Lazing on a sunny afternoon

There are days when I'm all hyper-productive and get lots of stuff done. There are also days when I just don't do anything. This has pretty much been one of the latter. Although I did talk to the Cambridge local paper. And I, well, expressed enthusiasm on hearing that Ravinder's documentary has officially got the sort-of go-ahead from Channel 5. That counts as memory-related work, right?

Anyway, I'm going to Ashford tomorrow afternoon for the othello on Saturday, rather than getting the early morning train, so I probably won't post anything tomorrow night. Yes, I'm still pointing it out every time I don't intend to post anything here. I have a very inflated sense of this blog's importance in the grand scheme of things.

More reasons to be cheerful

Man Utd won 7-1 last night and it was a great game. I saw the first five goals before turning over to watch the last episode of Life on Mars, which was also absolutely fantastic. I found those raffle tickets today without even meaning to, while looking for something else. I also found the something else I was looking for. Boston Utd did indeed beat Macclesfield on Monday, and are now at the lofty heights of 22nd (out of 24) in League Two. This is important, because the bottom two get relegated. Granted, they're only three points clear of Wrexham, who've got a game in hand, but it's the psychological advantage of not being in the relegation zone that matters. Plus, Boston's last four games are against Hereford and Chester (both comfortably mid-table with no chance of making the play-offs), Torquay and Wrexham (the two clubs below us). We've got a good chance of survival. I'm doing an interview with the Cambridge Evening News tomorrow about the memory championship, and hopefully getting it a nice bit of advance publicity. It's definitely spring, you know - it's been all warm and sunny for the last couple of days.

Hello, sunshine! Hello, birds on the wing!

I've got lots of bunnies! By which I mean that I've got The Tale of the Bunny Picnic, which you may remember me bidding for on eBay last week, in rather more formats than I was expecting. For some reason, the seller has also enclosed a "free gift" of a pirate DVD copied (or "ripped" or "burned" or whatever the technical term is) directly from the official, original VHS that he actually advertised, sold and sent to me. I don't get why he would do this. Did he think "well, if he likes the legal version, he's sure to also like a less legal version along with it!"

Come to think of it, "captured" might be the technical term.

Anyway, I'm glad that I've got it. I've watched it twice today, since that's obviously what the seller wants me to do, and watched a couple of the brilliant songs at least hrair times. I haven't seen the Bunny Picnic for years and years, and I'd forgotten just how great it was. If I had the first idea how to go about doing such a thing, I would burn/rip/capture/sync the wonderful musical number at the end when the bunnies confront the farmer and put it on YouTube for you all to watch, because nobody should go through life without hearing that song.

I find it hard to describe to normal people the feeling of sheer delight and euphoria I get from watching a stirring musical tale of bunny bravery like this. Suffice it to say I've been in a deliriously happy kind of mood all day. It even helps me put a positive spin on things that I might otherwise consider bad - having done a bit of Cambridge championship preparation work today, I've been thinking "well, it's nearly all done now and well ahead of time", rather than "I still need to do the historic dates in multiple languages, and that takes ages, plus I need to arrange stopwatches or timers for the speed cards and I should have done that yonks ago".

And when the charity Cerebra phoned me tonight to ask for money and I suddenly remembered I've got some raffle tickets of theirs that I'm supposed to be selling and have no idea where they are, my thought is "wow, good thing they called or I would have forgotten all about it and then felt horribly guilty when they write to me asking for money", whereas had I been in less of a cheerful mood, I might have been thinking "aw, now I'll have to turn my living room upside down looking for those raffle tickets. How could I have forgotten them, anyway? I'm supposed to be a memory champion. And why are Cerebra pestering me for more money when they haven't finished with this raffle yet, for Pete's sake?"

Everything's better with bunnies. Man Utd are 3-0 up after 20 minutes! It's the bunnies, I tell you! Incidentally, Lugsy is the real hero of Tale of the Bunny Picnic, not Bean. He's the one I always admired.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Woo! Did an hour cards practice today, attempting 33 packs and got 29½ right. And the half (you get half a pack if there's one mistake) was just stupidity on my part - I memorised it right, I just wrote the wrong thing down and didn't notice. I'm still not 100% confident with going for more than thirty packs, but I'm feeling now that I can maybe eventually speed myself up just that little bit more so that I can look at each one three times. Today the sixty minutes ran out when I was just short of the end of the 27th pack for the third time. And my recall was still good on the ones I only had time to look at twice - it was harder work and took longer, with a bit of educated-guesswork, but I got most of them right. The mistakes came on packs 24, 29 and 30, plus the aforementioned annoying blunder on pack 7. And I was finished with the recall with ten minutes of the two hours still to go, rather than frantically scribbling till the end. All in all, I'm happy with that.

And while I'm talking card-memorising (I have quite honestly been told that there are people out there who really like reading things like the above paragraph, you know), I'll throw out a favourite tip of mine for "memory athletes" in training - try to practice things in the exact format of the championships. Between memorising and recall when I practice hour numbers, while I'm putting those fiddly little rubber bands back around the cards and stacking them up neatly, I like to turn the telly or radio on to simulate the talking that goes on at competitions during the hiatus. I also avoid consciously trying to recall any of the images I've seen until the recall time has started, because you never know what distractions are going to come along at the world championships.

When it comes to speed cards, I also always wait the full five minutes until recalling, even though I'm going through the pack in thirty seconds and then just sitting in silence. Sitting still and not saying anything is something I have difficulty with, you see, so it's good to get in a bit of practice. I'm an incorrigible daydreamer, and I can never spend the whole four and a half minutes thinking about the cards I've just memorised without drifting off on a mental tangent, so practicing like that really helps - now I can daydream all I like and still keep the cards bobbing around in my brain until I have to regurgitate them.

When did my hobbies turn into work?

Not only am I wrestling with writing a book about memory and stuff (that's "wrestling" in the sense of doing nothing about it, which is an unusual but quite acceptable use of the word), but I'm also trying to entice people to chip in with some prize money for the Cambridge championship (I'm still hopeful on that front). And if that wasn't enough, I've been wrestling with a question about the British othello rating list that David asked the committee about - should people who don't live here any more still be included?

I can think of lots of sensible arguments both for and against the idea, which is confusing me a bit. I would have expected not to care either way, since the only rating I ever look at is my own, but in fact I seem to be deeply passionate about every possible argument for and against every possible arrangement. Perhaps I just need to get out more. Come to think of it, I maybe shouldn't be posting publicly about this in the first place. Some people might argue that it's private committee business (the committee of the BOF doesn't generally do anything, so it's probably a good idea to shroud anything we do do in mystery, so as to give the impression that we do more). Ah well. They can always excommunicate me, or whatever the expression is.

Heckle and Jeckle

I've been in Nottingham today for the dual purpose of finding out whether the comic mart is still a good thing to visit, and to see Boston Utd travel to Notts County in the hope of getting an essential win to pull them out of the relegation zone. It turns out that it's not, they didn't, and tonight's Doctor Who wasn't all that great either, so I'm in a bad mood.

I saw a freakish number of magpies today, not even counting the two Notts County mascots. From the train window I saw a whole bunch of single magpies and one group of four, which I interpreted as meaning that I was in line for a whole lot of sorrow, but at least would get a boy.

The comic thing, which I used to go to regularly when there were rather more people interested in buying and selling old comics, really isn't what it was. It's no longer taking up the whole basketball court in a leisure centre in the unfashionable end of town, but is now relegated to a smallish back room at the ice rink where four or five dealers try to offload their boxes of back issues at 50p each. Sad, really.

As for the game, the Pilgrims didn't play all that badly. It was just that they never really looked like a team that could score a goal - and sure enough, they didn't. County scored two. But they gave it their best, despite the continuing difficult circumstances - with Paul Ellender suspended again, we could only manage to bring three substitutes, and that included Adam Rowntree from the youth team, who looks about twelve.

Five minutes into the game, the ref noticed that we had two players on the pitch wearing number 17 - Colin Cryan had somehow managed to put on Stewart Talbot's spare shirt instead of his own. That's fairly typical of the way the game went. We're not quite doomed to the Conference just yet - with Torquay hopelessly dead at the bottom of the table and Wrexham also in dire straits, a win against Macclesfield (fourth from bottom) next week might just save us at the last. Fingers crossed...

That's how we use an apostrophe

There's a birthday card on sale in Smith's with the words "Life's to short" on the front (and "...to date ugly men" on the inside). I mean, seriously. What is it with young people* these days? Don't they teach them anything in the schools now that my dad's no longer with us**? He'd be turning in his grave if he hadn't been cremated. Yes, you might say "does it really matter if people don't know the difference between 'to' and 'too'?" You might add "it's perfectly obvious to anyone who reads it what the card means to say, so misspelt or not, the card is doing its job." You might go on to say that in a couple of decades' time, "to" (or even "2") might well be the dictionary-approved spelling of the word we pedants now write as "too". You might question my own grammar and punctuation in the preceding paragraph. And you'd be perfectly correct to make all these points, and within your rights to call me a weirdo for objecting at such length, but I don't care. I hate this kind of thing. With a passion. I'm going to find out who made this horrible birthday card, go round to their house and shout at them.

In less insane news, my mum sent me an easter egg in the post, and for some reason Thorntons decided to package it in a cardboard box that could have fitted a dozen easter eggs of the same size inside it. Seriously, it's the size of a house. I might live in this cardboard box if I ever feel I need a second home in the country. I found this box sitting outside the door to my flat today (someone else in the building must have signed for it) and thought some mystery admirer had sent me a new television set or vacuum cleaner.

*I'm assuming, with no evidence to back me up on this, that everybody involved in the production of this card is younger than me.

**And now I'm apparently assuming that everyone involved in the production of this card is so young that they went to primary school within the last year.

