A weekend's othelloing

Sheffield is just far enough away that there isn't a train early enough on Sunday mornings for me to come home half way through a two-day othello tournament, but close enough that I didn't have to get up too early on Saturday morning to get down there, which was nice. Also nice was the fact that a whole three people recognised me from the telly and said hi while I was on my way from Beeston to Sheffield - the woman serving baguettes at the Upper Crust at Derby station, a man on the platform at Derby where I was waiting for my delayed connection, and a boy on the train itself. I'm getting quite a bit of "my kids saw you and thought you were great" lately - surprising though it is that children would want to watch a documentary like Superhuman Genius, maybe we've encouraged a whole new generation to get interested in memory!

Although to be honest, I was more impressed when the aforementioned boy's younger brother, who didn't recognise me from the telly, asked if he could try on my hat. I'd rather inspire a new generation to start wearing hats than to enter memory competitions. Just imagine, a whole country full of hat-wearers, and all thanks to me! Wouldn't that be groovy?

Anyway, I eventually arrived at Sheffield and found my way to the Heeley Institute, where I've been once before, many years ago, and didn't arrive more than fifteen minutes late (which in othello circles counts as being quite early). We had the AGM, which passed without memorable incident, and then launched into the 32nd British Othello Championship.

With Graham Brightwell being somewhere overseas, the chance of a final not contested between him and Imre Leader for a change was significantly improved. And with Joel Feinstein and Garry Edmead being more or less retired these days, Imre was the only representative of the four players who between them had won every British championship for the previous twenty years. Against him were an impressive lineup of fourteen other othelloists, many of them significantly better than me, so my hopes weren't high. But all in all, I played quite well. On the first day I lost to Davids Beck and Hand, but didn't feel like I did anything monumentally stupid. I probably did, but I didn't know about it, and that's the important thing. But I beat Yvette in between David-games, and in the fourth and final game of the day I took my revenge on nine-year-old Tani Turner, wiping her out in a brutal kind of way. I'm not proud of myself here, but it was kind of fun.

Then we went out for the traditional Saturday night meal, at an Indian restaurant where the highlight of the evening was probably Ali's anecdote about being taken to a similar place by an Indian colleague who picked out all the mildest things on the menu because he doesn't like spicy food. To which Tani replied, very loudly and while the waiter was collecting plates "What's the point of being Indian, then?"

Then back to the hotel (on the way, walking through the back streets of Sheffield, Imre asked if anyone knew where he could find a croissant shop), which was very nice - I got a room with three beds for the price of one, a TV that worked if you leaned the severed aerial cable against the socket it was supposed to go in and a skylight in the bathroom (which made me a little worried about passing balloonists ogling me in the shower). And a full English breakfast, which is a must for any hotel I stay at. And we all got back to the Institute in good time for the second day of competition.

I lost to Iain, beat Roy and lost to Guy, again without being under the impression that I was playing badly. Meanwhile, David Hand was beating everyone, Imre was doing exactly the same thing as last year (losing two of his first three games and then winning all the others) and Michael, Other David, Iain, Guy and Geoff were also fighting it out for a place in the final. There was quite a lot of excitement, all in all, and I'd write about it if I could remember who beat whom and how. But I can't, so you'll just have to wait until Geoff posts all the games on the forum, and play through them, and make your own deductions about which were the most interesting.

Anyway, being around the middle of the leaderboard, I got the bye in round eight, leaving me on four points with one game to go. David H had lost one game, to Iain, and was a clear point ahead of Imre and Michael, each on six, then David B and Iain on five. So with the top two going to the final, anything could still happen.

The final round had Michael playing Iain, the Davids each playing someone who wasn't mentioned in the list above, don't ask me who, and Imre against me. "You wouldn't be so nasty as to beat me, would you?" he asked. "That's the thing," I replied, "I was sort of rooting for you to get to the final, but now..."

But even though I have a startlingly good record against Imre, I didn't expect anything amazing. Still, the game started quite well for me, and then he played a move that was so very, extremely, obviously bad that I assumed I had completely missed some subtle point and was in fact about to lose horribly. But no, it turned out after the game that it was just a silly mistake. And then I thought I'd lost after all when he took the diagonal, but I managed to find the rather clever way to make sure I'd be able to cut it, and the rest was simple. 47-17 to me. That makes six times I've beaten Imre in competitions, which is probably a higher proportion of wins to losses than practically anyone.

The Davids both won, and we all crowded around the table where Michael and Iain were still finishing their game. It looked to me like Iain was on top, but either he went wrong somewhere or he'd never been on top after all, because Michael finally won. So Adelaide was spared the headache of working out a four-way tie-break for second place (she refuses to use a computer or even a calculator for this kind of thing, believing that it's more fun to do it by hand - this would doubtless have caused friction when David B and Roy, who both brought laptops with them, calculated the Brightwell Quotients themselves and got different figures) and the final was much more Handy than ever before, David Hand v Michael Handel.

I left before the game in order to memorise the wastage figures for all of Boots's Scottish and Irish stores that'll be coming to the conference on Tuesday, but I hear that David won. Congratulations! A new name on the back of the permanent trophy! (the name of each winner is on a little metal shield stuck to the big wooden shield, and they ran out of room on the front of the trophy in the late eighties. At the present rate, we will also be out of space on the back in another ten years or so)

David also won the third-place play-off - Other David, that is, who beat Imre - and I ended up joint fifth with Roy, Iain, Geoff and Guy. Which is a definitely cool kind of position to end up in. That means the British team for the world championships in Oslo will be David H, Michael and British Grand Prix winner Iain. One of these days, with a few more flukey results going my way, I might end up there too, who knows?

But one world championship I will be going to is the memory one, of course. And, I hear, so will Andi! Fantastic news! Last year's was the first Andi-free WMC since 1994, so it'll be good to see him there again. And if he's shelling out for a trip to Bahrain, it seems to me there's a good chance that he's been practicing and is really going to try to win. Also, Gunther will definitely be there, it seems, so it's going to be a good competition. If only I can find the time for a little bit of training...

One final memory note, hot off the presses (thanks, Dai) - congratulations to Tansel on winning the Australian Memory Championship!

If I had the time and energy to think of something else to write, I would

The council estate on Bumblebee Road has been controversial from the start. While the project was still in its planning stages, Porr-Lon, the god of housing developments, manifested himself nearby and played a melody on his pewter bassoon which all those who heard it agreed meant that he felt the estate should be built on the other side of the river. The council considered re-siting the planned estate, but eventually concluded that the additional expense of drawing new blueprints, the difficulty of aligning the houses with the constellation of Aries on the other side of the river and the fact that Porr-Lon is one of the less important gods made it impractical to change the location of the estate.

Immediately after it was built, there was a space adventure involving Martians, and after that had been dealt with there were complaints from local residents that crime levels had risen and there was an unpleasant smell coming from certain of the buildings. These allegations were inaccurate - crime had in fact been completely and totally eliminated in the entire county the day after the council estate was built, and in fact in some regions the number of reported crimes fell as low as minus seventeen every day. And while there was indeed an unpleasant smell coming from certain of the buildings, who are we to criticise unpleasant smells? After all, most people smell quite unpleasant, if you come to think about it.

Nonetheless, the controversy reached such a level that the leader of the council, Bog Myrtle Sutherland, signed an emergency decree banning the estate from ever having been built in the first place. When it comes into effect, next Tuesday, the whole estate and everyone who lives on or near it will be wiped out of existence entirely and this whole article will never have been written. Which is a shame, but that's Bog Myrtle Sutherland for you. She's always overreacting to things. There was a time when she overreacted to a horse, and that didn't end well for anyone, except the jockey.

Not quite so panicky

Did a 30-minute binary tonight and it went quite well. Low score, but no concentration problems. If I can do a few hour cards and numbers in the evenings, I'll be fine for the world championship. Doesn't leave me much time for blogging, though...

Just starting to panic a little bit now

The World Memory Championship is a month away, and I'm nowhere NEAR match-fitness. It's infuriating - on one level I can't stand the idea of losing the world championship yet again, but on another I can't really summon the enthusiasm to go all-out for the win. And circumstances have kept me from getting into any kind of training schedule lately, so I think I've already left it too late to get back into top form before the competition, even with some excessively draining training over the next few weeks. We'll just have to see what happens.

A healthy memory

Well, the not-blogging-about-work-in-case-I-get-in-trouble rule lasted for two months, more or less, which is pretty good going. But I can't resist this one tonight. The worlds of work and memory are sort of merging, you see, and the people who read this blog for the memory technique insights might be interested in this.

As I might have mentioned before, it's the Boots Healthcare Conference in Birmingham next week, woo, and I've been asked to go along to our department's stand (it's all about store-controllable wastage) and persuade attendees to come and look at this not terribly compelling-sounding display by performing a memory stunt. I'm not 100% comfortable with being an Official Boots Memory Man as opposed to a Boots Profit Protection Analyst, but as long as it's only once in a while, I don't really mind.

So what I've done is taken a list of all the stores which will be represented at the convention, which each have a number from 5 (Beeston) to 6526 (Glasgow Fort) and the value of their healthcare-department credit claim values for this year to date and last year in three different categories (out of date, damaged and theft), all of which are a one-to-five-digit number, and when somebody tells me their store number, I'll be able to reel off the six figures for their store, and amaze and astound them. Then I suppose I'll order them to make an effort to reduce their wastage if they want to see more memory feats, or something like that.

Having played around with techniques for memorising these slightly tricky numbers (when you have a 3-digit-image system like me, memorising a 4-digit number is inconvenient), I decided to memorise them as eight three-digit numbers, by taking off the first digits of each and combining them into one number. So for example, if store 27's [there is no store 27 in the Boots world at the moment, and the following numbers are entirely fictional] six numbers are 1425, 684, 9723, 226, 8821 and 23, I remember it as 027-109-425-684-723-080-226-821-023. See what I'm doing there? The 027 is the store [I forget where store 27 used to be, but it closed down last year. I reiterate, I'm not quoting real figures here], the 109 is the thousands figure from the first three numbers and the 080 is the thousands figure from the last three.

