it did work, sorry to confuse you. I couldn't see it on my computer until I re-uploaded it.

Hooray, hooray, it's a holi-holiday

I was meaning to wish all my American readers a happy July 4th yesterday, and remind them it's too late now to come running back and say they want to be a colony again. Hope you all had a good time, anyway, even though I saw fit to devote last night's entry to more whining about my free holiday next week.

Although it would be cool to be American in order to have fireworks in the summer, what wouldn't be cool is the amount of time off work you get over there, from what I've heard. This trip to Brazil next week, New York earlier this year, Germany the other week, then the WMC, MSO and BOC to come have almost completely eaten up the 25 days' annual leave I get. I don't know how I'd cope if I only got a couple of weeks off a year.

One dream of mine is to acquire a biggish chunk of money, £20,000 or so, and take a year off work to do all these things I never get round to doing. I'd join a gym, go to college or university or both and do as many weird courses as I could find (this is what the bulk of the twenty grand would go on), do all the usual memory and other mind-sporty things only with more time to practice, fit in a couple of trips to Las Vegas and general globetrotting, just generally have a good time. Write a book or two, set up websites about weird things. Maybe learn to play snooker well.

I'd also need some kind of brain surgery to stop me feeling guilty about spending all that money on myself rather than giving it to the people who need it, of course.

Oh, and by the way, I'm flattered and fascinated by all the comments I got on that post about my credit cards and things. I thought at the time I wrote it that it was the most boring blog entry I'd ever done, but it seems to have been one of the all-time most popular. I mean, I take the contents of my pocket and write about them in graphic detail, and people read the whole thing? Am I out of touch with what's cool and interesting nowadays? Or am I just such a great writer that I could transcribe the phone book here and everyone would love it?

What I wouldn't give for an intergalactic omniglot

Sorry I've talked about nothing else for the past week, but the show I'm going to be on is called Caldeirão do Huck. It's got a website, and it doesn't look like the kind of thing that they'd invite foreigners on in order to play cruel jokes on them, but I'm still not sure what it's all about. Or for that matter what a caldeirão do huck. A cauldron of something, possibly. I'll have to ask Alberto for a crash course in what the show's all about - I have a feeling it's a kind of Noel's House Party.

Anyway, I'm still not practicing memorising cards, I notice. I think I have some kind of subconscious desire to fail spectacularly in front of the watching Brazilian millions. How many people watch this programme, anyway? And once again, what happened to my policy of not doing things like this? Sorry, I just get nervous before scary new experiences. Ignore me.

Things I should be doing tonight

1) Learning Portuguese.
2) Working out how I'm going to memorise a pack of cards in a TV-friendly way.

Things I'm actually doing tonight:

Sitting around in my pants watching Popeye cartoons and reading the entire run of Exiles comics.

I don't know. It's disgraceful, really. But it's been so hot today!

In other news, I'm going to a funeral on Thursday. You go your whole life without going to a funeral, and then two come, both at once. Not anyone I knew, an old friend of my parents who used to hang out with them and my uncle Stewart in days of yore. But my mum's swanning about in the south of France and Uncle Stew is a jetsetter who's practically never in the country and Grandma wanted someone to go to the funeral with her, so I volunteered. Although taking the day off work is going to cause me a lot of hassle for the rest of this week, because we're busy at the moment, especially with me flitting off to Brazil next week and everything. Still, RIP Daz, I've heard plenty of anecdotes about your antics over the years and I'm sure you'll be missed.