I guess I'm just lazy

This afternoon I got as far as laying out 33 packs of cards on my desk with the intention of doing an hour cards practice, then decided I wasn't really in the mood. So I left them out so I could do it tomorrow instead. A bit later on, after coming back in from the shops, I found that it was unbearably hot in my living room. Possibly, with hindsight, it was a bad idea to turn the heating on on the hottest day of the year so far. But if I opened the window, the wind would blow the cards on the desk all over the floor! I was faced with the choice of either leaving the window closed and the room like an oven (an oven at a temperature of about 30 degrees at the very most, but an oven nonetheless) or putting rubber bands back around each of my 33 packs of cards to keep them together. And I found the latter to be a quite unacceptable use of my time, so spent half an hour in stifling heat before finally giving in. And now I'll have to take all the rubber bands off again tomorrow!

That's if I do the cards tomorrow. Actually, I was planning to devote most of the day to promoting the Cambridge Memory Championship - dig the groovy new website, courtesy of James Kemp and James Ponder! One month to go, start practicing now!

The horrors of commercialism

Blogger tried to persuade me last night to put Google ads on this site. I would, but I gather they don't actually pay you anything until you've amassed a huge number of clicks' worth of money, and I doubt whether very many of my readers would be at all interested in adverts for memory foam mattresses (which is pretty much exclusively the ads you get on memory-related sites). Not that I've got anything against memory foam mattresses. I'd buy one myself if they weren't rubbish.

Ooh! I'm watching Heroes and there's a woman on it whose superpower is a super-memory! Seriously, everyone nowadays is saving the world by remembering long numbers! That's my new job, I've decided.

Land speed record

Ramón Campayo has invited me to the first World Speed Memory Championships, in Spain, on April 28th and 29th. Rather short notice, but since that (I'm almost positive now) is the one weekend in the foreseeable when I'm not doing anything, I might consider it.

"Speed memory" - memorising the maximum possible number of digits or whatever in one second, or three seconds, or half a second or so on - is not really my thing. In fact, it's not really anyone's thing except Ramón's, he's the only person who does it, as a rule. So it might be fun to do something a bit different here. I don't have much spare time to practice what with Cambridge and that loony idea of getting my book finished in the next month, but then the thing about speed memory is that it involves a lot more luck and instinct than 'real' memory competitions - there's no need for fancy techniques and things, it's just a matter of getting your brain used to going quickly.

On the other hand, it means going to Spain, and hanging out with a lot of other people who will presumably be mostly Spanish and complete strangers. As I might have mentioned before, I don't really like going places where I don't speak the language, and I certainly don't have time in the next four weeks to learn Spanish. I can't even watch Dora the Explorer, because I haven't got Nick Jr and it's only on ITV once a week. Also, it's a terrible, terrible cartoon.

It's the holidays!

Or at least it would be if I was a teacher or a schoolboy. It's deeply unfair that I don't get some kind of paid holiday, in fact. I mean, technically, I could go on holiday or just stop doing even the tiny bit of "work" I'm doing at the moment, but it's not the same unless there's some kind of official sanction for me not working.

Anyway, while we're talking about Easter, remember that Tale of the Bunny Picnic video I bid on on eBay even though it was £5? It ended up going for £23! I mean, I didn't really want it all that much, but seeing several other people bid insane amounts of money for it tweaks my competitive impulses. There's another copy on eBay now that I'm bidding on, and I can see me squandering my whole life savings on it.

Brown ale and black pudding

So, last night was Vicky's birthday party. We went for a meal at Soul, a place I've never been before because I had the vague idea that it was all organic food and things, so I avoided it on principle. It possibly is organic food and things, but if it is it doesn't rub it in customers' faces. Now I'm prejudiced against it mainly because it's posh and expensive. On the other hand, the food, though inexcusably posh, was actually very nice. Well, except for the chicken liver parfait which seemed to be the most edible starter on the menu. That wasn't terribly nice. But the main course I had, roast duck with black pudding, some fancy kind of potato with a creamy spinach concoction on top and a blackberry jus, was absolutely delicious. And considering it was posh, which normally means tiny portions on big plates, it was very filling. Big plates, but quite large portions, piled up vertically so it looked like small portions. I approve of this kind of thing. And then rhubarb creme brulee with rhubarb ripple ice cream for pudding, which was really scrummy too. The company was good too - nobody I knew, but a nice bunch of people all round.

Afterwards we went to the beer festival, where the highlight was the live music, provided by a German oompah band. The leader and tuba player, surreally enough, looked exactly like Ulrich Voigt (a comment that will be useful only to the very select group of my readers who not only know what Ulrich looks like but can imagine him dressed in lederhosen and a German army helmet, playing an Abba medley on a tuba). Their music was absolutely brilliant, and everybody got very much into the spirit of it, aided by the wide range of strangely-named beers on offer. They also played happy birthday to Vicky.

Onto other business, I've been "tagged" by a "meme", or by Jemfy, I'm not sure exactly how you phrase these things. So even though I don't do things like this (they make me feel like I'm trying to be a trendy young person), I'll do this one because the answer to it provokes a sort of funny story:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next three sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
6. Tag five other people to do the same.

"Call Lionel, over at the Times, and tell him his press privileges have been revoked. I didn't appreciate his little comment about my earrings. Questions?"

Not a particularly exciting three sentences, sadly - if we'd gone a few sentences further you could have read "What the--?" "Leave the lights off." "Gasp!", which gives a bit more of a clue to what the book is - only in comics do people say "gasp". It's from "Blood and Water", the fourth compilation volume of "Noble Causes", the comic by Jay Faerber. It doesn't have page numbers, so I hope you appreciate the effort it took to count 23 pages into it (when I run out of fingers and toes I tend to run into difficulty).

Jay Faerber is an American comic writer who I have a bit of a complex about. Back in the distant dark ages when I first bought a computer and started discovering the wonders the internet had to offer, I commented on a newsgroup about the upcoming second volume of New Warriors. I was a huge fan of the original New Warriors series until it was cancelled, and I was decidedly unimpressed by the previews of the sequel. I said as much on the newsgroup, and observed that Marvel Comics obviously didn't care about the New Warriors and their small but loyal fanbase, since although they had finally decided to relaunch the series, they'd done so with very little publicity, downright bad artwork, a change in tone to more light-hearted adventure with few of the original characters, and a second-rate writer in Jay Faerber. I was horrified to find that Jay Faerber himself replied to my comments, taking exception to the description. This was the first time I realised that talking about comics on an internet newsgroup was a bit more public than talking with friends in my house. It really hadn't occurred to me that I could bad-mouth someone on the internet and the person in question might actually hear about it.

So ever since then, not only have I been a little more careful to keep my opinion of comic book writers I dislike to myself, but I've gone to great lengths to pretend that I really, really like Jay Faerber's writing, so as to make up for my faux pas. This has been quite difficult at times - New Warriors volume 2 really wasn't very good, and was cancelled after ten issues. Volume 3, by someone else, was much, much worse, so I have high hopes for the upcoming volume 4. Anyway, after years of generally not reading anything by Faerber so I didn't have to say it was brilliant, I just recently decided to try "Noble Causes", his series about a family of superheroes. Flicking through the first collected volume in the shop, I was hooked. By the time I'd bought and read the first two volumes, I was positively ecstatic. Not only is Noble Causes quite genuinely and honestly great, it's by Jay Faerber! I really like something by Jay Faerber! I felt like I'd laid some ghosts to rest and could praise him to the skies without knowing that I was just doing it because I was rude about him eight years ago.

So just last week I bought volumes three and four, and... they're not as good. Volume 4 particularly so. I was quite disappointed, in fact. The story shifts towards more traditional superhero adventures and it's rather more insubstantial and less intelligent than the first two volumes. The artist of "Blood and Water", Fran Bueno, is a step down in quality from his predecessors. All in all, I feel let down after that brief burst of euphoria. And the fact that I haven't yet put the book away, coupled with this "tagging" thing, just brings all these conflicting emotions to the surface.

Well, enough. From now on, I resolve to not only buy more Jay Faerber stuff, in the expectation that I really will like some of it, I won't go out of my way to pretend I like the rest of it when I don't. Honesty is the best policy. I'm sure he's long forgotten the whole second-rate-writer episode anyway, so perhaps I should too.

Ooh, unless he reads this....

No time, no inspiration

Don't you hate it when you're going out to a beer festival and think it's probably best to update your blog beforehand because you're not intending to be in a fit state to type when you get back, but find that you have to leave pretty much immediately so as not to be unfashionably late and can't think of anything to write about?

Actually, I don't hate it as such, and if you do you really need to get your priorities right. I mean, it's only a blog, for crying out loud! What's wrong with you?

Existentialism

Having forgotten what he did for a living, Cecil was participating in an archaeological dig in Middlesbrough when he uncovered the fabled Amulet of Dennis, which confers on its owner the power to become ruler of the world. He phoned Phillip to tell him the news, before getting back to work.

Phillip immediately burst into Samantha's bedroom, kicking the door down and dynamiting the remains in his haste to get inside. "Cecil's only gone and found the Amulet of Dennis," he lamented, "and he's going to end up ruling the world unless we stop him right away."

"But what can we do?" asked Samantha from the dining room where she had been sitting having lunch with Phillip before he ran upstairs to talk to her.

"We have to stop him using the Amulet," explained Phillip. "Luckily, he won't be able to do anything with it until he knocks off work for the night. It seems he's under the impression he's an archaeologist today. That gives us four hours to find him and do him in."

"But surely," protested Samantha, thinking that this whole endeavour sounded too much like hard work, "if the amulet gives him so much power, we won't be able to do anything?"