I tried memorising a scene of these nine images in isolation for each of the 192 stores that'll have representatives at the conference, but they just wouldn't stay in my memory. So I used journeys instead, and placed nine images in each location, and somehow that works a great deal better. Now when someone says 'store 27' to me, I have to run through my journeys and work out where it is, but when I find it, I can remember the images perfectly.

I don't know why that's so much better than doing it without a journey. Maybe my mind is just used to journeys and now I can't survive without them. Anyway, it's been fun to be working from home this afternoon, memorising numbers and getting paid for it, although I still feel guilty because I can't quite mentally accept that memorising is part of my job at the moment.

Speaking of memory, you can check out Gaby's pictures of Maisons-Laffitte here!

And the BBC were speaking of memory today to me, too, asking questions like "when you talk about memorising a pack of cards, do you mean a 52-card pack or a 36-card pack?" I suppose you have to check everything, but that's one I've never been asked before. They want to film me on October 7th.

Wait, I forgot to mention the interesting technical bits of the healthcare memory thing. Some stores have a four-digit store number - ones that start with 1 I remember which journeys they were on and just memorise them as a 3-digit number without the 1, and the handful that start with 20 or 50 or 64 or 65 I use others of my images that I don't usually use with numbers, so store 2053 becomes store h-5-3, a hummingbird, in my head.

And for the stores whose credit claims in a category are over 9999, I use another consonant or vowel for the 10, 11, 15 or whatever thousands figure - no number is over 16000, luckily. Creating systems is about 75% of the fun of doing something like this.

Old fellow

It's othello in my dad's ancestral home of Sheffield this weekend. I've played a couple of games on playok in some kind of preparation, conscious that I haven't looked at an othello board for months now (except in the course of moving mine to the new flat and dumping them in the corner of my living room - they're among the things I haven't found a place for yet). I also haven't done my treasurer's report for the AGM... come to think of it, where did I put my box of othello paperwork? I'm pretty certain I brought it with me, but I don't think I've seen it since. Ah well, there's days before I need it.

With this kind of advance preparation, I think I'm a dead cert to win the nationals this year!

Hooray, I'm home!

Despite a slightly awkward moment going through security at Charles de Gaulle airport when the machine picked up an undeclared bottle of liquid, an unidentifiable big heavy object and lots of sophisticated-looking timing devices in my rucksack. But I managed to explain without too much difficulty that the timers are used for timing memorisation of cards in memory competitions, that the big thing was the trophy I won at the UK Memory Championship and that despite the above I had put a half-drunk bottle of coke in my bag and completely forgotten it was there. I drank the coke without exploding and the security people seemed satisfied.

As for the competition itself, I won't say much except that I was rubbish. I still won, so obviously I wasn't all that rubbish, but it definitely showed that I hadn't done any training. Got to get on with it now for the next month.

Good food, though - at lunch, we had a waiter who bravely attempted to talk with us in French, English and German, as necessary, which led to a fun multilingual bacon/Schinken/chicken confusion. And in the evening we had crepes, in the proper French style. And I got to see lots of sights in Paris!

Well, I did it.

I bought a new rucksack. I hated to do it, but I had to face facts - my beloved old rucksack is now essentially just a scrap of cloth that, at best, can be wrapped around things and carried in my arms without dropping too much stuff from it. It's not actually going to be possible to take my clothes, cards, toothbrush and other memorisation accessories on the plane to Paris in my old rucksack.

This is terribly sad, but I suppose I have had fourteen years of loyal service from my rucksack, and before that it put in a good three or four years carrying my brother's PE kit to school. Maybe I'll give it back to him now, seeing as I borrowed it temporarily from him in autumn 1994, or maybe just keep it in my box of treasured memories.

Apart from buying a rucksack, incidentally, I am completely and totally unprepared for the French Memory Open, or whatever it's called. I've done no training, I haven't planned out what journeys I'm going to use or how much I'm going to attempt in each discipline, I haven't even printed out my e-ticket details, map to the hotel in Maisons-Laffitte and useful stuff like that. I don't really feel like I'm going to be getting up early tomorrow to get the train down to Birmingham airport, then spending a day in Paris. I'm sure I will, but I'm surprisingly underprepared. We'll just have to see what happens.

And you, blog readers, will just have to see me on Sunday, because I won't be blogging till then. Au revoir!

Get off your back, go into town, don't let them down

One thing they do at Boots is encourage head office staff to go out into real live stores and help out on occasion. So that's what I've been doing today, back in Derby. It's really groovy - in all my varied jobs over the years, I've never actually worked in a shop before, so this is all new and exciting.

Nobody in the store recognised me (my fame might just possibly be fading here) but when I went for lunch someone did ask me "Excuse me, are you off the telly?" I like that phrasing better than the more common "Did I see you on the telly?". Being 'off the telly' suggests that I'm a regular TV star, rather than a subject of a one-off documentary. It's a subtle point of linguistics, but very flattering.

(It occurs to me that any foreigners reading this could use it as a local-dialect lesson, if they ever come to this part of the world.)

I have this conversation a lot these days

"Ben!"

"Hello."

"Remember me?"

"Um... no."

"Steve Barker [or possibly Chris Barton, or something along those lines]. I was in your brother's year at school. How can you not remember me? You're a famous memory man, I've seen you on TV!"

See, the non-famous-memory-men-and-women of the world have me at a real disadvantage now. They know all about me from my many TV appearances, whereas I, with my famous inability to remember names and faces, know nothing about them. And yet it's me who ends up looking stupid! I tells ya, it's tough being a celebrity.

Anyway, I don't remember any Chris/Steve/something-similar Barker/Barton/something-like-that being friends with my brother. I didn't pay much attention to those little urchins in his year, but I knew all his closest friends, I thought. I should be at least vaguely aware of the existence of someone who, when told that our grandma lives in Chilwell like he does now, observes 'oh, is she still around? I remember Joe used to go to Chilwell to see her on his holidays...'

Perhaps he's some kind of conman. Or perhaps I'm just really, really bad at remembering names and faces.

We are the world

Following on from last night's entry, I also have the same kind of feelings about the world championship as I do about the French. Apart from the bit about how it hinders my training for the world championship, of course, because that would just be silly. But I'm not really all fired up about the WMC at the moment, and I haven't done anywhere near the amount of training that I should, with one thing and another. Turnout is going to be pretty low this year, with plenty of people who could just about afford one trip to Bahrain not being able to make it an annual holiday, and a probable lack of Gunther and all the other previous world champions. I'm told that there might be even more Chinese competitors this time round, but I haven't seen a list of names yet, and the one of them who I'm friends with isn't going to be there. I just worry that the whole thing's going to be a bit of a flop.

Still, this shouldn't stop me getting into some serious training. I need to knuckle down and get my brain in gear, quick. Shame I've got Paris this weekend, Sheffield next weekend for the othello, a brotherly visit the weekend after, and then we're practically in Bahrain already, even without the inevitable BBC-pestering that's also going to happen. I have a feeling I'm not going to win again this year.

So this is gay Paree, come on along with me!

It's the first ever French memory championship next weekend, in Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris. I'm going along, although to be perfectly honest I think I might prefer not to be - it's a very small competition that few people will be coming to, and it's actually more of a hindrance than a help to my preparations for the WMC next month, because I need to be practicing the long disciplines now, not the quick ones we'll be doing in this championship. But still, I said I'd go along, and it'll hopefully spread the word in a country that's remained bafflingly untouched by the spread of competitive memory in Britain, Germany and Austria. With the greatest of respect to Pierre, it would be nice if more than one French person had ever competed in a memory championship, and from the sound of it we might just double that figure next Saturday.

Still, Gaby and Idriz will be there, which will be fun, and I'm going to spend Friday seeing the sights in Paris, which I've never really done before (I've made two flying visits in the past, but never even been to the Eiffel Tower. I mean, I already know what it looks like, but it seems silly to have never been there in person.)

Sleep!

Right, I'm worn out after another Saturday of moving heavy objects from one place to another. I need a real weekend, the kind where you sit in front of the telly and do nothing, or maybe do some memory training if you're feeling conscientious. I'm going to bed. I'll make up for this skimpy blogging tomorrow.

Moving house again

Well, I know I've spent the last week talking about my new flat, and I'll stop now, but I really do like the place. I've very nearly got everything unpacked and put away, and I could maybe get back to some memory training if not for the fact that Grandma, that big copycat, is moving tomorrow, from an upstairs flat to a downstairs one in the same building, and I'm helping her out. I might become a removal man full-time, it might give me more free time to do other things.

Although writing this just reminds me that I need to email lots and lots of people about memory-related subjects. I'll have to spend the rest of tomorrow doing that, and then, maybe, spend Sunday actually memorising things.

Plant life

Another thing about this new flat is that it came with a couple of plants. There's a plastic flower thing, and a sort of big tall thing with leaves. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm pretty sure it's not plastic and so probably needs some kind of looking after if I don't want it to die. I'm not what you'd call an expert gardener, as you might have guessed from those first few sentences, and watering plants sounds so easy in principle, but gives rise to all sorts of complexities when you come to think about it. Is that too much water? Not enough? Is this one of those plants that dies if you put water on it? Is it likely to bite me if I get too close? Does it need sunlight? Fresh air? Music? Should I just get rid of the thing before I inevitably knock it over and get mud all over the nice new carpet?

Room to spare

There's a room in this flat that is either the guest bedroom or my study - it's got a bed, but now it's also got my desk and all my memorising paraphernalia too. I'll memorise in it when I haven't got someone staying here, and use it to accommodate guests if anyone ever wants to come and visit me. It's also got a little shelf, on which I've dumped a random selection of my books, for the education and enlightenment of my guests - I'll list them some time when I'm less lazy and see what that says about me - and also, serving as bookends, two of my memory trophies, so guests can recoil in amazement at the sight of the ugly great Memory World Cup 2004 (which used to be a silvery colour but has gone a fascinating array of tarnished shades, I can only guess at what the thing is made of), and the 3rd-place-in-the-world-championship trophy 2003, made of good Malaysian pewter and still the same colour it's always been. Although the little bit on top is about to break off if anyone touches it ever again.