Dragon's pocket adventures

I haven't got a wallet, but I have got a big stack of credit cards and things that I carry around in my pocket at all times. Today, for the first time in ages, I had a look at the 'and things' and realised how long it's been since I threw the useless things away. It's mostly business cards that people keep giving me at memory championships (half the people there have some kind of memory-related business and use the competition as a good excuse to hand out business cards). So just in case anyone's interested, here's the inventory of what's in my pocket:

Maestro card

Train season ticket

Bank of Scotland preference account debit card (I haven't used the account in years)

Monument Visa card (occasionally use it online when a site won't take Maestro)

National Insurance Numbercard (I've been carrying this around in my pocket since I turned 16. Perhaps I should take it out and put it in a drawer somewhere - I know the number off by heart)

Business card for Samantha Birkinshaw of Michael Page Recruitment (She was the one who got me the job at Parkhouse, I think. I'm pretty sure she stopped working there a couple of years ago).
HSBC Savings Card (cashpoint-only card for an account I don't use any more)

AT&T phone card (only works in the USA, and in fact doesn't even work there any more. I bought it the first time I went there in 2000.)

Ulrich Voigt's business card for Likanas Verlag GmbH (he's a 'mnemonist' from Germany, and a very nice guy in fact despite being so intellectual and disapproving of 'memory sports' as pointless wastes of time. That IS the point! I don't know what his company does, if anything.)

Fiona Samouelle's business card from Michael Page (I think she's left too.)

Lincolnshire County Council library card (surely must have expired by now, I haven't used it in a good ten years or more)

One of my own business cards (I don't know how that got into the pile. I had them printed earlier this year to give to people who give me one. They just say "Ben Pridmore, idiot" and my email address)

Nick Rosen the TV director guy's business card, with an American phone number scribbled on it that might be his or someone else's, I don't remember.

Barclaycard (which I only use when I'm abroad and need to stick something in a machine. Usually for train tickets in Germany.)

A book of first class stamps, seven left.

Business card for someone called Branislav Maricic in some language that I'm guessing is Czech. I think it comes from last year's world memory championships, and he's some kind of journalist, but I might be wrong. On the back are some cryptic notes I've written - "Pack o' cards" "Andy" "375001" "David - person" and "8.30" I have no idea what any of them meant, but I hope I found them useful at some time.

Alina Lord's business card from Nord Anglia PLC. She was one of the former employees at Cheadle who taught me most of what I know about my current job. She was (and presumably still is) Transylvanian and a lot of fun. This card has lots of phone numbers and things scribbled on it - I was using it to record everything important when I first started there.

Lim Teck Hoe's business card from Maximum Recall. He's the Malaysian guy who organised the 2003 WMC and was going to be organising this year's until it all fell through. I've scribbled "445900" on it at some point, for some reason.

Ottakar's book shop Reward Card - get it stamped ten times when you spend £10 or more (before November 2005) and get £15 off future purchases. Woo! It's got one stamp on it.

Mensa membership card. I think this is still valid, I've got a direct debit comes out of my bank account every year, but I didn't tell them my new address when I moved to Derby so I don't get any correspondence.

James Jorasch's business card from Walker Digital Management. The most recent memory guy to give me his card!

Mhairi Fitzpatrick's business card from Michael Page. A hat-trick of Michael Page cards! I think I only spoke to Mhairi once, and she gave me her card anyway.

Midland Bank (yes, Midland, not HSBC, that's how old it is) Pay-In Card. (Came with the British Othello Federation bank stuff when I took over as treasurer. You can only use it to stick in the paying-in machines.)

Burton card, which they gave me the one and only time I've bought anything at Burton's in the last ten years or so (the suit for my dad's funeral. If I ever have occasion to shop there again, I'm sure it'll come in handy.)

I don't think I'll throw anything out, it's kind of fun looking through this stuff and remembering where it came from. I'll keep adding cards to the heap until I can't fit them in a pocket any more.

Oi

So immediately after Portugal knocked us out of the world cup, I start trying to learn Portuguese. Makes me seem like some kind of traitor. It does remind me, though, of a fundamental fact about myself - I hate learning languages. I just find the things so darn difficult to do. Makes me wonder why I devoted a big chunk of my teenage years to languages, but hey, I was weird when I was younger.

Still, did you know they don't use the letters K, W or Y? That means I'm already three twenty-sixths of the way to mastering Brazilian Portuguese! Which is my aim over the next eight days, before I fly out there on the 10th. If there's one thing I hate more than learning languages, it's going to a foreign country and making people talk to me in English.