"No, no," explained Phillip, "it confers on its owner the power to rule the world. By which I mean that what you do is present it to the Prime Minister and he turns over control of the country to you. It doesn't give you super-powers or anything. And it's an Amulet, not an amulet."

"It's not possible to aurally distinguish between a word spelt with an upper-case letter and one spelt with a lower-case letter, so get off my back," commanded Samantha. "So what are we going to do?"

"Well," explained Phillip, "Cecil neglected to tell me where in the world he is at the moment, so I'm going to get Richard to drive me randomly around the country in the hope that we bump into him. I need you to go to London, seduce the Prime Minister and persuade him to go and hide down a hole in Czechoslovakia."

"You mean the Czech Republic," said Samantha, "and what if the Prime Minister is a woman, a homosexual man or a member of a different species such as dog or wolf?"

"We'll have to take that risk," said Phillip firmly. "I know there's no way of knowing who or what the Prime Minister is until you get to 10 Downing Street and meet him, but I think it's statistically likely that he'll be seductible by an attractive woman. And don't bother pointing out that you're not the slightest bit attractive and in fact look less like a woman than I do, beggars can't be choosers and you'll have to do."

Samantha, who hadn't been intending to say anything of the sort and actually considered herself to be quite good looking, shrugged consent, and Phillip stormed determinedly out of the door and down the street to Richard's house. Samantha got to work on her part of the plan immediately, going into the kitchen and putting the oven on. "I'm going to need energy for the trip to London," she reasoned, "and although I just finished a large lunch five minutes ago, I'd better cook some Findus crispy pancakes, just in case..."

Meanwhile, Cecil had left work early, having got permission from his bemused "boss", who of course had no idea who Cecil was. However, on his way down to London, the train was suddenly derailed by a sinister cloaked figure, who abducted Cecil and dragged him up to the top of a perilous mountain in the vicinity of Stevenage. "And now, Cecil," the mysterious stranger intoned, "prepare to meet your nemesis!"

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Cecil. "Uncle Graham!"

"That's right," intoned the stranger, throwing off its cloak. "It is I, your third cousin Brenda, returned to destroy you once and for all as I swore to do seventeen years ago!"

"But you said you'd leave it twenty years before destroying me," whined Cecil.

"I meant seventeen," snapped Brenda ill-temperedly. "It was a slip of the tongue."

"I'm sorry, you did say twenty. I'm free for another three years and there's nothing you can do about it. Now bog off. See you at cousin Steve's wedding next month."

Brenda wandered off, kicking small stones and sheep, and Cecil climbed back down the mountain and headed off towards London again.

Meanwhile, Richard's car was not fifty miles away from Cecil's position and heading in roughly the right direction. "We're making good time," observed Phillip, quite loudly so as to be heard from the roofrack, to which he was fastened with chains (Richard's car had no seatbelts).

"Yep, we're sure to find Cecil before long," said Richard happily. "Oh, blast," he suddenly added, bringing the car to a screeching halt in the middle lane of the M1.

"What's the problem?" Phillip asked.

"I've just realised that an isoscles triangle exhibits reflectional symmetry along one axis, regardless of the size of its internal angles," said Richard, in tones of deep despair.

"Is that such a problem?" Phillip inquired, but Richard was lost in silent contemplation, occasionally muttering to himself that he had wasted his entire adult life, and for what? Phillip freed himself from the roofrack and ran for the safety of the hard shoulder, but was hit by a speeding unicycle-steamroller and sent flying.

By a stroke of luck, he landed on Cecil, who was in the process of hitching a lift down to London. Phillip was rather annoyed to see that the driver who had stopped to give him a ride was in fact Samantha.

"What in the name of Dennis are you doing?" he demanded of her.

"I'm giving Cecil a lift," said Samantha. "Turns out we're both going to see the Prime Minister. Small world, eh?"

"Words fail me," said Phillip, inaccurately, and went on to explain at length what he had told her at lunchtime.

"Oh, that's okay," said Cecil. "I accidentally buried the Amulet of Dennis again five minutes after I phoned you, and then couldn't find it. I was just going to see the Prime Minister to ask him whether I'm actually an archaeologist. I just have a feeling that I might not be."

Torvill and Zoom

I think we should all give a nice round of applause to Boris Konrad for producing the above image. You know, sometimes I worry about the sanity of my friends, but then they go and prove that I've got nothing to worry about by producing a very impressive composite photo of my head on Christopher Dean's body, without me even asking them to.

Back in the real world, have you seen "Desperados"? It's a rather brilliant drama series on children's BBC, about a wheelchair basketball team. I've seen the last three episodes of the series over the last couple of days, and I was enthralled. I've sometimes considered taking up some kind of wheelchair sports - I can't do the non-wheelchair kind on account of my dodgy knees, but the more I get towards middle aged fat-and-laziness, the more I feel like some kind of regular, competitive exercise would be a good thing for me. Although I always find memory competitions physically exhausting, so maybe the solution is just to have more of those in a year...

Figure skating

Yes, figure skating. You and I know that figure skating is the stupidest kind of so-called sport in history, consisting just of people faffing around on ice skates and looking stupid, and that I'm not at all saying that because I'm jealous of people who can skate, look good in sparkly spandex and dance acrobatically on ice. Anyway, I think the rules of figure skating competitions provide an interesting analogy to memory competitions (a real sport, because I'm good at it).

Apparently, in the olden days, 60% of the scores in major figure skating championships came from what they called 'compulsory figures' - skating in such a way as to carve circles, figures of eight and so on into the ice. Judges would examine the figures in afterwards and mark them according to how perfectly circular and evenly-shaped they were. Which was all well and good, but then people outside the figure-skating bubble noticed that spectators weren't at all interested in that bit, which took hours and was mind-numbingly boring, but loved the free skating part. So when it became big and televised, the free skating gradually got a higher proportion of the marks, until the compulsory figures were dropped altogether.

So the world ended up with was a sport that looks pretty but has lost most of the claim it used to have to being based on any kind of technical skill, as opposed to looking pretty and waving your arms in time to the music.

And this is a pretty similar kind of situation to the world of 'memory sports' - there are those who want to introduce shorter events, and more telegenic championships like the US, and those who feel that the hour-long marathon number-memorising sessions are the real test of memory, as well as a big part of what makes memory competitions special. There are arguments for and against that I deeply sympathise with, but when it comes down to it, I really don't want to turn into Torvill and Dean. However handsome and athletic and well-dressed as Christopher Dean might be. Not the slightest bit of jealousy here.

Hectic life

It occurred to me today that it's a good job I'm not gainfully employed, or I'd never get any extracurricular memory-related stuff done. Granted, I'm not getting much of it done as it is, but it would be even worse if I had a real job, because it struck me that I'm fully booked for every weekend for the next seven weeks. What worries me particularly is that having established that to be the case, I now find that I can't remember what I'm supposed to be doing on April 28th. Oh well, I'm sure it can't be anything life-threatening. I just checked to see if it's another othello regional, weirdly scheduled for the week prior to Cambridge, only to find out that it's not, but Mansfield is on May 19th, so that's eight consecutive weekends. I don't know, I thought I was the unsociable type.

For the record (and in case I forget again), it's Vicky's party next Saturday, the Nottingham comic fair the Saturday after that (combined with my grandma's birthday on the Friday and possibly going to see Notts County v Boston Utd if I can fit that into the schedule too), then the Ashford regional (maybe I'll go down there on the Friday, seeing as I've had trouble in the past with getting up early enough to get all the way to Kent in the morning, possibly even hang out in London on the Saturday night and see a show, like some wealthy socialite), my mum's wedding on April 21st (if I forget that one she'll write me into her will just so she can write me out again), some mystery event on the 28th (really ringing mental bells there, but I can't think why the heck it would), the Cambridge MSO with all its attendant othello and memory hoopla, the Bristol comic expo (haven't booked a hotel yet for any of these things, and I really must get round to it - Bristol keep adding really great names to the guest list), then Mansfield. If I had a job, I'd be stark raving mad by the end of it.

True confessions

I bought two medium-sized easter eggs at the supermarket the other day, because they were cheap, and I've eaten one a night for the last two days.

Film And Cult Television

The real highlight of my extremely brief university career was the FACT club. We met once a week and watched Star Trek and things. I've been in a trekkie kind of mood lately, having stumbled across "Memory Alpha", the Star Trek wiki while wandering around the internet. It's always nice to know I'm not the only person who feels that the world really needs an authoritative analysis of every appearance of the ever-present but untalkative Lieutenant Leslie in the original series.

I'm going to have to stop doing these links to whatever website I've been reading. This blog is becoming full of them. It should be full of talk about how great I am, and I'll make sure it is in future.

Meanwhile, I've also lately been watching my way through the "future" series of the Transformers cartoon. It's set in 2006, but that was the future when it was made. It's something I've always had a great affection for - the artwork is generally terrible, and the plots are normally more simplistic than the older episodes, but there's something really compelling about the ongoing storylines and characters that makes it all worthwhile. We didn't just watch it for the glimpse of toys we posessed or wanted to posess, it was exciting space adventures of the kind that you just don't see much of nowadays. Poor youngsters today don't know what they're missing, those who watch Ben 10 excepted.

Cookies!

Why doesn't new Blogger remember my login details, even when I tell it to? I think I'm much too busy and important to be expected to type my username and password in every night. I've a good mind to refuse to write anything tonight, in protest.

Actually, I've a good mind not to write anything because I'm trying to play in an othello tournament on Kurnik, watch Match of the Day and type this, all at the same time, AND when I'm finished with that and finally go to bed, it's British Summer Time, so I have to lose another hour to the government. Sometimes there literally aren't enough hours in the day.