This is a great flat, it really is.

Oh this rain it will continue...

Wow, serious downpour outside as I sit down to type this (laptop perched on a box full of comics I haven't put away yet). I'm trying to stretch my inadequate memory and recall whether this summer has been more or less rainy than last summer, but I can't be sure. And since I don't trust weather statistics quoted by any other source, I suppose I'll just have to never know.

Anyway, before it started raining, I was going to observe how cool it is that they're turning on this Large Hadron Collider thing in Geneva tomorrow. I really like the idea of a device costing billions of pounds that smashes things together harder than anything's ever been smashed together before. I especially like the name - I'm a big fan of the recent trend in science to give things simple names like the Very Large Telescope, and I hope to see a lot more similarly-named, vastly expensive and completely unnecessary devices being built in the future. After all, the money would only have gone to waste if they hadn't built these things, and it probably wouldn't have ended up going to the impoverished and needy anyway...

I'm back on the grid!

Woo! Yay! New swanky two-bedroomed, just-down-the-road-from-work, cable-phone-and-broadband-connected flat! If you're ever moving house, I recommend... well, I can't remember what they're called, but they're the first removals firm in the Derby Yellow Pages. And they're cheap, efficient, friendly and didn't lose, destroy or eat any of my posessions. And they were impressed by my trophies, even though the nice-looking ones were packed away in boxes and the only ones they saw were the big ugly metal ones that are awkwardly-shaped and wouldn't fit in anything.

During the excitement of moving, another man on the street recognised me from the telly and said hello. He then turned to his girlfriend and said "He can memorise a whole pack of cards." The girlfriend replied "Yeah, right," in a tone that made it clear she believed he was lying. I'm surprised by this. Is it so completely unbelievable that someone can memorise a pack of cards? Actually, there are quite a lot of people who can do that, you know.

Another suitcase in another hall...

Moving tomorrow, won't be back in internet land until Monday, still got to pack things, can't talk now, see you later, bye.

Gah!

Stupid cheap shoelaces! Bought them last weekend, one's broken already! I'd take them back to the shop if I could remember where I bought them and if they'd cost more than a pound. That does it, I'm going back to my bad habit of not untying my laces, ever, and just treating my shoes like slippers.

Also, I'm sorry if this blog has been unspeakably trivial just lately, but all I've been doing is working and packing. Not that that hasn't been fun - work is still going really well, and I've even been persuaded to use my memory skills for good rather than evil and perform memory tricks to attract people to our department's stand at the Boots Healthcare Conference at the end of the month. So make sure to book your tickets (if you're a Boots healthcare manager and have access to a time machine, since the registration deadline was three days ago). Funnily enough, shortly after agreeing to this, I had an email from a non-work person who wants me to perform memory tricks to attract people to his stand at some kind of computer retail exhibition, a week after the Boots thing. Something about me must just suggest 'corporate memory man'. There might be a career in this, if not for the minor stumbling block that I don't want one.

Boxes upon boxes

In early 1998, I moved from a rented attic room into a tiny little room in a shared house, and my friend Karen helped me move my stuff. She observed "Ben, for someone who's had a short little life like yours, you haven't half accumulated a lot of shit." I miss Karen and her colourful expressions, actually. I must look her up some time.

Anyway, it's ten years later, and I would estimate that I've got about ten times as much junk piled up in cardboard boxes now. Moving house is a terrible inconvenience, especially if you find it impossible to throw anything away, ever. Half the stuff in these boxes is probably just going to be unpacked, put somewhere and never touched again until the next time I move. Maybe I should just dump it all outside the Oxfam shop and make a fresh start? But then what would happen if I find that I really need that half of an issue of Autosport magazine from 1997?

Warning!

I've got a new bike, did I mention that? Yes, I know it's no more than a couple of years since I last got a new bike, but it was falling to bits through lack of care and maintenance, and I felt like splashing out rather than keep fixing the thing. Anyway, it came with a little sticker on it that says "Warning: For safety reason. All bolts must be checked for tightness before every ride. Failure to do so could result in serious and/or/fatal injuries."

I ask you. I could nitpick the unusual punctuation and grammar, or wonder whether it really means to imply that you can have injuries that are fatal but not serious, but I'm more interested in the instruction that I have to test every bolt on the bike, every time I want to ride it anywhere. I mean, I'm all in favour of safety (except for wearing a silly-looking helmet, I'm still not going to do that), but that seems a little excessive. And does this mean that if the bike spontaneously falls apart, I can't sue whoever made it, because I didn't check all the bolts?

I suppose I could lie in court and claim that I had, but they're probably monitoring me with CCTV cameras, just in case. Or I could be honest and say that the sticker fell off, which it quite genuinely did on the way home tonight. I hadn't noticed it until then. I'll keep it and stick it onto something else, just to confuse everyone.

But wait, if I leave Derby...

I won't walk past that chip shop on my way home, the one with a sign saying "You are welcome to breastfeed here" on the door! I won't be able to quip "Well, thanks, but I think I'll stick with the haddock and chips..." and entertain whoever happens to be with me at the time!

And next door to it, I won't be able to giggle at the sandwich board outside the Discount Furniture Warehouse that says "BED'S FROM £79" on one side and "SOFA'S FROM £49" on the other. Some punctuation-conscious employee of the DFW sellotapes little bits of white paper over the unwanted apostrophes, but they keep blowing off or getting rained off and rendering the sign all ungrammatical again. Perhaps I'll buy them a bottle of tippex as a going-away present.

And a bit further down the road, in the somewhat more shabby furniture-and-miscellaneous-junk shop, I won't be able to admire the stuffed fox-with-rabbit-in-mouth tableau and wonder whether I admire the taxidermy skill and want it to decorate my living room or feel repulsed by the whole thing.

Nor will I walk past the most badly-planned traffic lights in the country, with a pedestrian crossing not synchronised with the traffic lights at the roundabout fifty yards away, so if someone presses the crossing button at the wrong time, no cars can get on to the roundabout ever, and the queue stretches back for miles.

Nor the corner of Hartington Street, next to where the Discount Furniture Warehouse people live and park their vans in an impossibly tight space, that serves as one of my memory locations and for some reason has a tree in my mental journey that isn't there in real life.

It's the little things I'll miss.

Match of the Day

It's nice that the football season's started again, but it would be nicer if they'd show the highlights of Sunday's games a bit earlier in the evening. Don't they realise I'm working now and have to get up early on a Monday morning?

Yes, I can't think of anything to write about tonight. It's been dull and rainy all day, just for a change, and I haven't really done anything worth mentioning.

Actually, it might have been a cheetah

Lord Aberystwyth rang the bell and called for his butler, Hopkinson. "Ah, Hopkinson, there you are," he said, as soon as the butler came into the drawing room. "How was your day at school?"

"I believe you're confusing me with your son, who is also named Hopkinson," said Hopkinson.

"That's the last impertinence I'm going to take from you, Hopkinson," said Lord Aberystwyth, sternly. "If I ask you how your day at school was, then by Brahma you will tell me how your day at school was."

"Very good, sir," said Hopkinson, respectfully. "My day at school was most pleasant. We learnt about fractions and Shakespeare."

"Splendid," said Lord Aberystwyth. "Now, I remember why I called you here. There's some kind of big cat, possibly a jaguar or maybe a leopard, eating me. Would you do something about it, please?"

"Very good, sir," said Hopkinson, picking up a poker and jabbing at the wild beast tentatively. It turned around briefly and gave Hopkinson a reproachful look, before turning back and continuing to devour Lord Aberystwyth's left arm.

"No, no, no," tutted this worthy peer. "You'll never do any good like that, Hopkinson. Grab the thing by its tail and pull it away."

"Very good, sir," said Hopkinson, attempting to catch the presumed jaguar's tail, which was flicking from side to side in a manner more reminiscent of a domestic cat than a member of the panthera genus. "It seems a little elusive, sir... ah, there we are," he said, seizing it and pulling the animal away.

"I don't need a running commentary, Hopkinson," said Lord Aberystwyth. "Now, get rid of the thing and then fetch a bandage. Maybe two bandages, it seems to have eaten most of my internal organs."

"It appears to be eating me now, sir," Hopkinson protested apologetically. "I'm afraid I'm not in a position to fetch bandages."

"Well, for Buddha's sake, if that doesn't just take the biscuit," snapped Lord Aberystwyth. "Honestly, I expect better service from you, Hopkinson. I hired you on the basis of the most impeccable references, and my wife was in labour for thirty-two minutes giving birth to you. If you can't do it yourself, ring for the first footman and have him bring me my bandages."

"Very good, sir," said what was left of Hopkinson. Unable to ring the bell owing to a shortage of remaining arms, he shouted "Ding-a-ling-a-ling!" at the top of his lungs, at the right pitch to indicate that the first footman and several bandages were required.

The footman, whose name was also Lord Aberystwyth, arrived promptly and bandaged his lordship deftly. "You've suffered extensive blood loss, sir, and your lungs, kidneys and appendix are absent, although it's possible that the last-named organ had already been removed prior to the cat incident. In my medical opinion, although I haven't been a practising doctor for three days now, you will pass away in another twenty seconds or so."

"I think I had my appendix taken out as a child," mused Lord Aberystwyth. "Although it may have been my tonsils. Go and consult my childhood diaries, Lord Aberystwyth, and let me know."

"Very good, sir," said the first footman, taking his leave. Lord Aberystwyth did indeed pass away exactly twenty seconds after Lord Aberystwyth had finished pronouncing the word 'twenty', which would have proved the footman right in a wager he had recently undertaken with another doctor-turned-domestic in the household regarding his diagnostic abilities, if only anybody had been present to witness the exact moment of the master's demise. However, Hopkinson had by that time been entirely devoured by the still-not-positively-identified animal and was unable to be of any use in the matter.

Of course, if he had been alive and had been an accessory to an unlicensed gamble among the servants of a peer of the realm, he would have been a disgrace to the world of butlering, so it's probably best for everyone concerned that he wasn't.