Remind me again why I agreed to do this TV thing?

Senile dementia

I left the house without my briefcase today, and didn't realise I'd forgotten it until I got to the train station, too late to go back and get it. And then at work while going out to buy a sandwich (the most important function of my briefcase is carrying my packed lunch), I quipped to a colleague "I seem to be getting very short-sighted in my old age. No, not short-sighted. What's the phrase I'm looking for? Means forgetful?" It took me five minutes to remember 'absent-minded'. This isn't a very impressive display of memory from someone who's hoping to win the World Memory Championship in a month and a half.

In my defence, I think forgetting my briefcase in the first place came about because I wasn't wearing my usual office clothes. I decided to go casual on casual day for a change, so that I could wear my Germany shirt. Because having spent quite a lot of money on it, I thought I should try to get as many jokes out of it as possible. It'll be outdated after the World Cup, after all.

In other news, my washing machine just behind me here is making some very loud banging noises. I hope it doesn't blow up or anything. It's a good seven and a half years old by now and it's never completely broken down yet, so I shouldn't complain. Generally speaking, my posessions all stop working much earlier in their lives than that, I seem to have the touch of death with technology.

P-p-p-pick up

Sainsbury's have a half price offer on 18-packs of penguin biscuits. 89p, which is a pretty good deal really. Interestingly, they haven't got a similar offer on the packs of 9 on the shelves next to them, which are still 98p a pack. I felt like buying a 9-pack just to make some kind of ironic point, but then I realised that that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense, so I didn't.

I'm watching Andy Murray playing tennis at the moment, and his horrible mother's in the crowd. I saw her being interviewed last year when Murray had just won a very impressive game, and rather than saying anything nice about her son, she immediately launched into a list of his deficiencies as a tennis player and observed that they'd have to work on them before he'd be any real good. Although on the other hand, maybe if I'd had a mother like that I'd be practising speed numbers like I said I would right now, instead of wasting my life watching Wimbledon.

Bom-dia, meu nome é Zoomy.

I'm almost certainly going to Brazil in two weeks, touch wood. Which is extremely scary and I don't think I want to do it any more. But I'll get over it.

This is of course another distraction from training for the world championships, and I've had a lot of those lately, what with the football. And general laziness, to be honest. I had a real buzz of motivation earlier in the year, but for the last few months I've been steadily declining back to 2005 levels of don't-feel-like-it-ness. Well, not quite that bad (seeing as for most of 2005 I didn't look at a pack of cards or sheet of numbers that weren't pi at all), but getting there. I did have a go at speed numbers tonight, but considering there wasn't even any football today I should have done a lot more, really.

Never mind, this weekend I've got no plans (although come to think of it I haven't been to see my grandma for aaaaages, so maybe I should do that too), so if I can drum up the willpower to do it, I can do an hour numbers and cards and maybe come up with a definite plan for how much of each to attempt at the worlds.

More pretty pictures!

What you can't see here is that the lights on the face really flash and everything. 


Just for the purposes of comparison, for the benefit of those poor people who didn't watch Battle of the Planets. 

And a picture too...

 

An epic travelogue

So, if memory serves (and remembering something that happened more than five minutes ago isn't my forte, as I think I've demonstrated this weekend), I set off on Thursday night for the first stage of my journey, and the great challenge of finding my hotel. A cursory search of the internet hadn't revealed any of the various hotels actually at Birmingham airport, so I'd booked a room at the Holiday Inn a couple of miles down the road. I decided to walk it, seeing as it was nice weather and I don't like getting taxis. And it was a very pleasant walk - the area around the airport is for some reason absolutely crawling with rabbits, it's like walking on some kind of bunny carpet (I didn't actually tread on any, don't worry). But the number of rabbits I saw on the walk was inversely proportional to the number of Holiday Inns, since it turned out not to be where I thought it was, and after a couple of hours of walking around I found my way back to the airport train station and got a taxi like a normal person would have done in the first place.