Judge For A Day

I've just devoted part of my evening to reading the judgement in this legal case, which Paul O'Brien linked to. It's fascinating on multiple levels for me - I find the basic facts of the case hilarious (a work of modern art was supposed to be being stored by the defendants, but in fact they seemingly mistook it for rubbish created by building work, and threw it away), as a businessman (it's a side of me I do my best to conceal and suppress, but it's still in there) I'm horrified that the company didn't make sure to include their terms and conditions in correspondence with their clients (you ALWAYS do that, in case something like this does happen!), and generally speaking, I'm always intrigued and enthralled by the obscure workings of the legal process. I had to do an exam in business and company law for my accountancy qualifications, and even though it involved a lot of writing rather than number-crunching, and a lot of questions where there isn't a single right answer (something I hate more than anything else in the universe, except kiwi fruit), I enjoyed it a lot.

In fact, I rather think I'd like to be a judge, or as a second choice a lawyer. I appreciate that a lot of it would be boring and routine, and another lot of it would involve extremely unpleasant delving into the motives and reasoning of unpleasant people, but I think it would be worth it for the occasions when you get to hear two opposing art experts arguing as to the value of Hole and Vessel II. Plus you get all the fun of pedantically observing the rule of law and/or interpreting it in ways that nobody, least of all the people who wrote the laws in the first place, has ever considered before. And then you get the fact that everyone looks up to you and thinks you're clever, which is always a bonus in any job. I'd go and look up how to be a judge now, but it's late, and you probably had to go to public school anyway.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to work out how to get better at hour cards. I did a practice today, attempting 30 packs and getting 27 right, exactly like at the WMC last year. But I have great difficulty getting beyond that level, and it's frustrating. I hate plateaus. Or is it plateaux? I don't like the things, anyway. If I attempt more packs, I get fewer of them correct, and it's been like that for a couple of years now. With everything else, I'm still gradually improving my best results (very, very slowly), but here I'm stuck.

Miscellany

I've bid on a tape of The Tale of the Bunny Picnic on eBay, even though it's a fiver, which is a ludicrous price to ask for something like that, because I was gripped by a sudden urge to hear the big song at the end again. I've been sort of humming it to myself for the last twenty years or so, and today I looked up the words and had trouble fitting them with the tune as I remember it, so now I need to hear it again to make sure I know what it goes like. And it seems it's the only piece of film in the world that isn't on YouTube.

Boston Utd beat Mansfield Town last weekend to drag themselves out of the relegation zone. It made me wonder why I never go to Mansfield, when it's only down the road. Still, there's an othello regional there this year, so I'll have a good opportunity to find out what's so bad about the place.

There's a new strip in the Dandy called Space Raoul, by Jamie Smart who did My Own Genie, and it's brilliant.

The interview this morning was surprisingly fun. It was very apropos-of-nothing, because they didn't bother with the general talk about forgetfulness that they were sort of planning beforehand, and just dropped a chat with me into the middle of the breakfast show. And it was a completely pointless kind of chat, too - I made them laugh by recounting the pi record story and reciting a hundred or so digits just to prove I could do it, and only spent a few seconds on the remembering names bit that I was expecting to do. I'll have to see if I can get some more media exposure like that.

I'm not sure whether to watch "The Yellow House" with John Simm as van Gogh, or just switch off the television set and go out and do something less boring instead. I will confess that I just don't get van Gogh's art. I don't honestly think it's all that good. I do like John Simm, but somehow I feel like my opinion of the work of the historical character he's playing is more important for my enjoyment of an ITV drama.

I'm a writer, you know

I've actually been properly working on the book today. I've set myself a deadline - I'm going to have it done in a nice, tidy, complete draft form to show people (whether they want me to or not) at the Cambridge championship on May 6th. Then I'm going to get a proper job again and be respectable, in return for which my grandma will refrain from hitting me over the head with her walking stick.

As well as the book, there's plenty of preparation work still to be done for Cambridge, so I'm going to be kept busy. But this is a good thing. There's no place in this world of memory experts for loafers.

The never-ending media circus

I've got an interview on Radio Lancashire on Thursday morning, in case I have any Lancastrian bloglings who might want to tune in to the breakfast show. I don't know when exactly, it was going to be 7:55 tomorrow, but they've postponed the bit about forgetting names and anniversaries by a day. I'd be interested to know what fascinating subject has bumped me.

Of course, they're under the impression that I might have some words of wisdom to impart on the subject of remembering names. Anyone who knows me knows otherwise, but I didn't have time to point this out - having asked the Alzheimer's Society people for my contact details (a new way to find me that I haven't encountered before), the conversation went "You'll do it? Great, I'll call you five minutes before we go on air. Bye." Still, it's not going to be an in-depth searing exposé, judging by the five-minutes-before-the-news timeslot. It'll go:

Tony Livesey: So, Ben Pride-more, you're the world's number one memory man, do you have any advice on how we can remember those important wedding anniversaries?

Me: Gor, I dunno.

Tony Livesey: Great! And now it's Hercule Poirot with the news.

I'm actually annoyed with my memory today. I woke up singing a song I'd been dreaming about (it was a strange alternative title sequence to Tiny Toon Adventures), but at some point in the morning I totally forgot the tune, although I can still remember the words. It's frustrating - I think it was an original tune, at least that's the impression I had this morning when I could remember it, but now it's disappeared from my brain the sceptical part is saying "oh, it will just have been one of those Japanese songs you were listening to yesterday, you can't compose music." This is the second time I can remember writing about something like this happening in my blog. Next time I dream a song, I'll grab a tape recorder when I wake up and sing into it. I don't own a tape recorder, so there'll be a certain amount of running down the street in my pyjamas and then hanging around outside... a shop that sells tape recorders, which come to think of it probably don't exist any more. It's all MP3s and DVDs these days. Modern life is rubbish.

Wait a minute. I do own a tape recorder. It's sitting there on top of my telly in plain sight. I haven't used it since I was practising reciting pi in 2005, but for pete's sake. What's wrong with my memory today?

Blame it on the weatherman

It's cold and intermittently haily around here today, and I've achieved very little in the way of work. I've been contemplating getting a real job again and giving up on this life of freedom sooner rather than later, but then I've also been contemplating joining a gym and not being so fat, and I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen. Still, if I don't improve my work rate, I'll feel like I'm wasting my life.

I have been having some fun wasting my life today, though - I've been watching Japanese things on YouTube (as an alternative to working on the textbook because I've got to a hard bit), and this is the kind of thing we should have been entering in the Eurovision Song Contest. It's such a catchy tune that you're dancing and singing along to it as soon as it starts, and it doesn't matter at all if you don't understand the words. I certainly don't, so I apologise if you do and it contains explicit sexual references or a savage denunciation of western society - I'm assuming based on the wonderful cartoon that accompanies it that it doesn't, but you never know.

The beat of the drum goes round and around

Yes, I'm writing about TV two nights in a row. Sorry. But tonight on BBC4 it's "Tube Night", four solid hours of programmes about the London Underground. The theme nights these people come up with never cease to amaze me. It's just started with a 1958 film about the night shift who work on the Tube after it's shut down, and a bit later on there's episode 1 of the Doctor Who story "The Web of Fear", which I've never seen (the BBC saw fit to destroy all the other episodes, so watching it is likely to be a little unsatisfying, but never mind).

I think that when "Moonwalking With Einstein" is a big hit, there needs to be a Memory Night spectacular to tie in with it. Or possibly a whole Memory Week - we need documentaries about famous world championships and champions, repeats of Dominic O'Brien on Friends Like These and Ant and Dec, Andi Bell when he was on Transworld Sport that time, me on The Weakest Link... come to think of it, there's more than enough footage there to do a really great theme night, without even having to dip into foreign TV shows! I'd still like to do a US-championship-style thing in Britain, maybe that can be the centrepiece of the week's themed entertainment?

Day of rockening

Well, we're not going to win the Eurovision Song Contest again this year. After Lordi's win last year, you just know gimmicky costumes are going to feature in every performance this time round, so the great British public have selected "Flying the Flag" by Scooch, who dress up as flight attendants and can't sing. Admittedly all of the songs to choose from this year were terrible, but this one was particularly so. Terry Wogan and Fearne Cotton also made a mess of announcing the winner (they tried to do a gag where they each said a different name, but of course Terry bellows so loudly that nobody could hear Fearne saying anything), and it all ended in confusion. But still, John Barrowman was on it so the experience wasn't all bad. And yes, I could have spent the evening doing something other than watching this rubbish, but Eurovision just appeals to me. If I confess that another of my unfulfilled dreams is to win the Eurovision Song Contest, would you just laugh at me?

I also went to Nottingham today, and I must say the newly-unveiled market square looks fantastic! I've got so used to the whole area being boarded off and hidden away while noises of construction emerged every now and then, I'd forgotten it wasn't meant to look like that. There are squirting fountains and everything. The layout is brilliantly designed and original, and I think it's fantastic. When I'm a zillionaire I'll get the same person to design my back garden.

What I need is some kind of telepathic typewriter

I seem to have a great talent for writing, but only when it comes to composing bits of the book/website/exciting superhero comic in my head at any time when I'm not sitting at my computer and typing. When it actually comes to writing it down, it doesn't work anywhere near as well. I should make some kind of resolution to sit down and transcribe what I'm thinking about as soon as I think of it, because I have a habit of sitting down and mentally composing huge long essays without bothering to write anything. I sometimes suspect I'm not a natural writer. Natural writers are the ones who write.

Not pretending any more

This is the real post for tonight, seeing as the one this afternoon was just pretend. But I haven't really got anything to say, seeing as I spent most of the day either waiting for a plumber or waiting for a TV crew. And I've already pretended to blog about the filming, and the plumber adventure really isn't exciting enough to merit a blog post to itself.