For those who are keeping track of my movements

I'm not moving this weekend. I'm moving next weekend, and to a different place from the place I was going to be moving to. I found a slightly nicer flat that costs the same, so I decided to take that one instead. So, unless I find a nicer flat still, it's next weekend for the big move to Beeston. Which is good, because I've still got a lot of packing to do...

Also, I need to do some memory training. I haven't done any for a while now, and I had a dream about abstract images last night. That's a sure sign my brain wants me to memorise things.

Largeness

The somewhat inaccurately named 99p Shop in Derby is selling 2-litre bottles of Pepsi for 79p. This is a bad thing for those who are trying to lose weight but can't resist a bargain or a sugary drink. I mean, diet Pepsi is the same price, but that tastes like wee, so I'm forced to buy the unhealthy stuff.

I really should be making an effort to be slender and beautiful right now, because I quite literally can't set foot out of doors at the moment without being recognised. Every time I go out in public, somebody is waiting to compliment me on my amazing memory abilities. Everybody seems very impressed by it, funnily enough, although I didn't think I came across as much of a genius. Nobody's stopped me in the street to say "Ha ha, you're the one who's got no job!" yet, either.

An open letter to the people of the world

Hi, people. I really am touched by your generosity, but I've got a job now, and don't have any money problems at all (well, I won't in a month or so, anyway). So there's really no need to offer me money or a way of using my amazing memory talents to earn money. By the way, this particularly applies if your plan involves card-counting in casinos with the aid of your cash investment. That really wouldn't work out well for you if we did try it, I promise. (Oh, and distinctively-voiced journalists whom I spoke to 18 months ago about a similar subject especially need not apply, using a fake name and claiming to be some vague kind of businessman).

On the other hand, a big thanks to all the people who've recognised me on the street or on the trains lately and complimented my amazing abilities! It's great being a celebrity.

Grab your coat, don't forget your hat

Moving house is a big inconvenience. You have to pack all your videos and books and comics into big cardboard boxes that are too heavy to carry, tell the cable, water, gas and electric people you're leaving, change your address with the bank and credit cards and everything, arrange for someone with a van to help you move, clean your current flat so it's a little less filthy when you leave... and probably a lot of other things that I can't think of right now.

And I bet I'm going to end up leaving something behind. The toys under my bed, or whatever I keep in my Forbidden Closet Of Mystery (the cupboard in my bedroom without a door handle so you can only open it by prying the door open with a knife. I don't use that cupboard very much). Or my toothbrush, like I do most times I go away for a night. But I do need a new toothbrush anyway, so that wouldn't be such a huge disaster. I don't know why I'm making a fuss about it. In fact, maybe I'll leave my toothbrush behind deliberately, and cut down on the heavy lifting while I'm transferring all my other rubbish to Beeston.

Catching up

Let me see, what happened to me last week while I was drivelling on about the UK Memory Championship weekend? Well, on the Wednesday we had our Team Challenge (no relation to an old friend who goes by that unusual moniker) and went out to renovate the playground of a community centre creche, spreading the good word of Boots community spirit wherever we went. (Yes, Boots are the mysterious people I'm working for. I can't blog about what I did on Thursday without mentioning them by name, so the secret's out.) I "helped" my boss make a new gate in the fence, by handing him tools and occasionally hammering things when he told me how to do it. I'm bad at DIY, as everyone who knows me is well aware.

Then on Thursday I had my been-there-a-month induction session, which turned out to be more interesting than I expected, because of the revelation during the "history of Boots the Chemist" part that in 1935 they commissioned a cartoon, animated by none other than Ub Iwerks, called "See How They Won"! It chronicles the fight against evil germs by the heroic Boots army. I knew there were perks to working for a big company like Boots, but I didn't expect them to include getting to watch classic-era cartoons! I'm all the more convinced that I picked the right job now.

And somewhere along the way I confirmed that I'm moving to Beeston next weekend. Nice little flat, much closer to work, and hopefully the transition will be smooth and uncomplicated. But if I disappear from the internet for a while, you'll know why. Unless I've been abducted by Bulgarian anti-memory crusaders, in which case you'll believe you know why I'm not blogging, but you'll be wrong.

One more thing

Yes! Not content with an extra-long post earlier tonight, I'm going to write an extra blog entry too! I found something else that I can't resist blogging about. That chess game I briefly mentioned in passing, between Jan Smeets and Nigel Short, can be played through on the internet here. And you can read commentary about it here, where it says that the game is "A brilliant effort by Smeets, who later described the game as one of his best ever."

Well... I don't claim to be a grandmaster (a real grandmaster, anyway. I am a memory GM, for what it's worth), but I wouldn't describe this game as brilliant. It's... simple. I understand what's happening, and I'm rubbish at understanding chess positions. It's Ruy Lopez, for goodness' sake! That's the most basic, overused opening in low-level chess games across the world! It's the opening that people figure out for themselves as kids and play exclusively for years because they don't dare attempt something more complicated like a queen's gambit.

And it's not like these two giants of chess do anything exciting with it! Threaten and defend the pawns, exchange a few pieces to make the position more simple, bring the queen out, zoom it into that little undefended space in the corner, chase the king around the board a bit until you contrive a position to take a rook, win.

I've played this exact game a zillion times with my former fellow nerdy teenager best friend David (perhaps it's not just the MSO and othello worlds that are overcrowded with Davids, maybe it's my whole life). And yes, I was the loser in these games more often than not, but still. If that's what passes for a brilliant game between two GMs these days, maybe it's time I came out of retirement...

UKMC, episode five: Escape To Victory (or a bronze medal, at least)

After the speed cards, there was only time for a very quick speech from Phil and Tony thanking everyone for coming and asking them to get out of the room and let the chess players in. I missed it because I was talking to the Sun on Phil's mobile phone, but I'm sure it was a fitting end to an excellent weekend's memorising. I gave Phil his mobile back, burbled something quickly into the microphone about how great it was to see everyone and how the organisers are all great, while trying to keep hold of my non-closing rucksack full of speed stacks timers and packs of cards that were falling all over the floor. You can see it on the Sun website if it's still there and if you really want to. I don't think it shows that I was in a hurry, knowing I was going to be late for the othello if I didn't dash quickly. All that remained were a few closing conversations:

-Phil: Your cards from yesterday are through here, follow me.
-Me (following him): Okay. Thanks again, great competition, etc...
-Lots of other people: Congratulations!
-Me (repeatedly): Thanks! You too! Well done on the [insert anything I could remember about whatever whoever I was talking to had done well]!
-Boris: Hey, Ben, where does a score of 6350 put me on the ranking list?
-Me: I have no idea. I never remember the ranking scores. [I had to keep asking what score I needed to get to number one over the course of the weekend. I seem to have a real blind spot with ranking points memory] James Paterson's the one to ask. James, where's Boris on the rankings now?
-Sun journalist with camera (not the one I was talking to on the phone, another one): Ben, got time for that quick chat?
-Me (seeing Phil had by now disappeared out of sight): Sure, why not? Talk and walk?
-Sun guy: Let me just quickly put this radio mike on you...
-Me (after extensive attempts to clip the thing on my shirt, only for it to fall apart): Can I just hold it in my hand?
-Sun guy: Sure. So, happy with the result?
-Me (holding radio mike): [burbled something about the competition. You can also see that on the Sun website, same video clip, same provisos as before]
-Sun guy: Great, thanks.
-BBC camera crew: Ben, got time for that quick chat?
-Me: Um, yes, sure, just a minute, let me get my cards back first, I'm really in a hurry.
-BBC presenter: Sure, I just have to go and [do something I wasn't paying attention to] first. Talk to you in a minute.
-Me (seeing Phil being hassled by even more people than were hassling me, but noticing a box full of packs of cards sitting near some chess people): Ah, my cards!
-Raymond Keene OBE: Ah, Ben, this is Jan Something and Someone Else, he's the Something of the chess tournament.
-Me (finding my cards, dropping the contents of my rucksack again and trying to pick them up): Oh, great, look, I've really got to dash, I'm playing in a...
-Raymond Keene OBE: Ben's just won the memory competition.
-Jan Something: Ah. You are a competitor in the memory?
-Me: Yes, that's right.
-Jan Something: Ah. And you are the winner?
-Me: Yes.*
*[conversation edited for comic effect. I'm sure Jan Something (possibly not his real name) is a great conversationalist, it's just that I was really in a hurry to get away and not arrive at the othello more than 15 minutes late]
-Jan Something: Ah.
-Me (thinking if I'm going to be talking to chess people, I might as well do what I'd been meaning to do all weekend, and say hi to Nigel Short): Is Nigel Short anywhere around here?
-Someone Else (gesturing to a man sitting right next to him): He's right here.
-Me: Oh. You don't wear glasses any more. [thought to myself: Why, considering that I'm in a tearing hurry, did I just take the time to tell Nigel Short he isn't wearing glasses? He probably knows that already.] Um, I just wanted to say hi. Back when you were in the world championship match with Kasparov, I was a nerdy teenager and I was following the games with rapt attention.
-Glasses-less Nigel Short: Um, thanks.
-Me: Big fan. Got to go, nice to meet you.
-BBC presenter: Ben, have you got five minutes to talk?
-Me (leaving): No. Not even five seconds. Really in a hurry.
[for the record, Michael Adams won the chess, as usual. Nigel Short lost his Sunday game to Jan Smeets, possibly alarmed by the conversation with me, and ended up joint seventh with Jan Werle and Jon Speelman. And yes, everybody at the chess tournament was called Jan - three of the competitors and also the sponsor Jan Mol, who I suspect was probably the Jan Someone I was speaking to.]

I dumped my stuff in my hotel over the road without losing anything, cleverly fitted in an in-depth interview with the BBC while walking to the tube station (they offered to get a taxi, but I refused on working-class-hero grounds), said my goodbyes and hot-footed it to the Royal Horticultural Halls.

