Intermission

Before I continue the thrilling account of the World Memory Championship, let's put in a plug for Chris Dickson's very entertaining blog, and especially the bit where he suggests we start a campaign to make me Sports Personality Of The Year. Actually, I don't think that goes far enough. What about the new year honours list? I defeated the evil Germans, after all - surely that's a sterling service to the British Empire that's worth an MBE?

Anyway, Chris is also kind enough to mention that comic I drew, and since by coincidence I've just finished another one (it's taken me about a year to draw this - I just never seem to find the time), here:

Memories give me the strength I need to proceed

When we last saw Zoomy, UK Memory Champion, he was about to face the first day of competition, last Friday morning. I was staying at the same hotel as Phil, Chris and Jennifer, the people who do all the work of running the competition, and they were already at breakfast when I came down (good breakfast, too - as close to an English breakfast as you're likely to get in Bahrain, beef bacon is pretty much indistinguishable from the pork stuff, and next time I might get past the name and see what 'foul mesdames' taste like...). "Don't walk there this morning!" Chris cautioned, in a way that suggested he knew I wouldn't be so mad as to walk really. "I was planning to..." I said. And I did, too - it was a bit less than half an hour if you don't get lost, and it's nice to get a bit of fresh air (albeit swelteringly hot fresh air) and exercise before spending the whole day indoors, sitting down.

I passed Yip Siow Hong on the way, and he was out jogging! Now that's excessive. But you won't catch me taking a taxi to a memory competition every day, I've got a reputation as a cheapskate socialist to protect. I got to say hello on the way to a ginger cat who looked like he might be friendly but then ran away at the last moment. I'm normally quite good with feline body-language, but perhaps it's different in Arabic.

So I got to the conference centre in good time and picked my seat (we get to choose them in order of world rankings, so I technically get to throw anyone out of their place if I really want to, although I've never exercised this privilege - any desk at the front is fine with me). I ended up with Andi Bell to my right and Liu Ping to the left; both of them likely to be among my rivals. Ping was the best of the Chinese competitors last year (although Guo Chuanwei did better than him at the Chinese championships and wasn't quite on his best form at the 2007 worlds) but he's not really part of Team China - he shuns the team uniform in favour of his stylish pale pink jacket and doesn't generally join in their noisy and excited motivational chants that they broke into at unexpected moments between disciplines. Of my other expected rivals, Gunther Karsten was lurking a few seats behind Andi, dressed all in black - how good was he going to be this year? Chuanwei was dead-centre in the room, looking confident in Team China jacket, and Johannes Mallow was towards the back, looking very much like someone who'd startled the memory world with some amazing scores at the German championship and could spring a surprise or two here.

The room itself was spacious - more than big enough to fit the 44 competitors who'd turned up (once again just failing to live up to the most-entrants-in-history boasts of the pre-championship press releases, but comfortably more than last year, which I wasn't really expecting) - and rather noisy (there were board games tournaments in the room next door, the arbiters next door on the other side and the lobby just outside the room was the place where competitors gathered to discuss the competition so far), but otherwise excellent. Great sound system which worked fine all weekend, ample supplies of water on the desks, replenished regularly and efficiently by someone who deserves high praise but who I never even saw. The whole championship ran wonderfully smoothly, in fact - huge kudos to the people working behind the scenes to make it look effortless!

Those board games I mentioned were part of the "Festival of the Mind" (there's a Tony Buzan title if ever I heard one) which incorporated the memory championship. It also included little tournaments in chess, scrabble, dama, sudoku and possibly something else too, lectures from Tony and friends and an exhibition in the basement of various brain-related things which absolutely nobody seemed to visit.

Anyway, we didn't have time for that kind of thing, because we were off on event one of ten - Abstract Images. This is the newest of the ten memory disciplines, introduced a few years ago to replace the poem, which had proved impossible to offer fairly to all competitors in these multi-lingual times. It was Dominic's idea, and the idea was to provide something that uses natural memory rather than techniques. You get rows of five abstract shapes, and you have fifteen minutes to remember the order they came in. Then you get the shapes back with the images in each row in a different order, and have to number them. Five points for a correct row, minus one point for an incorrect one.