Tomorrow, though, I'm sure I'll manage to do something worth writing about.

Pretending to do my blog

I've got the TV people here, and the guy thinks it would be good to start with them pretending to interrupt me typing my blog. So while they wait outside, I'm sitting here pretending to type. Well, not pretending as such. I'm actually typing. I'm honest, you see, unlike television producers and their cinematic fakery. I suppose I'm going to pretend to say hello to them as if I'm meeting them for the first time when they come in, but that's the limit to the deception I'm prepared to perpetrate here. The whole thing is going to be a triumph of cinematic verity. Although I might not post this, which would make it a fake/pretend blog post of some kind, because the camera's pointing at me now and it's making me all nervous and I keep spelling things wrong, which just makes me look bad. Also, this whole thing is kind of incoherent, and when the guy came in I said "hello, I'm pretending to write my blog", which I thought would be funny at the time but actually came out sounding really stupid. Why did I agree to do this again? I should probably stop with the stream of consciousness stuff before I end up typing something really embarrassing.

The above paragraph is a shining example of why I don't write my blog when there's someone else in the house. Still, if this thing does get made and shown on Current TV, and you see me typing on my laptop, that's what I was typing. The inside story, brought to you by Zoomy.

Blue CHEATer, more like

I watched Blue Peter today, because I'd heard they were going to apologise for the slight mix-up in a competition last year when they awarded the prize to a passing child in the studio rather than anyone who'd phoned in. It turns out that the show is exactly the same as it was when I used to watch it regularly however many years ago that was, which is rather comforting. Well, except for all the modern technology, and come to think of it they didn't make anything today, which is a bit disappointing.

They did have the results of another competition, to design a new Bash Street Kid, and I couldn't help notice that one of the winners was a girl with a split personality called Rose and Thorn - you know, like the old DC comics character with a split personality, Rose and Thorn. Frankly this doesn't restore my confidence in the fairness of Blue Peter competitions. But then, I'm just jealous because I always wanted a Blue Peter badge and I never got one. I never entered a competition or wrote in to them, but I wanted a badge anyway. They could have just sent me one to be nice.

I've got the Current TV people coming to film me tomorrow. I watched a bit of Current TV yesterday to see what it was like, having read about it. I'm not terribly impressed. But still, you all have to tune into it now in the hope of catching a five-minute chat with me.

I'm currently wondering whether to risk destroying my laptop in order to listen to an old CD. It's a cheap one that I haven't listened to for years, vaguely remembering that it was broken, but I took it out and tried to play it tonight and it turns out it still sort of works - it plays okay but makes rattling, grinding noises and periodically stops, freezing up my computer in the process. But I can't remember what one of the tracks goes like, so I won't be able to sleep tonight unless I play it. I'll risk it, after I post this.

St James Infirmary Blues

Check out this fantastic post on Dennis Hyer's blog! He's pieced together the sensational backgrounds from the Betty Boop cartoon "Snow White", and that's quite a feat since Koko is dancing in front of them in the cartoon itself (also check out Dennis's previous post for a clip of the song from the toon - it's an unmissable Cab Calloway performance).

I've probably said it before, and I'll certainly say it again, but in the early 1930s (if not in the whole of cartoon history) the best cartoons in the world, by a long, long margin, were the ones produced by the Max Fleischer studio. They are insane, surreal, clever and absoluely hilarious, and it's really quite criminal that they're not better known these days than they are. "Snow White" is a fine example of all the best points - like a lot of these cartoons it starts off with a story, a fairly straight telling of the fairy tale (years before Disney's, I would remind you), but then lurches into the song and dance routine, and finishes with the Queen turning into a monster and chasing our heroes, who defeat it in short order (Bimbo pulls on its tongue and turns it inside-out) and then dance in a circle to celebrate. The seven dwarfs have vanished by this point, forgotten in the way that the setup plots in Betty Boop cartoons usually are.

There are so many great moments in Snow White - I just love Betty dressed in her cold-weather outfit (her usual skimpy dress, plus a tiny woolly hat perched on top of her head), the animation is fluid, detailed and looks wonderful, and the musical number (one of three Cab Calloway Betty cartoons, and they're all timeless classics) accompanied by those amazing backdrops is maybe the most visually arresting sequence the Fleischers ever did.

It's often said that if not for the Hays code, which came into effect in 1934 and severely limited what you could put on screen, Betty Boop and Max Fleischer would have gone on to be as big as Walt Disney and his gang. They certainly deserved to. But Betty (being basically a personification of sex) had to be drastically toned down under the new rules, and people forgot how great she had once been, watching her awful late-thirties cartoons where she dresses in modest outfits and points at series of weak visual puns. It's a crying shame, it really is.

Bimbo and Koko are the ones I feel sorry for - at least people still remember Betty Boop today, thanks to the revival of her merchandise in the last few decades. Her sidekicks, scrapped in the mid-thirties because they weren't allowed to have characters openly lust after the heroine any more, have disappeared into cartoon limbo, the poor things.

Ooh, I could crush a grape!

I'm really annoyed with myself. Memorising binary digits this morning, everything was going fine until well into the recall, when I realised I'd used a wrong journey by mistake, and hadn't even noticed. My journeys are in a fixed sequence (a completely arbitrary one based on the order I wrote them down on a piece of paper a couple of years ago, but a fixed sequence nevertheless) and I always use them in the same order. But today I realised I'd skipped to an entirely wrong one (the Queensgate centre in Peterborough) somehow, and then gone back to the normal sequence after it.

Very strange. But it doesn't matter, of course, as long as I remember where in the sequence I put this rogue journey (I used six-and-a-bit journeys in total). And that wouldn't be a problem, because I was doing that thing where I link the last image in each journey with the first of the next. It's a sort of double-check failsafe thing. So I concluded that I'd done Queensgate after Meadowhall, and wrote it all down. Something still didn't feel right, but I knew it had to be that way round. When I came to check my answers, it turned out I'd got the sequence wrong - I'd blanked on the last image of the Burton journey, and that same image was one of the final group of images in Meadowhall too, so I'd got them mixed up. I actually did Burton-Queensgate-Meadowhall. So I'd written two whole journeys - 52 rows of 1s and 0s, 1560 digits - in the wrong places.

I hope that makes some kind of sense. I have great difficulty describing the inner workings of my brain. The simplified version is that I made a really major fundamental mistake that I didn't even think it was possible for me to make. The most irritating part is that my recall was excellent - even without those two journeys I ended up with a score of 2830. With those extra rows in the right places, I would have scored a bit over 4000. I can take comfort in the fact that it was caused by an unlikely combination of circumstances - the wrong journey (which I've never done before) and the annoying duplication of one image in just the wrong places (which is statistically unlikely) - so I'm not likely to do the same thing again at a competition. But it's still infuriating!

The recurring image, incidentally, was Skeeter from Muppet Babies. I think this is some kind of karmic retribution for not going to see Howie Mandel in Las Vegas.

Still, I shouldn't complain. I also got 79 in abstract images, which is a timely reminder that I really need to work on that some more, and a more than acceptable 1920 in hour numbers. And got it all done with plenty of time to spare for sitting around watching TV! It's great having no social or professional life.

Willy!

The champion of Crufts 2007 is a dog called Araki Fabulous Willy. Seriously. What kind of person calls a dog 'Fabulous Willy'? It gives the poor thing a lot to live up to in life. Still, congratulations to it. Similarly, congratulations to David Thomas, who did win the US Memory Championship yesterday. Now if his parents had decided to call him John I could have had a really rude joke there, couldn't I?

Anyway, I haven't spent the whole day giggling at words that stopped amusing most people around the age of seven - I've decided to spend the next three days doing a full world memory championship's worth of practice events, all ten disciplines, even the ones I don't like. So I've been getting memorising and recall papers ready for that. This is going to take up a heck of a lot of time, and I'm not entirely sure whether it's feasible - at memory competitions you have someone else to mark your papers and work out your scores for you, and you very seldom have to cook your own meals in between events, but I think it'll be fun.

Then on Thursday I've got the latest TV person coming to film a typical day of mine, so I'm going to have to think of something to do. A genuinely typical day for me wouldn't really be worth filming, after all. I'll do exciting and telegenic things and pretend I'm like that all the time.

Let's hear it for me!

Yippee skippee! I won! Well, not won as such, but I came second, and that's considered in modern fashionable circles to be even better than winning. Seven of us at the Oadby Regional, which is a nice number for a seven-round tournament because you can do all-play-all. Eight is even better, obviously, because then you can do all-play-all without someone having a bye each round, but I shouldn't complain. I got off to a flying start, in fact, beating Steve, Roy and Geoff to be in the lead at lunch, then lost not too horribly to Jeremy and Phil before rounding the day off with a win over David... hang on, I can get this right... Beck. There were a lot of close games and interesting results all round, it was a superb advertisement for the game. Although the only people who would have seen this advertisement would be the seven players and the occasional elderly churchgoer who wandered in during the competition (which took place in the lobby of the Baptist church).

Phil won, with 5½ wins, me second with 5, then Steve on 4½, David on 4 and the others on other scores that I can't remember. I don't know why I'm quoting the full results like this when I can't even be certain that I'm right about them - look them up on the yahoo group when somebody who thought to write them down gets home and posts them, if you're that interested. The important thing is that those wins over David and Geoff will give my rating a boost - it's been in freefall for ages, so maybe this is a good omen for the 2007 season. I might even start to entertain thoughts of having a chance at the British Grand Prix title, although that would just be silly - I might occasionally get a good result like today, through luck rather than skill, but I'm fairly certain I can't do it at all five regionals. Still, I'm happy. I've never won one before, and I've only finished second a couple of times - I'm trying to decide whether this second place (by a mere half a point) is cooler than that time in London when I beat everyone except Graham (who's so much better than me that it hardly counts as a loss when I inevitably lose to him). I think I'll arbitrarily say that it is, so that I'll feel good about myself.