I was only ten minutes or so late, and the othello hadn't started yet. There were six of us there - me, Imre, David B and Geoff plus MSO regulars Bharat and David P. The MSO, like the othello world, is overrun by Davids, and another one of them, David Kotin, was running the othello tournament. We played a double-round-robin of ten-minute games, and Imre was on the kind of everybody-squishing form that he seems to reserve for tournaments that don't affect the British rating list. He won all his games, and I managed to win six out of ten, beating Othello David once and Geoff once to end up in bronze medal position.

They don't do actual medals at the MSO any more, but they do do stylish little mini-trophy/plaque things, which look really nice. Of course, they hadn't made the othello ones yet, so I didn't get it before dashing off again, but I'm hoping to collect it some time.

The highlight of the othello was the game against Geoff that I didn't win - I was already well and truly dead, but also running out of time, and so I was playing my moves at a frantic rate. I played my penultimate move, Geoff played his and Imre quipped "Ah, so now Ben can't lose on time."

Not paying attention to this, I played what I thought was my only available move and started flipping discs, only to notice from the giggles of the spectators that this actually wasn't a legal move, and in fact I didn't have any legal moves and should have tapped the clock to signify that I had to pass. This made sense of Imre's comment, but it sank into my brain just a second too late, and I didn't manage to unflip the discs I'd wrongly flipped before my time ran out. So I lost on time in a position where it's not possible to lose on time, which is quite an achievement.

And so that was the weekend. Hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed living it. I doubt you did, since I'm not THAT great a writer, but never mind. I got criticised for not blogging enough about the world memory championships last year (even though I spent it in a hotel without internet access), so I wanted to make up for it here. Normal bloggery resumes tomorrow with a precis of what's been happening to me over the last five days.

UKMC, episode four: Am I Still Writing This Thing?

Seriously, I'm going to have to spend next week catching up with blogging all the things that have happened to me this week. And then the week after that blogging all the exciting things that will happen to me next week. And the week after the week after that... well, you get the idea. Maybe I'll just spend all day blogging tomorrow instead of packing up my stuff because I'm moving house next weekend.

That's something I haven't blogged about yet, because I've been writing about the UKMC.

Anyway, last Sunday morning, it was the final day of the competition. After another very nice full English breakfast at the swanky hotel, I went over the road to find that I was comfortably in the lead. So in five minute numbers I went for a "safe" 360, only to forget an image half way through the final line, so I only wrote down 339. And had a mistake in a previous row, so ended up with a score of 299. Which is still pretty good, really. Wasn't long ago that 280 was my safe-ish score and 324 was my risky second attempt. Which just goes to show how the standard at these competitions is going up at a staggering rate, like I always say.

I was reasonably confident of a halfway acceptable score in abstract images, having done a bit of practice before the competition. I said to Boris that he was going to get 200 or so, wasn't he, and he replied that no, he wasn't going to do that, 150 would be a good score for him. Accordingly, he got 205, while I ended up with 144. Which is still a personal best, and a halfway acceptable score by any standards.

Around this time the media throng started arriving, in the form of that BBC documentary I've probably unwisely agreed to allow to film me, and also another person with a camera from the Sun. I spent most of the time in between disciplines (and there wasn't much time, since we were hurrying to finish before the chess players moved into the room) talking to people and not really being sure who I was talking to.

So, we got on with the historic dates, which went pretty well, and the spoken numbers, in which I got a quite acceptable 99 in the first trial (Boris got a perfect 100, but I always struggle with that last digit, since I memorise them in threes and have one left over that I have to remember by just repeating it to myself). It's always fun to watch memory competitors after a spoken numbers - everyone stands outside the room in a group, reciting the number to each other and exclaiming "Drat!" or "Woohoo!" depending on whether what they remembered agrees with the group consensus.

Which left us with speed cards. I had a lead of around 1200 points, so I was safely the UK champion unless I failed to memorise anything and Boris did a pack in 25 seconds or so. But I was in with a good chance of knocking Gunther off the world number one spot, with a time of (according to my rough calculations) 50 seconds or so. So the sensible strategy was a safe, slow first pack to make sure of that, followed by an amazing world record to blow everyone away.

And so I went through the pack twice, really really quickly, in 47 seconds or so, which should have been safe, but my brain wasn't really up to speed, and I didn't pay attention to the last few cards both times I looked at them. So I got the recall wrong and was torn between attempting another safe time or saying to heck with it all and going for that world record. I really wanted to break the world record and make "Superhuman Genius" out-of-date before it was even broadcast. Besides, it annoys me that they bullied me into making a record attempt outside the competition and ending up with a sort-of-semi-official-but-not-counted-as-a-100%-real world record.

In between speed cards trials I escaped the cameras long enough to get my historic dates score corrected (the arbiter had somehow stopped marking my recall paper about a third of the way through the final page, possibly distracted by a butterfly)* and recalculated that a speed cards time of about a minute would still be enough to take that number one spot. And, on the advice of James, I decided to refrain from attempting the world record anyway, and just play it safe.

*[see my post of three days ago. The arbiters were great. Really they were. Just ignore me.]

So, I did 56.41 and recalled it without a hitch. Woohoo, UK Champion, World Number One, Really Great Memory Person, and so on. Woohoo! Boris did 54.41 to ensure his second place and to move back into the world top ten (at the expense of Dominic O'Brien! That's a cool achievement to put on your CV!), and Gaby did 54.50 to narrowly snatch third place from Katie.

James Ponder won the battle of the Jameses to take fifth place and the coveted third-best-British-entrant trophy and prize (another thing I forgot to mention about the arbiters - arranged lots of sponsorship and some extremely cool prizes again!). Jürgen, Ameel (have I mentioned Ameel Hoque? Another excellent newcomer to watch out for in future competitions!), Mark Channon and Mia rounded out the top ten. Two-time Polish champion Tomek Krasinski was a close enough eleventh that I'd feel like I'm being rude not to give him a namecheck too. Mark Aarøe Nissen (who I haven't mentioned here before, but who was competing in his first real-life competition after taking part in the Online Memory Challenge) got an excellent 87.11 seconds in his first ever real life speed cards. Everybody else, I'm sure, had good reason to be proud of their performance. Give them a round of applause, if you're reading this!

Of course, by the time we ended we were overdue to clear out and let the chess players in, so they were huddled outside muttering dire imprecations in Russian (most of the competitors were British, but I assume chess players of all nationalities curse in Russian), and I was decidedly overdue for an othello tournament quite some distance away elsewhere in London.

Final episode tomorrow! Thrill to my attempt to make a quick getaway from Simpson's!

UKMC, episode three: Interlude

With the competition only taking place in the mornings because we were piggybacking a chess tournament's rooms, I had Saturday afternoon free. Eventually, anyway, because as mentioned I was talking to Canadians while everybody else got to wander off for lunch - and that was only after waiting around for them to finish talking to Tony (who is one of the world's great talkers, as everyone knows, and can go on for hours if you give him half a chance). Meanwhile, Ray Keene did his best to persuade me to come to the prizegiving/gala dinner on Monday evening and I said I would (mainly because of my usual difficulty in saying no to people), despite having to work in Beeston on Tuesday. Then after leaving Simpson's, it occurred to me that I was on telly on Monday night and I would much prefer to be at home for that. So I made a mental note to tell them that I wouldn't be going to the dinner after all. But I decided to wait until after the competition had finished, just in case anyone had the idea of rigging the result so that the winner would be at the prizegiving.

Not that anyone would do that, of course. I'm joking. Please don't rig the result of any future memory championship to teach me a lesson, arbiters.

Anyway, I went to Victoria station for a late lunch - I love the food court there, a couple of times when I went to the MSO and stayed in a hall of residence nearby, I had my tea there every day. And then I went down the road to the Royal Horticultural Halls down the road, where this year's somewhat smaller-scale MSO was taking place. The Horticultural Halls are surprisingly devoid of any plant life, but a nice place for an MSO, featuring rooms of various sizes spread around the building, just right for all the various competitions.

There wasn't anything happening there on Saturday afternoon that I could compete in, but I went along anyway, just to say hi to all the usual MSO suspects - the dozen or so people who can still be found there every year. Everyone seems to still think of me as a usual suspect, too, even though I've barely shown my face at the MSO for the last few years. But after that, I decided to see a few sights, seeing as I was in London. I got a tube to Oxford Circus, intending to walk down Oxford Street to Charing Cross Road, check out all the bookshops, go down to Trafalgar Square and admire that big column thing, then walk back along the Strand to my hotel.

This was a pretty ambitious plan for me - I can't cope with London streets, even if I'm only planning to walk along three really big and well-known ones. I get confused and lost if I try to travel anywhere in London that isn't within sight of a tube station. I have taken the tube from Euston to King's Cross in the past.

However, on Saturday I set out on this adventure with great confidence, which was only slightly dented when I realised after quite a bit of walking that I'd turned the wrong way out of Oxford Circus and was headed down Oxford Street in the wrong direction. Never mind, I thought, I'm still seeing the sights, and I haven't really been down this end before very much, and when I get to Marble Arch I'll get the good old tube down to Tottenham Court Road. But when I got there, it turned out that Central Line services were seriously disrupted due to what the tannoy described as "a person under a train". So I got a bus instead. I practically never take London buses, and I should do it more often. And I got off at Tottenham Court Road and successfully completed the rest of my planned walk, so I felt hugely accomplished and metropolitan.

Then it was just back to the hotel to enjoy some abstract images practice and rather a lot of Sky One. Being a Virgin customer, I really miss being able to see some Simpsons episodes other than the handful that Channel 4 keep endlessly repeating with all the funny lines edited out, and even better, I got to see the new series of Gladiators!

New Gladiators is basically exactly the same as old Gladiators, which is exactly the way it should be. I'm hugely in favour of this! And I still want to be a Gladiator when I grow up. Maybe once I've won the world memory championship I'll turn my attention to bodybuilding.