I've been moaning for years that the images program is hugely not what it was supposed to be - the shapes are all well and good, but nobody looks at the shapes, because they're coloured in with one of a very limited number of textures, so you can just memorise those. While I was moaning about it, Gunther was practicing and working out the best system to do them, so he's better at it than anybody else. And he refuses to allow them to change it unless and until he no longer has a huge advantage. So lately I've been practicing too, and trying to catch up with him, but (as is always the way with these things) he keeps getting better too. He's recently lobbied to increase the number of rows provided from 50 to 60, and so a world record was expected from him here. It's 1000 championship points for 50 rows (250 images), so my aim here was to be less than 500 points adrift of Gunther (knowing I can usually make that up on things like binary and dates, where I'm the one who's much better than everyone else) and roughly on a level with everyone else.

[For the uninitiated, note that each discipline in a memory championship has two kinds of points to it - a 'raw score', for example 250 images, and a 'championship points' score, also known as a 'milennium standard' score, although I think that's a silly phrase and don't use it, which converts the raw score to a number proportionate to a 'milennium standard' that is worth 1000 points. So everyone is theoretically at least shooting for 1000 championship points in each discipline, which might be 250 images, 2500 digits, 100 dates, or whatever.]

I attempted forty rows, more than I've tried before, and it went pretty well. Gunther looked pleased with himself, Boris Konrad looked contented too - I should have mentioned him before, he's the second-best in the world at this one - and everyone else looked like they were waiting for the 'real' memory disciplines to start. The ones with numbers and cards, allowing the use of super-duper memory techniques, are the ones that most people come to these competitions for.

It takes time to get the results of each discipline, so we went into the second event of the day, binary digits, not yet knowing how the images had gone. Here we have thirty minutes to memorise as many 1s and 0s as possible. They come in rows of 30, and you get 30 points for remembering a complete row, 15 points if you recall a row with one mistake in it, zero for any row with two or more errors. I'm comfortably better than everyone else at this one - I've got a groovy and brilliant system for it that took a lot of work to prepare but gives me a huge advantage now it's ready and waiting in my head. Gunther is the second-best in the world. Almost all his best disciplines come on the first day of the world championship, so I knew if I was close to his score at the end of the first day, I'd be well placed.

I didn't do as well as I'm capable of doing here - for some reason I haven't quite been at my best all during my training this year, but I knew I'd still got a half-decent score by my standards; I was thinking in the region of 3700, which turned out to be very accurate, as did all my predictions this year. Memory people generally know what score they've got, more or less, but it's still nice not to be surprised.

The results of the images came in - Gunther had indeed set a new world record score, 276. Boris was second with 208, and I was very satisfied with a third place 188. That's a personal best for me, and I found out back at home that it's a higher score than anyone except Gunther and Boris has ever got, which I didn't know. But it's still cool. Boris was still disappointed, he'd been hoping for something better. That put me just 350 championship points behind Gunther. Not that the championship scores really matter at such an early stage after such an atypical discipline, but the top ten went:

Dr Gunther Karsten 1104
Boris Konrad 832
Ben Pridmore 752
Chuanwei Guo 684
Yuan Wenkui 660
Zhu Shao Min 636
Johannes Mallow 504
Su Ruiqiao 500
Dorothea Seitz 480
Mia Korkemeyer 460

The schedule had called for lunch after the binary, but it wasn't twelve yet and we had time to accommodate names and faces too. Now, as everyone knows, this is my weak spot in memory competitions. I'm rubbish at it. You get 110 photos of people's faces, each with a name underneath, and have fifteen minutes to remember them. Then you get the photos back, in a different order, and have to fill a name in underneath. One point for a correct first name, one for a correct last name. I suck at it, but my only consolation is that Gunther sucks at it even more. All I can really do with names and faces is sit back and get it out of the way, letting the likes of Andi and Boris get the good scores and just making up for it later.

After that, we went to lunch, which was again a very nice buffet, followed by an optional speech from Tony about which foods science has recently demonstrated are good for the brain. My own opinions about this being at odds with modern science, I decided to skip it.