At the train station on the way home, I saw a notice appealing for information about an incident on a train recently. What kind of incident, I don't know, because all the notice said was that there was "an incident involving a white male" and that "the male at one point was spoken to by a member of staff". Passengers who might have been on the train are asked to come forward if they noticed "unusual behaviour from a male between Leicester and Kettering". Is that really all the detail they can give us here? I mean, trains from Leicester to London are generally packed full of white males, and most of them are spoken to by train staff at some point, unless it's one of those trains where nobody bothers to check the tickets. Clearly the incident was so memorable that people who witnessed it will understand what the poster meant, and such a transgression of the boundaries of British decency that they couldn't bring themselves to describe it, but that's hardly fair on the members of the public who weren't on the train and are now trying to imagine exactly what might have happened, based on this minimal information.

You've come a long way, baby

Oadby (near Leicester) tomorrow, for the first othello regional of the year. Also traditionally the regional I can't go to because I'm doing something else exciting, but this year there doesn't seem to be any reason for me not to go there. I'm not sure if I should be happy about that or disappointed. Technically I could be in New York again for the US Memory Championship, but I've done rather too much frivolous world travelling this month as it is, and since they're still not allowing foreigners to take part I couldn't justify the trip as practice for the WMC.

Oadby is almost certainly the shortest distance I've ever had to travel for a mind-sports-related event. The World Memory Championship this year, depending on how far away Bahrain is in relation to Malaysia or Brazil or the USA (I need to get better at geography, I know) is going to be one of the longest. Assuming it happens, of course - this time last year we were assured it would be Malaysia again. But there have already been complaints from a lot of the European memory guys, who are probably going to have to pay their own way over there or miss out. Unless the organisers have such an amazing amount of money that they'll pay for everyone's tickets, but I can't see that happening somehow.

Of course, the WMC that I still rate as the best ever, Kuala Lumpur in 2003, was squillions of miles away from all the world's best at the time, and they all competed anyway, and a fantastic event it was too. So who knows, maybe this one will be the same.

I probably should also make a prediction for the US memory championship while I'm here - Josh Foer isn't going to defend his title, and Maurice Stoll also doesn't seem to be on the list of registered competitors. But David Thomas, who apparently lives over there now or at least can claim citizenship, is, and assuming he's kept more or less in practice since he last competed anywhere, he should be in with a good chance. I kind of hope he doesn't win it, though - I'd rather see the title go to someone who doesn't describe themself as "the world's leading authority on memory skills" with a straight face.

Shooting Pridmore

That's not the title of next year's hit movie, but a document that a TV guy has sent me detailing the way they want to film me. It sounds like fun - for some new channel that nobody's heard of, they're doing little five-minute interviews with interesting people. There's also someone else who wants to do an 'art project' about the Cambridge championship, which sounds like it'll be a bit different. And on top of that, I'm finally at liberty to say that the world memory championship is going to be in Bahrain this year (unless it changes again at short notice). I'd say more on the subject, but I'm still unwell after yesterday's excesses.

Drunken stupor

Vague memory of handing over all the money in my pocket to homeless man (whom my brother assures me is close personal friend) while lying on the pavement near Nottingham station. Subsequently taken to bar called "Prohibition" for more alcohol. Note to self: don't accept invitation to lunch with brother without expecting it to turn into all-day boozing. Really, really going to regret this tomorrow.

Book Revue

Another good thing about long plane journeys is that they give me a chance to catch up with my reading. I like to get a new book or two to read whenever I go somewhere far away. This time round, I was planning to get "Lisey's Story" by Stephen King, but while wandering around the bookshop I noticed "Making History" by Stephen Fry, which I'd somehow never heard of before although it was published ten years ago, so I decided to get that instead by way of apology. When I got to the second chapter and realised it was going to be about killing Hitler as a baby I started to regret my choice - could there be a more overused plot for a time-travel book? Heck, I wrote (or at least started to write) one myself as a teenager. My annoyance with the unoriginal concept lasted until about half way through, when they'd almost got round to actually changing history and I realised that rather than reading it as a novel I was just waiting for it to detail how the act had changed the world. I clicked a few mental cogs into different positions and started paying attention to the characters, and realised that it's actually a really great book. It's funny and clever and very readable, and I'd certainly recommend it to anyone. The basic changing-history bit was pretty similar to mine, too, and while I wouldn't have created a protagonist with the nickname "Puppy" in 1993 it's very much the kind of thing I'd do if I was writing that story now - I suspect that Stephen Fry is also a time traveller and has stolen some yet-unwritten masterpiece of mine. But then, I think that about all good books.

For the journey home I was again going to buy "Lisey's Story", but the airport bookshop only had it in a hardback edition so big I would have had a hard time fitting it through the door of the plane, let alone fitting it in my overstuffed rucksack. So I decided to go for "The Gunslinger", because I've always sort of meant to read the Dark Tower books, and it's only the fact that I don't really like early King as a rule that's stopped me before. But this is the 2003 revision of the original from 1970 or whenever, so I decided to give it a try. But for some reason I still couldn't get into it. I'll try it again another time, but in Minneapolis I decided to get something else, and ended up with "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" by Alexander McCall Smith. This is another series of books I've been meaning to read for ages, and this one has completely hooked me. It chronicles the exploits of Mma Ramotswe, the only lady private detective in Botswana (so no complaints about an unoriginal premise here), and the wide range of unusual cases she has to deal with, her unique thought processes that lead her to the solutions as well as a variety of conclusions about morality and the meaning of life. It's very well written - funny, touching, compelling, dramatic, clever, really everything you could want from a book. I've read the second volume since getting home, and I've just bought "Morality For Beautiful Girls" today.

I know I could be more profitably spending my time writing books rather than reading them, but I really am sort of getting somewhere with "How To Be Clever" too. Honest.

Skeeters, vocation, fell

When you've only got a limited amount of time and money to spend in Las Vegas, you have to carefully choose which shows to go and see. So when I got to my room, the first thing I did was to check the previous week's entertainment guide considerately provided by the hotel (on Thursday they replaced it with the following edition, which by then was also out of date), and a look at the cover made me think "Ooh, Howie Mandel's in town! I'll have to go and see that!" Then it occurred to me that I only know Howie Mandel as a voice actor in Muppet Babies, and not even a very good one at that - he left after the first series, and his roles were taken over by much better actors (Skeeter by the great Frank Welker, Animal and Bunsen by Dave Coulier). I'd come across references to him here and there over the years, enough to gather that cartoon voice acting isn't his real vocation (he fell in my estimation when I realised that, obviously - if I got the chance to voice a cartoon, I'd forget any other career you might care to offer me) and that he's mainly a comedian of some kind. But I don't think I'd seen a picture of him before, and I'd certainly never heard his name spoken out loud - I found out when I saw an advert that it's Man-DELL, not rhymes-with-handle like I thought.

So I didn't go to see him. Maybe next time. I gather that Dave Coulier's also mainly a comedian, incidentally, but if he'd been on in Vegas I would certainly have checked him out. His voice acting in Muppet Babies was wonderful.

How I wish that there were more than the 24 hours in the day

Back home again, to find that Sky have removed all their channels from NTL (or Virgin Media as it now is), and that Blogger have forced me to update to the new version, which is displaying what I'm typing in a slightly larger font. I hate change. Neither of these is particularly world-destroying, though - I didn't have Sky Sports in the first place, and I'm pretty sure nobody in the universe has ever watched Sky News, so it's really just the Simpsons and Futurama on Sky One that I'm going to be missing out on. And I've seen them all a hundred times already, so I can live without them.

Anyway, Viva Las Vegas indeed! There's a place that hasn't changed much since last I was there - there are always new hotels and casinos being built, of course, and while I was there the Barbary Coast closed down and started relaunching itself as Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon, but the general character of the city is one of those constants in life. Getting there is the difficult part, though. I flew into Minneapolis-St Paul without any difficulty (even remembering that Rocky lives in Minneapolis, or possibly somewhere else with a similar name, so I picked a house that looks like hers in a place we flew over that had a 50% chance of being the right city, and gave her a wave, just in case she was watching the plane with a powerful telescope), even though the Twin Cities seem to be under ten feet of snow at the moment, but then ended up staying there for quite some time. The plane was late, and when it arrived and we'd got on, we trundled up to the runway only for the pilot to announce that there was a technical problem with some piece of equipment that he assured us was essential, so we had to go back to the gate and have someone fix it.

So when I eventually got into Las Vegas, all tired and grumpy (you don't want to be around me when I'm up past my bedtime) having been up since half past eleven the night before, local time, it was very late at night, and I went straight to bed without even squandering a bit of money in the casino first. That seemed to crack any serious jetlag problem, though - I got up at about half past five every morning, which is fine in Vegas because everywhere's always open and the major shows are all finished by nine.

The Gold Coast hotel, as I might have mentioned before, is my absolute favourite Las Vegas hangout. It's off the Strip, but walkable in fifteen minutes or so. Not that you would want to walk, because there's a free shuttle service every ten minutes or so. There are also very big and comfortable rooms, a very nice buffet restaurant and single/double-deck blackjack. I didn't actually play much blackjack this time round, because I was enticed by "Ultimate Texas Hold'em", a new innovation which is basically hold'em poker played on a blackjack kind of table against the dealer, with a fabulously complex system of bets and wins. This game being based almost entirely on luck rather than skill I didn't have much opportunity to use my amazing memory techniques, but I refrained from losing quite all the money I'll ever have on it, so I don't mind.