UKMC, episode two: London On £80 A Night

I stayed in the Strand Palace Hotel, which is posher than any hotel needs to be, and rather expensive, but is just over the road from Simpson's. My justification for this is that I've now got a job, and I've got a credit card, and if a fellow can't splash out on an expensive hotel once in a while (or even every single time he goes to London, despite asserting that he always stays in cheap places), what is the world coming to? And it was quiet and peaceful, and since I'd brought my abstract images crib sheets with me and spent the evenings practicing (as well as watching telly), that's a good thing. Besides, the eighty quid includes a full English breakfast, and a good breakfast is an absolutely essential part of good preparation for any memory competition.

And, as I mentioned yesterday, this was a very good memory competition! 22 people competing, old-timers including Mark Channon who competed in the world championship back in 1995 before even I had heard of these things, and new-timers including Leong Hoo Tan who turns out to be one of Graham Brightwell's students at the LSE (proving beyond scientific doubt that it really is a small world) plus a wide range of usual suspects, among them Boris, Gaby, Jürgen and Mia from Germany, a couple of Jameses, a Katie and a Dai from England and Wales, lots of other international visitors and lots of other British people too!

We started out with five-minute random words, in which I attempted 104 but blanked in the recall on most of the fourth column and on just one word of the fifth ('bluebell', and for some reason I was sure it was either 'lily' or 'lilac'). 74 is still a pretty good score, and I know I could do quite a bit better if it goes really well for me some time. It did go really well for Boris (as indeed it always seems to do), and he broke the world record with 106.

Eventually his score settled on 106, anyway - there were a lot of mistakes in the marking and misunderstandings of the scoring rules, and all the scores had to be re-checked and adjusted a couple of times before we'd settled on the final results.

But while the words were still being marked for the first time, we were doing five-minute binary. My record in this of 795 was just waiting to be broken - I set it last year knowing that I can do a lot better in practice on a good day, and Saturday turned out to be one of those good days. This despite the fact that it turned out to be four-and-a-quarter-minute binary - a mix-up in timings led to us being told to stop memorising fifteen seconds early (we had a lot of that kind of thing this weekend - Phil was running in and out of the room all weekend doing three or four things at once, and none of the arbiters in the room seemed to be keeping track of the time. In the 15-minute numbers we were told to stop a full minute early and then told to carry on again, and a couple of other times I told the competitors to stop myself when time was up, seeing as I was sitting right next to the microphone and nobody else wanted to say stop).

[At this point, can I refer you to yesterday's post when I make it clear that the arbiters do a really great job and don't deserve to be publicly criticised like this. I've got it out of my system now, more or less. Sorry.]

Anyway, my recall was unusually perfect. Literally. And I ended up with a really groovy 930 digits! New world record, and by a long way too!

So, with the competition running more or less to schedule still, we moved on to five-minute names and faces, which of course I'm rubbish at, but I produced a quite acceptable score of 41 (once I'd got my score double-checked and corrected from an even more acceptable but clearly impossible 51) to stay in a good position overall. This is Katie's specialist subject, and she duly got the highest score, but only with 65 this time. Which is a bit strange, really, seeing as I thought the names here were quite a bit easier than the ones I made up for Cambridge, when she scored a sensational 82.

Anyway, by this point it was clear that, as expected, Boris was my main rival - he dropped out of the world top ten after Hannes's performance in Tuttlingen, and was eager to get back in - with Katie, James and James fighting it out for second-best-Brit (trophies and cash for the top three British competitors) and Ameel Hoque as a dark horse newcomer doing extremely well.

After that, we just had to finish off the day with the two 'marathon' events, at least by the standards of these short-discipline championships - 15-minute numbers and 10-minute cards. I tried for four journeys' worth of digits in the first (936, plus an extra three for luck) and ended up with an excellent new-world-record 819 (ie three rows with mistakes). Which is great, because before this I didn't hold ANY of the decimal-numbers world records and it was really annoying me. As I've mentioned before, my system isn't particularly exceptional with numbers, and I wish I could think of a way to improve it.

And in the cards, I contemplated attempting a daring eight packs, but in the end they just didn't seem to be sinking into my brain as clearly as they could, so I played it safe with just seven. And I finished the recall with minutes to spare, so possibly I could have gone for eight and been just fine, but never mind. I got the seven all correct, for another world record, so I can't complain.

So, lunchtime arrived - or at least it did for the other competitors who weren't dragged away to talk extensively to Canadian television - and the end of the first day's play. I really wanted to keep memorising, I was really in the mood. Too bad I had to wait until Sunday morning to keep going.

So, at the half-way point, I had a very comfortable lead, as well as three world records to my name. Second was Boris, then tightly packed together behind him were James Paterson, Katie, James Ponder, Jürgen, Gaby, Ameel, Mark and Mia. Stay tuned for what happened next!

UKMC, episode one: In Praise Of Arbiters

Okay, FINALLY I can get round to writing about the UK Memory Championship weekend! As I said yesterday, this is going to be split into multiple episodes over the next... four or five or three days. I'm not sure exactly how many. It might also be postponed if something exciting happens to me in the next few days. But it would have to be really exciting, because I spent today, uncharacteristically, doing DIY and things with tools and paint, and I'm not going to write about that, even though it would make for a fun blog. Because I really want to write about this.

So, before I start recounting the events of the weekend, it occurred to me that my account of the memory competition is going to involve observations about arbiting mistakes, and that this is really, really rude of me, because nobody ever mentions the things that go right with the organisation and running of memory competitions. I think I mentioned before that it's like being a football referee - you get no credit for getting it right, and no end of grief for getting it wrong. So, rather than just not saying bad things about the arbiters, who work unbelievably hard for little or no financial reward and never get recognised for it, I thought I would do a prologue-post in which I list all the many, many things that went right last weekend!

First off, the venue was excellent! The rooms above Simpson's-in-the-Strand had been booked for all the previous week's afternoons for a very, very major chess tournament (the kind that attracts Adams, Short, Speelman, Timman and many other recognisable names even to someone like me who's not really interested in chess all that much) and thanks to Ray Keene (OBE, chess grandmaster, buddy of Tony Buzan) we memory people were able to borrow the room, for free, in the mornings. And the room was classy, spacious, entirely silent and perfect for a memory competition! Also, there was a constant supply of water and glasses from the restaurant, which somebody behind the scenes presumably organised without any thanks from the competitors.

Or at least not from me. It's possible that all the other competitors are more polite.

Furthermore, all the memorisation and recall papers were prepared perfectly, which is a major headache to do - the abstract images, which take Phil a huge amount of time, were printed clearly and with very good quality (and, importantly, were exactly the same quality in each copy - it's a major problem if bad photocopying or empty print cartridges make some pages different from others). The historic dates, which also take a huge amount of time to write, were done just right. And the dates and the words were translated into LOTS of languages, and I didn't hear a single complaint about the quality of the translations. That's impressive.

The scores for each discipline were announced promptly - marking papers is a tiresome and tedious process that, just to make the point again, was done by mostly unpaid volunteers just helping to make the event possible. These markers were also always accommodating to competitors questioning their scores and demanding that they be double-checked.

In a related note, and something that isn't done enough at memory competitions, the memorisation papers were available for competitors to look at after the recall period had ended and the recall papers had been collected in. This is important because memorisers know what they've written down and, once they've looked at the memorisation papers afterwards, they know what score they've got, more or less. So if there is a mistake in the marking, they can challenge it with confidence and not waste everybody's time. It makes the whole thing go more smoothly.

The cards were all shuffled, and shuffled well and repeatedly, whether the competitors had brought their own or were using the cards provided. It's another thing that takes a lot of time, isn't any fun at all, and never gets any thanks.

The spoken numbers worked perfectly, without a technical hitch, and they'd tested the sound system beforehand to make sure. This is the number one discipline for things going wrong or competitors being dissatisfied, and it all went well this time!

And, as a major tribute to the organisation, there were TWENTY-TWO competitors! This is huge! Much more huge than any competition in this country for ages, bigger than the German championship, many more than I expected, not too far off the number I was expecting for the World Championship in Bahrain in October! Excellent work with the publicity and the press releases.

So, here's a special Zoomy thank-you to Phil, Chris, Ray, Tony, Warren (whose name I am really, really going to try to remember in future), Françoise, Neil, Jamie, Dionne, and whoever else was involved with the organising and arbiting but whom I've forgotten or never even noticed in the first place because they were doing such a good job. I really, really do appreciate all the unbelievable amount of hard work and effort! Thank you!

Hey, look! It's a superhuman genius!

Okay, I've finally seen it. Here's a bit of "the making of" dialogue, just for my loyal bloglings...

Director Matt: Can you say that again, but say "Marti Pellow out of Wet Wet Wet"? Because if you just say Marti Pellow, people won't know who you're talking about.

UK Memory Genius Ben: Okay. Should I explain who Elmer Fudd is, too?

Director Matt: No, everybody knows who Elmer Fudd is.

Poor Marti. Also, for the record, can I just stress that I HAVE now got a job, and money, and everything else anybody could want. I'm very grateful to my neighbour who put a friendly letter and £10 through the door this morning, but I'm not actually in imminent danger of starving to death for want of money. For that matter, can I make it clear that when I quit my job it was always with the intention of just having fun and then going back to the office in a year or so, not an attempt to make a career out of being a memory genius? I just worry that the wrong impression's going to come across there, and I seem like a slightly more hopeless case than I really am.

Apart from that, it was good fun. Ariel the pianist looks like he'll be fun to hang out with in a few years' time, he's almost certainly going to grow up into a long-haired, extremely cool, piano-playing hippy dropout celebrity who's actually a genuinely nice guy. Akiane the artist rather less so, but great paintings. Would've been good to see her sketching something, though - I know it's hard to capture the artistic process on a brief TV segment, but the scenes of her pretending to put the finishing touches to a painting didn't really put across how she goes about creating her pictures.

Anyway, that's the last you'll be seeing of me on telly for a while, to the best of my knowledge. A similarly-themed BBC documentary early next year, most likely - they filmed me in London over the weekend, and will be pestering me a bit more in the future.