After that, I got the plane in the morning without any difficulty. The usual funny look at the passport control because my picture looks like a completely different person, but no trouble. The departure lounge seems to have got more interesting since I was last there, and I had two good books to pass the time with anyway, The Marlows and the Traitor, and Kavalier and Clay. Then I had a day of looking around Düsseldorf (which I didn't think much of) and Essen (really nice!). I bought a Germany football shirt to wear for a laugh at the competition. I know I don't normally buy clothes, generally wearing the same old falling-to-bits ones I've had since I was a teenager, but I'm not above spending huge amounts of money on a single garment every now and then if I think it'll be funny. And I like to think I've got a reputation for wearing interesting T-shirts at memory competitions, so I need to keep that going even now that everyone's seen my entire wardrobe.

I also bought a teddy bear in a Germany football shirt, just on a whim. He's called Ballack, and he seems to be getting along well with Hi-Fi, Tom Jones, Treelo, Iago, Dragon and Shelley, the rest of my stuffed toys who I really should blog about some time soon. I thought about taking him to the competition as a mascot, but decided that two Germany shirts would be overkill, and anyway he wanted to stay at the hotel and watch TV. I found the Essen Holiday Inn without much trouble at all, although negotiating the constantly-shifting roadworks and diversions and working out which direction cars were likely to be coming at you from while crossing the road was a bit of a challenge.

The weather all weekend was absolutely baking hot and sunny, the kind of temperature where it's seriously uncomfortable to be in the direct sunshine. My hat comes in handy for stopping my bald shiny skull getting sunburnt in this kind of situation, but it's horribly hot and sweaty wearing it. Still, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, and I'm too superstitious to stop wearing it to memory competitions now. Somehow I don't think I could memorise anything without it sitting on the desk (or, if there isn't room, on the floor) in front of me.

Anyway, I found the competition venue without any trouble at all, considering I got off at the wrong one of Hattingen's S-Bahn stations and so the map I'd carefully printed out beforehand was of limited use. As well as the Speed Cards Challenge, the Schulzentrum Hochhausen was host to a speed-stacking competition and other sideshows. This is something that the German competitions do very well, and the British ones do terribly. The WMC is always accompanied by Tony Buzan and his friends and relatives giving lectures on self-optimisation and things to gullible businessmen and charging the kind of prices that make your mind boggle. German competitions are accompanied by the kind of shows and contests that people actually want to come to, and this is probably why lots of people there like 'memory sports' and nobody over here does.

Boris did a fantastic job organising everything, by the way - very much putting my shambolic Cambridge effort to shame! There were only ten competitors in the SCC at the end, which was a bit disappointing. Possibly the clash with Germany's football game in the afternoon had something to do with it. Clemens wasn't there, but there was me, Gunther, Steffen Bütow and Alisa Kellner among the participants. For the first round, I was up against Florian Dellé, and stuck with the strategy I'd come up with in advance - just go for a fast time and then if it goes wrong, go a bit slower in the next two heats (it was best of three, head-to-head, if you remember). Actually, I needn't have worried - as usual in these things, when I'm actually in competition, my recall is much more accurate than when I'm at home. I did 32.03 seconds (a bit better than my existing world record) in the first heat, and something like 34 seconds in the next. So I'd won pretty comfortably, and got to sit out the third heat. Watching Steffen against Alisa was entertaining - there really could be something in this as a spectator sport, you know!

For the second round against Franz-Josef Schumeckers it was the same kind of thing, I had another couple of times in the low 30s, including a 31.03, and won it without any difficulty. Nobody else was doing much under a minute. I was up against Steffen in the third round, and he decided to forfeit it and save his mental energy for the final round after lunch. That annoyed me a bit, to be honest. But I decided to go for a super-fast time rather than doing nothing, and made a complete mess of it twice in a row.