I also had time to check out the many things that make Las Vegas so cool - the white tigers, the Venetian canals with singing gondoliers, the dancing fountains and the hourly artificial rain storm in the Desert Passage. On Wednesday morning, though, people homesick for British weather could just stick their heads outside, because it snowed. I'm fairly certain it's not meant to snow in Las Vegas, but it did. I also saw Dirk Arthur's Xtreme Magic Show, which is basically Siegfried and Roy's old routine but not as spectacular. Still a lot of fun, though. And the Blue Man Group, which defies description, and the Cirque Du Soleil's Beatles-themed extravaganza, Love, which is just sensational.

It's an hour and a half of dancing, acrobatics, slapstick, rollerblading, trampolining and everything else you expect from the Cirque, all choreographed perfectly to Beatles music and themed around the lives and times of the Fab Four. You have to see it to believe it, really, it leaves you breathless. Next time I'll need to take another Beatles fan along with me, to join in with me singing along to all the songs before and during the performance. In the usual Cirque style, the clowns were wandering around the audience before the show and one of them stuck a little plastic star to my forehead. When I got back to my hotel room, I stuck it on the mirror, up in the top corner, and hopefully it's still there now.

The new-look Blogger template has a box where you can enter labels for your post, "e.g. scooters, vacation, fall". Scooters? Actually, I can mention scooters here - one morning on the shuttle bus I noticed that the people in front of me were talking in broad Midlands accents, so I said hello and we got talking. They were from Mansfield and Lincoln, and were in Vegas for some kind of scooter convention. I'm not sure why anyone would go to Las Vegas just to look at Lambrettas, but it seems that people do. At least it's a good excuse for a vacation there, I suppose. As long as you don't fall off.

Going back was equally frustrating - it seems that planes have a real problem leaving Minneapolis. This time there was a problem with the in-flight entertainment system that had to be fixed before we could take off, following which the plane had to be de-iced. So when I finally got into London on Saturday morning, even tireder and grumpier, I decided not to incur the annoyance of travelling across London and getting the train back up to Derby (there was a real chance of me punching somebody for looking at me in a funny way) and spent the night in a hotel. Eighty quid, but worth it to keep the world a peaceful place. I found fault extensively with the bathroom (the door to the shower was bizarrely designed such that you couldn't get into the shower after opening it unless the bathroom door was open), went to bed and got up this morning (well, midday) feeling fully refreshed and happy again.

Best conversation of the week: Talking with an old American in the lift at the hotel - he asked me what part of Britain I was from, and when I said Derby, he thought about it for a minute and said "Like Derby County? Brian Clough? He's dead!" (this last in strangely jubilant tones). I agreed that he was, and the guy added "He was a good coach." Then the lift got up to my floor before I could enquire further how the heck he'd heard of Brian Clough, let alone been so wronged by him that he was still celebrating his passing. That's like someone in Derby NOT having heard of Brian Clough. Unusual, to say the least.

I'm leaving on a jet plane

Well, tomorrow I am, but I'm already down south in preparation (ever tried booking a flight to Las Vegas from Birmingham? Without going via Amsterdam? Well, I have, and it seems it can't be done). I'll be back on Saturday, and I'm not planning to hook myself up to the internet any more than is completely unavoidable for the next week. So only five or six hours a day, then. I sometimes worry that I suffer from net addiction, but whenever I turn on my computer to look up the symptoms I just get distracted by some other website and forget all about it until I next emerge from the world wide web ten hours or so later.

A conversation, or "Sorry, it's late and I'm in the middle of an othello tournament and I can't be bothered to write a real entry tonight"

Have you ever considered horses, Thatcher?

I'm not sure I really understand the question, Devereaux.

Horses, Thatcher. Have you ever considered them?

Well, if you put it like that, I suppose I haven't.

They have legs, you know, Thatcher. Legs. Four of them, I believe, although I haven't ever counted the things, of course.

Really, Devereaux? I didn't know that.

Ah, well, you're a country boy, aren't you? Not so many horses where you come from. Not like round our way.

Barnsley?

Barnsley, yes, that's right. A lot of horses in Barnsley.

Trees too, I would imagine.

Horses, Thatcher. We're talking about horses, not trees.

I thought perhaps you might have both horses and trees.

Do stop interrupting me, Thatcher. Listen to what I'm saying about horses.

I did in fact wait for you to finish your...

Horses, Thatcher, and their legs. Just bear that in mind.

Bedtime For Sniffles

Last time I went to Las Vegas, two years ago, I got the flu and spent most of the holiday in bed all feverish and delirious. Which was fun, in its own way, but it meant I missed out on a lot of the stuff I was meaning to do while I was there. So I haven't really had a proper Vegas experience since November 2002, which was the last time I decided to give up working and be an unemployed layabout. That time I saw Siegfried and Roy, before Roy's tiger-mauling (which I heard about on the plane back from the WMC in Malaysia a year later), and was completely amazed by it. Yet another of the things I'd love to be is a magician, but I've never really been good at magic tricks. I never had the patience to get the sleight of hand right. It would be good to do a memory/magic show, so maybe I'll force myself to make more of an effort some time.

And so, once again, the day is saved...

Thanks to the ability to memorise long numbers!

From this week's Civil War #7, which was okay if you like that kind of thing. The series as a whole has been very entertaining, although it's been more interested in big fight scenes than exploring the possibilities of the very original storyline. I would have preferred a better artist, too. But it's done its job of establishing a new status quo for the Marvel Universe, and some of the upcoming series spinning off from Civil War look like being fun (Dan Slott writing "Initiative" is sure to be brilliant). Almost makes up for Thunderbolts, Exiles and Runaways losing their writers and becoming in two cases at least (Joss Whedon's Runaways hasn't started yet) absolute rubbish. I'm a bit disillusioned with Marvel comics as a whole at the moment.

But more importantly, it makes me giggle to think that we're supposed to take his recall of a 69-digit number as further proof of the Black Panther's genius. Any old eejit can memorise 69 digits with a bit of practice! Really, boasting about something like that just shows what an insecure person he is (although you could maybe have guessed he's a bit strange by the way he wears a mask with little cat-ears on top).

Anyway, I've had enough of rain and not writing books. I've decided to have a holiday in Las Vegas after all. I really do think the change of scene will help me churn out a bit of writing, and I want to see that Cirque show with Beatles music.

I remember

I came tantalisingly close to a perfect 200 in spoken numbers today - just two digits wrong, and both of those were memorised wrongly (ie the digit was 0 and I memorised the image involving a 1 instead) rather than recalled wrongly. Of course, the first mistake was on the 35th digit, meaning a score of 34, which is rubbish, but this is still a good result for me, because it's the first time I've attempted 200 and got the recall spot-on without any problems. Now I just have to sort out this problem of memorising mistakes, which I think is caused more than anything by anticipation - I hear the first couple of digits in a group of three and I'm already thinking of a three-digit group that makes an image that fits in nicely with the story I'm creating. I need to make sure I listen to all three digits rather than making them up as I go along. But I'm definitely hopeful of getting a good score in the spoken numbers at the WMC this year. Of course, this probably just means it'll all go wrong for me in another event...

As mentioned previously, though, while the memory training is going fine, the book-writing and stuff really isn't. I'm having great difficulty sitting down to do it. I need some kind of slavedriver to stand over me with a whip.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

I've just been watching Man Utd playing Lille, a bad-tempered kind of match in which the Lille players threatened to walk off the pitch after a couple of very dubious refereeing decisions went against them. I think there's a part of me, my inner hooligan if you will, that always really wants trouble like this to flare up at sporting occasions - it really is exciting to watch an unexpected mass brawl break out in the middle of gentlemanly athletic pursuits. At moments like this I almost understand why people like ice hockey.

This is the 'round of 16' of the Champions League, and I have issues with that name. First off, it's not a league when it gets down to the knockout stages. A league is when each team plays all the others. And secondly, what's a round of 16 when it's at home? We've got by in football competitions for decades just by calling them 'first round' or whatever until it gets to the quarter-finals. It's just silly.

I must apologise for the preceding paragraph. It's psychological - after admitting to wild bloodlust, I find myself reverting to pedantic nerdiness. And then I feel the need to apologise for that. And I could go on saying things and then saying that I've said them all night, but Life On Mars is on.

Puckles the Cuckold

Well, this is the funniest thing I've ever seen - Knife & Wife! It was written by Paul "Mr Biffo" Rose, and the version of it that did appear on TV in 2001 completely passed me by somehow. It also seems to be the only television programme ever made that not even a snippet of is to be found on YouTube. I don't suppose anyone taped it?

I know I sort of promised to write about the weekend's othello activities, and I do have a lengthy and entertaining essay about it written in my head, but because I composed it on the way home yesterday, it feels like I've already written it, and I lack the motivation to rehash it. Maybe I'll do it another time, when I can't think of anything better to say. Meanwhile, I'll talk about what's on telly instead. "Heroes" starts tonight on the Sci-Fi channel. I've heard good things from American superhero-likers, and apparently it was a hit over there with normal people, too. Which makes it strange that the Sci-Fi channel have got first dibs on it, because that means that real channels like Sky and the BBC didn't want to spend money on it. Still, they spend money on all kinds of rubbish, so I'm not sure what that proves.

Also, Channel 4 are showing Studio Ghibli films every morning this week (except Wednesday, when for some reason they're showing The Brave Little Toaster), although I didn't notice that until Kiki's Delivery Service had finished today. Still, yay!

Young people today, I don't know

The British othello scene has been overrun lately by trendy young people who are better at the game than me. It's quite disturbing - I don't mind losing to old people like most British othello regulars (how's that for an off-hand comment guaranteed to offend no end of people?), they've been playing since the dark ages and have the wisdom that comes with their advanced years. Some of them are over forty, you know. But when I'm being comprehensively thrashed on a regular basis by youthful-looking twenty-somethings who can wear one of those hooded sweaters and get away with it and started playing the game more recently than I did, it makes me think I should start learning how to play properly. It's embarrassing being so bad and so old.