Then we got the results of the binary digits, which is always the first indication of who's on form and who isn't. And it seemed that I more or less was - a score of 3730 - and Gunther wasn't quite. He got 2460, when he's normally above 3000. Dr Yip was on form, though, in second place with 2865, and Hannes was right behind him with 2840 - personal bests in both cases. The Chinese army, Guo Chuanwei, Su Ruiqiao, Liu Ping and Yuan Wenqui, all had scores over 2000 too, and Andi rounded out the top ten with 2013. Andi can do better than that - he genuinely had come to Bahrain believing he was in with a good chance of winning, but he's been out of serious memory competitions for quite a while and he clearly wasn't quite up to the form he had five or six years ago. Su and Yuan, on the other hand, are scarily young and clearly going to be dangerous if they improve on this year's performance.

Announcing scores is a very formal thing at memory championships, with a real ritual to it - Tony Buzan reads out the top ten in reverse order in his wonderful, sonorous, booming voice (generally mispronouncing the names of any non-English competitors) and everyone gets a round of applause (from everyone except Andi, who always sits motionless and scowling throughout), then the whole room goes out to the lobby to read the results posted on the noticeboard and see where they and their rivals are placed. The gap between me and Gunther had narrowed to a mere 34 championship points, which is better than I'd expected. I already had nearly 400 points on third-placed Chuanwei, although there was a long way to go yet.

And a major milestone on that long way was the afternoon's entertainment - Hour Numbers. This is one of the two 'marathon' disciplines; a whole hour to cram as long a number as possible into your brain. Scored like the binary, except in rows of 40, which makes it rather easier to make a mistake and lose all the points for a whole lot of numbers that you really have memorised properly. Gunther holds the record for this (1949), but I was quietly hopeful of maybe just beating it - I'd been doing very well in training.

During lunch, Andi, who has an annoying habit of offering me advice as if he's an old pro and I'm a newcomer, surpassed himself by advising me not to drink too much coke since we had an hour of memorising and two hours of recall to come. I treated this with the contempt it deserved, but in the afternoon I was rather grateful that the arbiters let competitors take a quick comfort break in between memorisation and recall, otherwise there would have been a very embarrassing situation for everyone involved, and probably a lower score in the hour numbers for me too. But, without too much bladder-related distraction, I was quite happy with my result. Gunther was reportedly rather less so, and was heard muttering that perhaps he wouldn't come back tomorrow.

We didn't get the scores until the following morning, but I'll let you in on the secret now to round off this first day report. In names and faces I'd come eleventh, with a mediocre 70. Gunther, as usual, was a little bit below me, in thirteenth with 62. The good scores had come from Boris, winning comfortably with 123.5, Corinna Draschl second with 101, then Dorothea an impressive third with 86. After them came Andi, James and Hannes, all making up a bit of ground on me, with Chuanwei just half a point ahead of me (you get half a point for a name that's phonetically correct but spelt wrong - I'm not sure how spelling works if you're getting your names in simplified Chinese characters like he does, but presumably there are arbiters who know).

In the hour numbers, I had the best score, a personal best of 1800, and I still wasn't happy. I'd thought there was an outside chance of a world record, dagnabbit. But Gunther had indeed underperformed, getting only 1352. The big threats to me were Ruiqiao with 1710 (yikes, he's going to be one to watch out for next year), Dr Yip with 1640 (he's always good with numbers, and he was clearly on form), Hannes with 1631 (in every discipline he'd elevated himself over the course of a year from the chasing pack to the top-flight competitors. I did the same, many years ago, and I'm going to need to make another quantum leap upwards soon if I want to stay ahead of these Johannes-come-latelies), Andi with 1580 (not his best, again, but you can never write him off) and Chuanwei with 1440 (a way behind me, but he's consistent at everything and I have a habit of messing one or two disciplines up every year).

The top ten championship scores after four disciplines looked like this:

Ben Pridmore 2853
Dr Gunther Karsten 2644
Johannes Mallow 2345
Chuanwei Guo 2302
Boris Konrad 2156
Su Ruiqiao 2054
Andi Bell 2041
Yip Swe Chooi 2034
Yuan Wenkui 1961
Edward Cooke 1759

Three British, three Germans, three Chinese and a Malaysian (no, Team China, you don't get to count Chinese-Malaysian Dr Yip). Boris had had a somewhat disastrous hour numbers, only getting 688, and would have to do something impressive with two of his best disciplines already gone, but was still up there. Hannes and Chuanwei were both lurking, but I was very happy with this position - being a couple of hundred points ahead of Gunther after day one and five hundred ahead of anyone else is better than I'd hoped for and started to put me into the ever-dangerous "if I don't make a mess of everything, then I might just..." kind of mindset.