And now I've got that out of the way, I can finally get round to writing the story of the UK Memory Championship and the MSO and the impressive way I found my way around the streets of London without getting excessively lost, and how I told Nigel Short I was a big fan of his when I was a nerdy teenager. I think I'll break it into chapters and blog it over the next few days.

And on an unrelated note, I just want to say hi to Jason. Hi, Jason!

Tell you later

Tonight's blog was going to be a huge mega-epic account of all the weekend's goings-on, but then I got a call telling me that Grandma had had a fall coming out of the pub this afternoon (she swears she only had a cup of tea) and ended up in hospital. She's fine, just an impressive-looking black eye and lots of bruises, but I even ended up missing Superhuman Genius. I'll catch the repeat tomorrow, and I'll let you know what happened at the UK Championship too. Or you could read the Sun tomorrow, or the Derby Evening Telegraph, or whatever other newspapers pestered me for an interview, I forget.

But right now, I'm completely exhausted, and I've got to work tomorrow. Going to be a long day...

Do you love anyone enough?

I had a sudden craving for a tube of rolos at work today. There are numerous little shops, cafes and snack machines in the head office building where I work (it's huge), but none of them had any rolos for sale. I bought a tube of fruit pastilles instead, because even though they're entirely unlike rolos in every way, at least they're round.

I still want rolos. I should have gone out to the shops tonight and got some. Oh well, I'll get some tomorrow and eat them on the way to London. I haven't had rolos for years! It'll make the whole weekend worthwhile - much more so than winning the UK Memory Championship will!

Also, pay attention, all ex-VPS people reading this (and the ex-VPS people are the only people who'll still be reading after two paragraphs about rolos). We're (that is Tish, Gilly, Crispy, me and others) planning a trip to Alton Towers in October! Come along and join us!

This Morning Without Richard And Judy

I might be on This Morning again, if they want me on one of the days I've already got booked off work, to tie in with Superhuman Genius. I feel like that might be insulting to Richard and Judy, actually, seeing as they used to be on This Morning until either it dumped them or they dumped it (I don't read the gossip magazines, but I'm sure there was some kind of scandalous story behind it) and I turned them down (or at least turned down the Tony Buzan publicity person who asked me if I wanted to be on their show) last week.

Still, it'll be interesting to see whether Phil and Fern (assuming they still present This Morning) remember me.

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's a Superhuman Genius!

Woo! I got my picture in the Radio Times this time! And an implication that I'm among "the planet's most talented people"! Well, that might not necessarily include me, but hey, I got the picture box! Kim Peek? Hah, just not photogenic enough! Those various child prodigies? Nope, let's go with the memory man in the cool hat!

Actually, I think next Monday is beardy-weirdy day in the Radio Times. Channel 4's picture-slot goes to Rowan Williams, who apparently has fascinating things to say about Charles Darwin, whereas BBC2 has a picture of the Hairy Bikers, who in a move worthy of the title Superhuman Genius have renamed themselves the Hairy Bakers in order to do a programme about bread.

I'm told that last night's "Superhuman: The World's Smallest People" got an audience of 4.4 million, so we need to beat that in order to prove that the world is less interested in freakshow TV than it is in freakshow TV about clever people. I'm sure we can do it - there have been about seventeen different freakshow TV shows about small people lately, and there hasn't been a good genius-themed freakshow since "The Mentalists". So tell all your friends and relatives and nodding-acquaintances to watch next Monday, ITV, 9pm!

And don't listen if they say they want to watch "New Tricks" because they fancy Dennis Waterman, or "Dragons' Den" because they want to see clever people who've actually achieved something in life, or "Before They Were Stars", the Channel 5 programme that is apparently no relation to the BBC's "Before They Were Famous" because they're too stupid to comprehend any more highbrow entertainment. Order them to watch ITV instead. Steal their remote controls.

Nudity is wonderful

But nonetheless, I think I need to buy some clothes. Next Wednesday our department is doing a "Business in the Community" project and renovating a community centre rather than going to work, and, well, I haven't got a thing to wear.

I actually only own two pairs of trousers that are suitable for leaving the house in without being arrested for indecent exposure, and they're my smart black work trousers. All the other trousers I own have got broken zips or big holes in the crotch or upper thighs, and I don't really want to dress like that while I'm helping to build a sandpit in the creche area. Likewise, my only footwear is my work shoes and my trainers with essentially no soles left to them, and neither of those is really suitable if it's rainy and muddy.

In fact, all in all, I'm terribly ill-equipped for the Great Outdoors. I need to take up rambling, in the walking sense rather than the drivelly blogging sense, or mountain climbing, or fox hunting, or anything that'll get me out of the house and incurring a grass stain or two. I used to be a cub, I bet if you dumped me in the middle of a forest I could still find my way out by reference to the side of trees that the moss is growing on, rubbing two sticks together, that kind of thing. I can just see me, swinging from tree to tree, clad in loincloth made from leaves and exchanging pleasantries with the squirrels...

Memory, all alone in the moonlight...

Why is that song playing in my brain tonight? Yes, I've been thinking about memory and related subjects, but that's not really something new for me, now is it? I would have thought my brain's resident DJ would have learnt to tune out any memory-related thoughts by now.

Anyway, I'm trying not to think too much about memory for the next week. Give my journeys and images a few days' rest so that they're fresh for next Saturday and Sunday - not that next weekend's competition is a major strain on the brain, being spread out over two days and only being one normal-memory-competition day's worth of memorising. Still, it might turn out to be more stressful and hard work, with a 20-hour gap between one discipline and the next. We'll have to wait and see what happens.

I don't remember whether I've mentioned this here before (and I'm resting my memory, so I don't care that I can't remember), but after the championship finishes on the Sunday morning I'm going to dash over to the Royal Horticultural Halls to play othello at the MSO in the afternoon. That's if the memory doesn't overrun by more than an hour or so, but I think it should be safe. It would be nice to play in the evening poker tournaments at the MSO too, but they cost quite a lot of money to enter if you're doing them individually - they're really just there for the people who pay the maximum fee, whatever it is these days, to play other events all week and want to relax in the evenings. I suppose I could sneak down to the poker rooms and hope that everyone there will recognise me and naturally assume I've paid to enter, but on the other hand I've written about it on my blog now so everyone will know that I haven't. Blast this internet thing, publishing my personal details for the world to see. It's a shocking invasion of privacy and I'm going to sue someone.

Pocket Dragons, Pocket Dragons, POCKet Dragons!

Woohoo! I just discovered today that the channel Tiny Pop (737 on Virgin, 625 on Sky, if like me you've got Virgin, don't trust the onscreen TV guide, use the one on the website) is showing Pocket Dragon Adventures! I wholeheartedly approve of this development! Tiny Pop is a sister channel to the one that showed old Transformers cartoons, and indeed between them they have a huge range of 80s and 90s cartoons - most of them along the lines of My Little Pony and Strawberry Shortcake, but I'm sure there are some good ones lined up too.

So please tune in to it if at all possible, because we need to spread Pocket Dragon love around the world again! Today's episodes were "Yonder Lies The Castle Of My Wizard" and "Pillow Squawk", but if they're showing the later episodes with poor artwork and uninspired stories, I'm confident that they're also going to show all the classics too.

In more domestic news, I feel that I need to sing the praises of Flash Multi-Surface Wipes. As anyone who's been to my flat and survived the experience knows, I seldom clean the place, but these wipes are amazing at cleaning up five years' accumulated filth! My kitchen sink is positively sparkling! My cooker looks brand new! No longer are all my appliances coated in a thick layer of unidentified brown gunk! It's great!

London beckons

Last weekend before the UK championships, so with any luck a full day of practicing tomorrow, then resting my brain for the week beforehand (with maybe a speed cards here or there in an evening). I still need to book a hotel, of course, but I'll leave that to the last second, same as always. It's more fun that way.

The BBC want to put me in a documentary, and also Central Tonight want me on the show again, impressing people on the streets of Nottingham with memory tricks. I'm thinking about it, but I still haven't really got over the novelty of being able to say "sorry, I've got a real job, I just do memory things in my spare time" again...

Legends? II'M more legendary than these guys!

For want of anything more productive to do, seeing as it's hot and I feel lazy, I'm watching the England v Germany "Legends" game. I take issue with the "legend" label being attached to some of these players - most of them were second-rate when they were young, and some of them aren't old enough to qualify as legends in my book, barely older than me in some cases. Still, Chris Woods's Weetabix save to let in the first goal brought back some childhood memories, so I can't complain.

I have a feeling my stomach's going to be complaining, though. I went out to buy a pint of milk and ended up getting a big bag of liquorice allsorts. Again. Someone needs to stop Woolworth's selling unhealthy foodstuffs at low prices.

Living space

It's a good thing I'm not urgently looking for a flat in Beeston, because there aren't any! Or at least there are, but they're all too big or too expensive or too unpleasant. It's annoying - Beeston is roughly the size of Boston (and it's nearly the same word too, just with an ee instead of an o) and I never had any trouble finding a place to live in Boston. Possibly it's the Credit Crunch I keep hearing about. Perhaps everybody's so poor that they can't afford to rent out one-bedroom flats. I bet it's Gordon Brown's fault. Everything is, nowadays.

Hooray for job stability!

It's really fantastic to be able to turn down an offer to appear on Richard and Judy because I've got my day job to do. Well, technically I'm not in a position to turn them down just yet, I've just heard that they might be interested in having me on the show, among others, to talk about the upcoming UK championship. But if they do go ahead with it, you can look forward to seeing something memory-related on Friday's show. Probably not me, though.

Cats (not the musical)

There's a couple of cats who've taken to hanging around the front of my house - a black and white one and a ginger. Neither of them are very friendly, but the ginger one in particular seems to think that the entire street belongs to her, and can often be seen lying spread out on the pavement on hot days, getting up and walking away with an aggrieved expression whenever a human has the nerve to come too close.

It's made me want a cat or two of my own. Well, I've always sort of wanted to have cats around the place, but it's more at the forefront of my mind now. Maybe I'll find a place in Beeston with a garden and acquire a cat to live in it. Or just make friends with a neighbour's cats - all the fun of a furry friend without the need to spend money on cat food and vets' bills. Either way, there should definitely be more cats in my life than there are at the moment.