After lunch (which was pizza, and free of charge for competitors, another coolness. I live on pizza and McDonald's when I'm in Germany - there are always people selling cheap slices of pizza in train stations and elsewhere, generally reheated several times, often burnt and always delicious. Haute cuisine!) it was time for the grand final, which was me against Gunther. After those failed attempts at breaking the record, I was concerned that I might make a mess of things, so decided I needed a new strategy. Gunther, I reasoned, would assume I was going for a 30-ish-second kind of time, know he couldn't beat that, so would hope that I made a mistake and take it slowly, and make sure of getting his own recall correct. That would give me leeway to go more slowly, say 1 minute, and be certain of winning. So I did, and I have no idea why - I know from experience that going through the pack twice makes me no more likely to recall it correctly than only going through once. Strange but true. My time was about 1:00.91, I think. To my alarm, it turned out that Gunther had done about 51 seconds. He'd expected me to do the sensible thing! I'm deeply offended. Haven't I spent my whole life not doing the sensible thing? And now that for once I have, it was anticipated by my opponent? Luckily, though, he got the third card in the pack wrong, so it didn't matter. I went back to doing the silly thing for the second heat and got it perfectly right in about 36 seconds, without any trouble.

So I won, and to be perfectly honest, I won without breaking a sweat. It sounds disrespectful to the other competitors, I know, and I really should be keeping my big mouth shut here, but I would have liked to be challenged a lot more than I was.

Anyway, the final ceremony included the finals of the speedstacking - very exciting and one of those things I've been meaning to get into since learning of the sport's existence last August, although I imagine it would be hugely frustrating to keep making mistakes at crucial moments; a blindfold Rubik's cube solver (extremely cool); an attempt by Boris at the two-packs-of-cards memorisation record (much better than my own disastrous attempt in 2004, but still unsuccessful, unfortunately); a magician, and a whole lot of trophies. This, again, is normal for a German memory competition. In Britain we get a speech from Tony Buzan, maybe about how great he or one of his friends is, and a quick presentation of medals.

So, thanks to the generosity of the sponsors (Volksbank Sprockhövel - if you want a bank in Sprockhövel, check them out! Assuming they are a bank, I'm not entirely certain about that) I went away with two trophies (for winning and for the best time), and a solid gold pack of cards (seriously cool!). Of course, once again I hadn't brought a bag big enough to take them home with me as well as Ballack and my clothes and things, but I managed to cram them all into my rucksack without leaving too much behind in the hotel room (my notepad, since there wasn't anything written in it and I can easily buy another one, and my jumper, since I've got about half a dozen more at home and I only wear one at a time).

I skipped the get-together at Boris's house for the football game. Rude of me, I know, but these competitions tire me out tremendously and I just didn't feel up to it. I went back to the hotel and was fast asleep by eight, not even disturbed by the sound of Germans celebrating their victory. Which reminds me, a German interviewer at the competition asked me what I thought the result would be, and I said 2-0 to Germany. Should have put some money on it, really.

Coming home yesterday was fun - the boiling hot weather lasted right until the split second I got on the plane, when it turned into the most amazing thunderstorm, with torrential rain (the plane was sitting in the middle of like a square mile of concrete and it was all under an inch of water by the time the rain stopped), vicious wind and some really great lightning. The pilot assured us that if the plane was struck by lightning it probably wouldn't kill us, but we weren't able to take off for an hour and a half until there was a break in the weather. Luckily, I was still immersed in Kavalier and Clay. It's one of those books that can still utterly absorb you even on re-reading it. And then when we finally did fly back to Birmingham, there weren't any trains from the station because of engineering works. In fact, there are practically never trains from Birmingham International station, and I'm not sure why they still call it a railway station except out of some sense of tradition. But the replacement bus service wasn't as slow or late as they usually are, so I shouldn't complain. Incidentally, in Germany the trains really do all run on time. I was hugely impressed!

Did I remember to set the video for Doctor Who?

Did I heckers. Now I'll have to wait till they show the whole series again on BBC3 to tape the rest of them. Anyway, lots to write about the weekend, but I'll save it for tomorrow because I've only just got back, later than planned, and I'm going straight to bed. I've got the day off tomorrow, so assuming I wake up at some point (I'm completely exhausted for some reason) I'll be able to blog at length then.