Stay tuned for the Day Two Report, tomorrow, probably. Unless I don't feel like it. This one was a bit boring, to be honest...

Memories are made of this

Okay, no Memoriad for me. But my feelings of guilt about dropping out at the last minute are assuaged by the glorious prospect of four more whole days of rest and relaxation. I can't remember the last time I had that (yes, I've only been employed again for three and a half months, but my memory has trouble stretching back that far).

So let's stretch my memory back a week or so and remember the World Memory Championship, Bahrain 2008. It all started, for me at least, on the Tuesday night - having realised at the last minute that it's not actually possible to get a train from Beeston to Manchester Airport early enough in the morning to catch the flight I'd booked, I realised I was going to have to spend the night in a hotel. A little bit more internet research revealed that every hotel in Manchester and the surrounding area was fully occupied (that was the night of the Man Utd/Celtic game), and eventually the closest place I could find was an expensive suite in the Novotel in Sheffield, which was at least half way there and allowed me an early-morning train to the airport.

I've never stayed in a suite before - I don't see the point, personally. Surely the fun of a hotel room is getting to lie in bed watching the telly? Why would you want an extra little room with a settee? Inviting other people to come and hang out with you, you say? Sit on the bed, the floor, any chairs/desks etc provided! Sheesh, what kind of people book suites in hotels? Anyway, I resolutely ignored the suite part of it (and the hundred-and-something-quid cost), lay in bed watching Man U thrash Celtic, and got a good night's sleep. After a quick call to Etihad Airways, anyway, having just noticed in the small print on my e-tickets that they have a policy of cancelling bookings that aren't reconfirmed three days before departure. Still, the person on the phone put my mind at ease on that point quickly enough.

Next morning, I got the train to the airport without incident (except for a surprising announcement on the platform at Manchester Piccadilly station that the train to the airport, which I and my fellow passengers were already sitting on, had been cancelled. Someone had pressed the wrong button on the hi-tech announcements system, apparently, and the staff had to go around assuring people that yes, the train did in fact exist and was about to depart) and had time to hang around the airport and find another book to read on the journey (picked Animal Farm, seeing as I don't own a copy, to go along with the ones I'd brought along, Frankenstein and William Sleator's Singularity).

As for the flight, I think it deserves a quick glowing recommendation/advert: Fly Etihad - the airline of the United Arab Emirates! They have the best range of in-flight entertainment of any airline I've flown with! Lots of good films old and new, and a huge choice of sitcom episodes, plus a few decent cartoons. Also, they give you free socks (possibly they're special socks that prevent deep vein thrombosis, but I don't really care. I approve of people giving me free socks, and immediately swapped my holey ones for these intact (if a little small) ones) and a good meal.

Got off the plane in Abu Dhabi, which was extremely hot, and bumped into James Ponder (how typical, you go all the way to Abu Dhabi and the first person you see is someone you know) who'd just come in on a similar flight from London to catch the same plane out to Bahrain. Realised that I'd left my hole-filled original pair of socks on the plane. We flew into Bahrain, which was also baking hot, although it was after dark (the idea of holding the WMC later in the year was to make the temperature less uncomfortable for us poor Europeans, but I didn't notice any difference from last August. Still unbelievably hot and humid!) and my big rucksack was the first bit of baggage on the carousel! This is a very good sign - I'm always the last to get my bag, I think the workers in airports around the world see it coming and decide to hang onto it just for a laugh. Or maybe to ransack it for memory-champion souvenirs, I don't know.

Anyway, we split up again to get taxis to our respective hotels in different parts of Manama. James warned me in advance that there's a current scandal of taxi drivers ripping off tourists, and mine did indeed refrain from using the meter and try (and succeed) to charge me more than James said was the going rate - but since it was still less than you'd expect to pay a taxi over here for the same distance, I didn't mind too much. I was staying in the Ramada Palace Hotel, which was very nice, fancy-looking, not too expensive and air-conditioned. They didn't have a single room available for the first night, so put me in another big posh suite. I'm turning into a suite kind of person, I can tell.