Vote for this guy!

I've always been vaguely contemptuous of the way Americans can't appoint anybody to any position of the slightest authority without holding at least 73 different elections, but it seems that Washington state have adopted a new system that I think is really quite groovy. They're having a "Top 2 Primary" election from which the two candidates with the most votes go forward to the real election later in the year.

The practical effect of this system is to actively encourage loonies to stand for Governor, Congress, and all the millions of other things Washington's voters will be voting for, and enables normal people to vote for the loony of their choice with a clear conscience, knowing that enough other normal people with less of a sense of humour will vote for the two real candidates (there are only two parties in the USA, remember) to get them through to the real election. I wish I lived in Washington. All the fun of voting, safe in the knowledge that the result is a foregone conclusion!

If I did live there, this guy would definitely get my vote for Governor. His qualifications for the position? "As an artist and inventor I have come up with an invention that will solve all of the world’s problems. I have invented an air engine that has the power to operate an automobile while relying on air as its fuel source. Adoption of this technology would mean an end to reliance on fossil fuels, stopping carbon-monoxide emissions, pollution and global warming."

What makes Javier O Lopez really cool is that he just slips this into the middle of an otherwise more or less sensible platform for election. He's in favour of reducing the tax burden on lower-income Washingtonians, improving the education system (well, his website doesn't actually say that he intends to improve the education system, it just points out that it's really bad at the moment, but I assume he means to do something about it if he's elected) and listening to the people of the state. Which is pretty liberal for a man who proudly tells us that he was actively involved in campaigning for Richard Nixon.

If you're in Washington state, go out and vote for Javier! And see if you can get him to make you one of those air engines!

Tis the season!

Memory season! I'm really in the mood now. UK Championship two weeks away, and I've done a practice run of the whole thing today (except names & faces, dates and words, but I never practice those and I do well enough in them. Except names & faces) and I might just do the same tomorrow. It's all about getting the brain used to memorising for long periods, so as I don't get bored or tired in the middle of the competition.

Actually, you know, life is good. I've got a fantastic job, lots of weird and wonderful friends to chat to, lots of memory competitions coming up, there's Dad's Army on telly all night, and I might even have two pennies to rub together some time soon. What more could anyone want?

Friday!

Hooray for weekends! But also, hooray for weekdays, because I'm really enjoying my new job. It's the perfect job for me, and I think I'm also just about perfect for the job. So everyone's happy! Hmm, I really need to find more things to blog about. Maybe instead of training all weekend, I'll go out and do something fun...

I make it seventeen days come Friday since anybody spoke to me

I get the feeling that my blog hasn't been all that interesting just lately. It's working nine to five that does it - when I'm doing the same thing every day, it doesn't inspire me to write about interesting stuff. And I blame this for why I haven't had much in the way of comments on my blog just lately. Even so, I would like to know somebody's still out there. Say something!

Possibly on the subject of whether I should get some new "business cards" for the UK Championship. I was thinking of retiring the "Ben Pridmore, idiot" ones and going with "Wile E Coyote, genius (have brain, will travel)"

Superhuman Genius (later than advertised)

Seems that it's been put back to Monday August 18th, rather than the 11th. But while this means it probably won't persuade new competitors to come to the UK Championship (on the 16th and 17th), it does mean that anyone who's travelled to Britain to compete might be able to stay until Monday night and see me on TV!

Although I'm only on for ten minutes at most, in a documentary about lots of superhuman geniuses, and these people will have seen me for rather more than ten minutes over the past three days, so I won't be offended if visiting memorisers don't want to watch it. Really.

I haven't done enough training!

Cripes, it's the UK Memory Championship in two-and-a-bit weeks! I need to seriously practice this weekend and next! I've got a title to defend! Actually, I don't know who's coming (early estimates suggested that every memory person I know was planning to turn up, but I haven't spoken to anyone for a while), whether there are prizes (I'd be happy with a cool trophy like last year's, but I wouldn't turn my nose up at another free trip to Bahrain if there's one going), where I'm going to stay (nasty hotel down the road from the venue, or nice but stupidly expensive one across the road? Probably neither and a bed-and-breakfast in Crawley because it's the nearest place with a room free when I finally get round to booking) or whether I'll be able to go to the Monday-morning prizegiving ceremony (might have to work that day) and whether the WMSC will officially strip me of my title if I'm not (probably not - I think I'm in their good books at the moment, or at least their indifferent books. I haven't accidentally offended anyone for weeks. As far as I know.)

This is what I get for missing the German championship. Everybody else probably had a whale of a time there, talking about all these things, and talking about me behind my back. Although they could have talked about me even while I was there, if they did it in German, and I still would have been none the wiser. I don't think I've spoken a word of German for more than a year now. I'm probably even worse at it now than I was before.

Right! Practice! And if you're reading this and you're going to the UK championship, post a comment and let me know! Keep me informed!

Ooooh, shiny!

I got one of the new-design 2p coins in my change yesterday, for the first time. I have to say, although I don't think there was any reason to change the classic designs on the back of coins, the new ones are actually rather groovy. They're stylish and modern, in a good way. It makes a pleasant change from the kind of awful design that the powers that be often end up commissioning for vast sums of money from popular but talentless designers. The 2012 Olympics logo, for instance. But I like the new coins. I think I'm going to start a collection.

I'm doing surprisingly well

I haven't yet slipped into my usual working routine of quickly ironing a shirt each morning before I go to work. I've got everything washed and ironed, plus the shopping done, at the weekend with plenty of time to spare. This kind of efficiency and advance preparation is alien to me, and I'm sure it won't last. Possibly tomorrow morning I'll oversleep, just to make up for it, and arrive at work an hour late.

Avast, ye scurvy lubbers

When it's really hot and sunny like this, my hat is uncomfortably sweaty. But since I need to wear something on my head to protect my bald shiny skull, and since I found an old bandana in one of my boxes of junk recently, I've taken to wearing a bandana when I go out. I think it looks seriously groovy. Especially when I'm also wearing my shades. However, I wasn't entirely convinced that I look good until today, when I was walking through town dressed like that (and a T-shirt saying "Aesculap Memo Masters 2007", in honour of the German championship happening in Tuttlingen today) and a small girl in a pushchair pointed to me and said (conversationally, as if it wasn't anything unusual or unexpected) "He's a pirate."

This is absolutely fantastic, and a huge improvement on "He's that one off the telly who lost to a monkey." Which, incidentally, is likely to happen if I go to Chicago any time soon - Jemfy saw me on telly there last night, being beaten by good old Ayumu. But now, everyone who sees me is clearly going to think "Hey, a pirate. Cool." I'm sure it's not just two-year-old girls who think that way.

I think I would still rather have been in Tuttlingen, but congratulations to Hannes for winning the German Memory Championship! I'm sure that more than makes up for him not being mistaken for a pirate today (as far as I know).

Spiders!

I don't get addicted to things very often. I even stopped drinking coke a couple of weeks ago to see if it would help me lose weight (the jury's still out on that one) without so much as a withdrawal symptom. But I do have a real weakness for spider solitaire. I actually deleted it from my laptop a year or so ago, because I was spending all my time playing it, but recently it occurred to me that I couldn't remember how to play, so I looked for it on the internet, downloaded it, and now I'm all addicted again. It's annoyingly compulsive. Are there rehab centres for this kind of thing?

Movie night!

I must find the time to go to the cinema. I really want to see Wall-E, and Batman looks like it's worth watching too. I wanted to look up when they're on at the big new cinema in the Westfield centre, but I can't remember what it's called, and internet searches haven't been much use. I could, of course, get on my bike and cycle down there in roughly sixty seconds, but I've got the internet, I disapprove of leaving the house to find information that I should be able to find by just sitting here and letting my legs fall off from lack of use.

I suppose I could just download the films instead of going out, come to think of it. Those TV adverts make it look like such a cool thing to do, with people coming and serenading you...

Doomed to stay in Derby

There's a real shortage of decent, affordable flats in Beeston. Maybe I'll just live on the street and carry all my posessions around with me in my trusty rucksack. It'll save me a lot of money in the long run. I'm surprised more people don't do that, instead of moaning about the difficulty of getting on the property ladder.

Hey, it's my blog, I can write what I want

Although the only thing that comes to mind to write tonight is an extensive list of observations about the Thundercats episode "Mandora - The Evil Chaser", by William Overgard. A really great episode, but watching it (as I did tonight) inspires a huge amount of criticism of plot flaws, voice acting problems and artistic issues (although actually, this was one of the better-drawn stories). And as far as I know, there's only one of my readers who'd know what I'm talking about, and he already knows everything I'm going to say.

But maybe I'm wrong. Would you, my readers, like to read a big long blog full of comments like "Why doesn't the Sword of Omens react when Quickpick steals it? When we see it later on, the Eye is wrapped up in rope (the normal way of deactivating it), but even if it was Quickpick who did that, and not the Mudhogs, how does he know to do that before touching it?"

Or "At the end of the episode, when the Thundercats 'all' chorus the final line, everybody's lips move, but only Tygra and Wilykit are audible. Were they just too lazy to overdub the other characters (who are voiced by the same actors)? And why can't we hear Panthro? He didn't share an actor with either of the characters we can hear."

And why does Mandora bellow "They're tying us to the ladders!" when the Mudhogs do so to her and Quickpick? Quickpick, presumably, has noticed this himself without being told, and there's nobody else around.

I've got about a million more of these, from this episode alone. It's a good job I'm going to refrain from posting them tonight.

Attention, viewers!

If you happened to be watching Granada Reports at 6:15 today, you would have seen my friend Gilly and her shop. Sorry I didn't get the message in time to advertise it in the blog, but if you saw it but don't know Gilly, well, now you can appreciate it all the more!

Here's an advance thing to set your video for (assuming you're still using an analogue TV/video setup) - "Superhuman: Genius", a documentary about various clever people and also me, will be on ITV1 at 9:00pm on Monday 11th August. Watch it and be in awe of my superhuman genius!