What's even more psychologically disturbing about this horde of new young players is that they're both called David, and I always get confused by their surnames. There's a story behind this, as there is with all of my weirdnesses. You see, as many of my friends know all too well, I automatically file people away in my brain by the name with which they were introduced to me. If for any reason they change their name thereafter, or if they were using a nickname or alias when I first encountered them, I find it impossible to remember to call them by their preferred monicker. Except for Kitty, who seems to have become fixed in my mind as such, even though he was SA when I first met him and seems to be mainly SumerianHaze these days, but that's another story.

So the thing with the Davids started at the nationals last year - I'd heard in advance that a player called David Beck, whom I'd never met, was going to be there, so when a newcomer introduced himself to me as David, I naturally assumed that was him. As it transpired, David Beck wasn't there after all, and this other guy was David Hand. But I didn't realise this for about an hour, and the mental damage was done. So now whenever I see David Hand, my brain automatically calls him David Beck. And when I see David Beck, my brain calls him... David Gray.

No, not David Hand. I know he's not David Hand. I'm not stupid. But I think that since I know, deep down, that he can't be David Beck, my subconscious trawls around for another likely-sounding name to pin on him, and comes up with David Gray. Who I believe is a pop singer of some kind, probably also younger than me and better at pop singing than I am, but who I otherwise don't know anything about.

When I started this post, it was with the intention of describing what I've been doing this weekend, but I think I'll do that tomorrow. This whole Beck/Hand thing has gone on too long already. And it's just this minute occurred to me that "David Beck/Hand" sounds surprisingly like "David Beckham". Maybe they're all related.

Darling, I am growing older...

I've just seen a trailer for Channel 5's tenth anniversary celebrations. Surely it can't be ten years already? I can remember Channel 4 starting, when I was tiny, and I wouldn't object to them commemorating that, but Channel 5? It's still brand new! Gah, I can't be thirty years old, it just isn't scientifically possible.

Ah well, I'll just cover my ears and sing 'la la la I'm not listening' whenever the subject comes up again. That'll sort everything out. Meanwhile, another thing I've noticed lately is a new and exciting magazine in the shops - Harry Potter chess! It's one of those magazines that give away a free gift, in this case a chess piece, with every issue, with the idea being that you gradually build up a complete collection as you buy the informative magazine, in this case a guide to how to play chess. The Harry Potter connection here comes from a couple of photos of Daniel Radcliffe and co liberally pasted all over it, and the fact that the chess pieces do exciting things! The rooks have got magnets in them so you can move them by 'waving a magic wand', the knights make a noise when you pick them up, the bishops make a slightly different noise when you pick them up, the pawns, um, fall apart, and the king and queen presumably do something fun too, but I stopped reading at that point.

The first issue is a mere £1.99 (normally £3.99), and comes with a rook, so presumably over the next 32 weeks enthusiastic Potter fans can spend well over a hundred pounds on a chess set and what must be a pretty exhaustive guide to chess play and strategy. Unless, of course, the series gets cancelled after three issues like these things always, without exception, are. Of course, since you won't be able to play chess until you've bought the final issue with that last piece, your learning will have to be strictly theoretical over the next seven months.

Off to sunny Cambridge tomorrow! Emmanuel Caspard gives what my limited understanding of French tells me is a very entertaining account of what makes the event so much fun in his blog, I might possibly write about it when I get back, if you're lucky.

I found it on YouTube

Happy Valentine's Day, again. I'd like to credit the writer, but I'm not sure who did it - the credits of the episode list lots of people with vaguely musical-sounding descriptions. Sung by Katie Leigh, who always deserved extra praise for striking a balance between doing the Rowlf voice and being able to sing.

You're Special To Me

What's the greatest piece of Valentine's Day poetry ever composed? Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls? Ophelia's song in Hamlet? No, the correct answer is in fact Rowlf's song from an episode of Muppet Babies. Or at least that's the one that comes first to my mind every time, anyway. Happy Valentine's Day to you all, anyway, love and kisses.

I've been looking back at last February's blog posts, because someone added a comment to the one about The Armstrongs today, to see what I was doing at this time last year. It turns out that I was getting better results at memory training than I currently am, observing that I was nearly a hundred places higher on the French othello rating list than I am right now (because they're rating more people nowadays, rather than because I'm getting worse at the game, but it's still annoying), appearing on BBC TV rather than just being tentatively filmed for a prospective Channel 4 documentary and organising the Cambridge memory championship rather more seriously than I'm currently doing. That's rather annoying. But on the other hand, this time last year the Uefa cup game I was watching was a dull 0-0 draw, and the one I'm watching tonight is 3-2 and quite exciting. AND there's an FA Cup replay later tonight too. So all things considered, I win in the achievement stakes over my year-younger self.

Another thing I did last year, although not in February, was enthuse over Life On Mars. Well, the second series is possibly even better than the first - I watched the first two episodes last night. They're putting more emphasis on the time-travel aspect this time round, but that's probably necessary because they're finishing it after this series and need to provide some kind of explanation. And it still doesn't get in the way of a brilliant police drama. The second episode was particularly enthralling - there really isn't a lot of stuff on telly these days that grips me in that way.

The sound of silence

I'm racked with indecision. I did a half-hour binary practice today using my 'new' method of linking all my groups of images together and scored 3660. Doing it the old way last week I got 3555. But I know I can do better than that with my usual approach, but then I'm also pretty sure I could do better with the new one too. It's just a matter of deciding which is the best way to go, if I want to get the maximum possible score. I'm going to try an hour cards new-style tomorrow (if I have the time and inclination) and see what happens there. I should go into more detail of what I'm talking about here, I know, but it would take hours and nobody would really be all that interested, so I'll leave it for another time.

This whole thing raises another existential dilemma - I'm doing lots of memory practice lately and that's all well and good, but when I left my job it was in order to experiment with ways of making money from being a memory guy (okay, if I'm honest it was in order to leave a job I didn't particularly like, but the making-money-from-memory thing was the justification for it), and I'm never going to make a living just by winning memory competitions, more's the pity. I should be writing that book that I'm all writer's-blocked on, I should be preparing an impressive pi-memory performance and getting it ready for Ulrich's pi-day festival next month, and I should be forcing people to make documentaries about me in much greater quantities than they currently are. If I'm to have any hope of not going back to accountancy when I run out of money, I need to do something other than mess about with infinitesimally increasing my score in half-hour binary, which I'm already the best in the world at and which nobody's going to throw money at me for doing.

Life is hard. I spend my days doing stuff I enjoy and having fun doing it, and I'm still complaining. I don't know.

Moral: always look at the bits of shops you don't normally look at

I had been thinking about buying the Order Of The Stick prequel book (containing stuff that isn't on the internet), and probably would have done already, but I assumed that buying it would mean ordering it from America over the internet. And I don't have any problem with that, but I generally think 'I should buy such-and-such' when I'm not sitting in front of my computer, and then I see a butterfly or some other distracting insect, and forget about it. But then on Saturday my brother and I went into Forbidden Planet here in Derby, and he happened to stand in front of the RPG section and talk to me, and I noticed that they had the book sitting on the shelf right in front of me! Which just goes to show something, doesn't it?

I decided to take an extra day off from 'work' today, because I woke up with a headache and a lazy attitude, and thought some fresh air and healthy exercise might help. The headache cleared up immediately, but the laziness didn't, and so I found myself in a bookshop. I sneezed in the foreign languages section, and a man across the other side of the room said 'Gesundheit'. I'm not sure if there is a distance limit for acknowledging a complete stranger's sneeze in public. Perhaps there are different rules for 'bless you'.

I also had my hair cut this morning. I was thinking of trying to grow it long, but it never works. It just gets down to collar length and then doesn't go any further. It's very frustrating when you've got the soul of a hippy trapped in the body of an accountant. I've also toyed with the idea of shaving off my beard (I had a dream the other day that I did, and it took me a while the following morning to remember that I was still hairy about the face). I seem to have almost more white hairs than black/brown/whatever-colour-they-should-be ones lately. Growing up sucks.

Never apologise, never explain

I would explain that I haven't posted anything for a couple of days because, as regular readers know, I don't like blogging when I've got guests. But I've said that two or three times before, and I don't like to repeat myself. Besides, I expect everyone who reads this blog to go through the entire archive and learn everything there is to know about me, so if you didn't know already that I wasn't going to post anything, it's your own fault. And besides, I'd be surprised if anyone really noticed, since practically everyone who reads this thing seems to read it at work on weekday mornings. I sometimes feel guilty about the amount of man-hours I'm costing British and international industry. And I'll be skipping a day or two next weekend too, because I'm going to Cambridge for the othello EGP.

I watched the Ireland/France rugby game today. I don't particularly like rugby, but for some reason I always end up tuning into a game or two during the Six Nations. Perhaps it's the way the BBC promote it excessively during their coverage of football and everything else I like to watch. I'm annoyed with the BBC because they deliberately showed Shrek last night at 7:15 in order to make people forget they were going to watch the new thing with the dinosaurs on ITV at 7:45, and I fell for it. I'm sure the dinosaur thing was rubbish ("Walking With Dinosaurs" was rubbish, and this is just the same sub-Jurassic-Park CGI dinosaurs with an added plot about time travel and a maverick scientist hero), and Shrek is great, but that's not the point. The rugby was also a good game, but that's not the point either. I'm not sure what the point is, but it almost certainly involves the licence fee.

My TV licence is actually in the name of Mr G Bridmore. I keep meaning to change it.