So then it was Thursday morning, the day allotted in the schedule for press conferences, competitor briefing, arbiter training and a posh opening ceremony/dinner. I hadn't brought a copy of the schedule with me, so wasn't sure when exactly these things were supposed to happen, and hadn't brought a map or the address of the competition venue (the Gulf Hotel/Conference Centre) with me, so I decided that a good strategy was to just go out, walk around the city and see if I stumbled across the right hotel.

I walked out into the sweltering heat (it was just about bearable if you stayed in the shade, so I spent the morning dashing from shadow to shadow) and pointed myself in the general direction of a big pointy building that looked like it might be the Gulf Hotel. Actually, as it turns out, most of the big, glassy, expensive-looking buildings in Manama aren't hotels (I've possibly been conditioned to assume that by visiting Las Vegas), they're offices - lots of big companies have their Middle East headquarters there. I'm still not sure what the big pointy building I was aiming for is, since I got distracted on the way there, but I'm pretty sure it's an office of some kind. It certainly turned out to be in the opposite direction to the Gulf Hotel, as I found out later.

I really do love walking the back streets of an extremely foreign city, and I spent a good couple of hours seeing the sights, while still keeping an eye out for anything that might be a Gulf Hotel. Had an expensive can of coke in a rather cool and crowded market place (it's hard to pretend you're not a clueless tourist when you're the only white person to be seen and don't speak a word of Arabic) and an extremely cheap one in the cool shopping centre, then I wandered all the way down to the Diplomatic Quarter, where last year's hotel was, just to prove that I can still find my way to places and to have a drink in their nice Harvester's pub (just coke again - championship the next day, and going to an Islamic country and having a beer in a British-style pub by yourself is a bit sad) before setting out back to the city. Eventually giving up on the chance of finding the venue by random wandering (or, indeed, of finding my own hotel ever again) and went into the Sheraton, pretended I was staying there and asked for directions. It turned out that the Gulf Hotel was right out over the other side of the city, and the doorman recommended that I take a taxi, but I explained that I disapprove of taxis and would rather walk, and anyway I was already as hot, tired and sweaty as it's possible for a human being to get. So he gave me a map and I successfully followed it for what must have been about an hour's further walking to the Gulf Hotel, out near the big fancy palace.

The hotel is surrounded by a big stone wall with only one opening, and I managed to walk around three and a half sides of the complex before finding the entrance, but I eventually made my way into the conference centre. I was warmly greeted by Chris Day and the good people of MICE Management (which, incidentally, is the best-named company in the universe, especially when they're organising a memory championship and thus enable Tony to make a convoluted joke about elephants, memory and mice) who appreciated the way I'd arrived at exactly the right kind of time, about fifteen minutes before registration officially started, so as to avoid the rush. I didn't mention that it was equally possible for me to arrive six hours early or not at all, and just cheerfully took the credit.

I love the feeling of a memory championship just starting to happen - all the memory people you know and don't know gradually arriving, all the organisers running around trying to make things happen the way they should (Phil Chambers, as ever, was non-stop all weekend, much appreciated by everyone, Dominic O'Brien was always doing something and Jennifer Goddard had the job of shepherding a small army of arbiters around the place, telling them where to go and what to do). It's always fun to guess who's going to turn up and how many competitors we're going to get - reports of Astrid's return turned out to be greatly exaggerated, but Andi had definitely been seen (not at the briefing, of course, he never comes to those, but at the airport), and Ed, who wasn't on the list although he'd told me a month before that he was coming, had showed up assuming nobody was going to tell him he couldn't compete just because he hadn't filled in a registration form. The Chinese arrived in a big mass as usual, all dressed in identical Team China jackets - I can proudly report that I can now pick most or all of the top Chinese competitors out of a lineup and even have a vague idea of some of their individual personality traits; it's still a bit them-and-us, but I think we intermingled a little bit more this year. The presence of Hugh (despite the name, he's Chinese) the official Team China translator, helped with that somewhat. They want to invite me to China to give talks and things, but I don't think I can any time soon - I've only got three days of holiday left at work to last me till the end of March.

Daren and newcomer Heidi, not to be outdone, sported Team South Africa T-shirts. It's a little bit harder to be a team when there's only two of you, but they managed it. Idriz, the only Swedish competitor, was wearing his zogaj.se cap and shirt. Chester Santos, who finally won the US Championship back in March, came along to his first World Championship, we had Dagfinn from Norway, Dr Yip from Malaysia and the usual crowd of Germans were joined by junior champion Dorothea Seitz, who I decided after a moment's consideration to talk to as if we'd spoken before - I know we were in the same building at the 2007 German championship, but I couldn't be sure whether we'd actually properly met. She seemed to think we had too, so it was okay. Also there was nine-year-old Konstantin Skudler, German Kids Champion, who had written to a TV company telling them he wanted to go to Bahrain but couldn't afford it and got a free trip with accompanying camera crew following him around (as were his parents, who by all accounts he'd dragged along to the competition entirely of his own volition, rather than being pressured at all by them to compete). The Chinese team had the similarly-aged Zhang Dianshuo, who made a point of saying hi to me whenever he saw me. Since his English ran to three or four words, and my Chinese vocabulary consists of no words whatsoever, our conversations weren't very in-depth, but he still seems fun.

The introduction and briefing followed the same kind of format as usual, with a couple of additions - an extra-long speech from Tony emphasising how much work the arbiter/organiser team do for no money and out of the goodness of their hearts, and a long speech from Dominic about sportsmanship, fair play and how cheating is bad. The first of these was a deliberate attempt to forestall any protests about the last-minute schedule changes - the original schedule called for the prizegiving dinner not to take place until Monday evening, despite the event finishing at Sunday lunchtime, and despite loud protests that this meant everyone would have to spend at least one extra night in an expensive hotel, they'd insisted that it was necessary to do it that way. Then, five days before the competition, they'd been forced to reschedule the prizegiving to Sunday night when the convention centre told them they couldn't have the room on Monday after all, and had rearranged the competition timetable in an attempt to leave more time between the finish and the awards, thus proving that they could have done it that way in the first place if they'd really wanted to. Despite this, I don't think anybody was planning to complain at the briefing anyway - these things do happen, and the revised schedule was by no means unacceptable in and of itself, and anyway everybody had already complained over email in the days before the competition.

The cheating speech was to highlight that Dominic, in his capacity of chairman of the Ethics Committee, or whatever his latest title is (great job though the WMSC do, they have an amazing talent for forming new committees and sub-committees and giving themselves official titles, considering there's only half a dozen of them) was going to come down like a ton of bricks on anybody who showed the slightest inclination to look at the memorisation papers after they'd been told to stop, kept writing after the time was up, or made any attempt to cheat in any way. They even had two CCTV cameras, which he promised could pick up any unethical activity of any kind. I don't know if they actually worked or if they were just there to scare people, but I'm all in favour of making it clear that cheating isn't acceptable, even if we haven't really had any problem with it in the past (I heard rumours, possibly made up, that someone had been caught communicating with a hidden microphone up her sleeve - it all seems a bit far-fetched and unlikely to me, but perhaps some people really do think you can gain fame, fortune and glory by cheating your way to an above-average score at the world memory championships?)

I had a splitting headache by this point, possibly from sunstroke, so decided to skip the posh dinner (I really dislike posh dinners, although as it turned out this one was a non-posh, no-waiting-around-between-courses buffet which I would have really enjoyed, but never mind) and went back to my hotel for a room service snack (I also, generally, disapprove of room service as being unnecessarily extravagant, but the Ramada Palace has a really nice choice of inexpensive meals). Or at least I eventually went back to my hotel - not remembering how to get there, I walked right past it and all the way back to the Sheraton, where I asked the same helpful doorman how to find the hotel I was actually staying at, still without giving away the fact that I wasn't staying at the Sheraton. Having eventually got to my posh suite, I had a very early night and woke up bright and refreshed at exactly the right kind of time in the morning. Interestingly, while I often feel headachey or unwell immediately before a memory competition, I'm always 100% fighting-fit on the day itself, and this year was no exception. But I'll pause this account here, and tell you about the actual competition just a little bit later. Thanks for your patience and thank you for choosing Zoomy's Thing; we know there are other blogs out there and we value our loyal customers.

Pros and Constantinople

Sorry about not doing the promised memory-writing last night. I was so tired that I went to bed at half past seven, and then woke up at half past three this morning (possibly posessed by the spirit of my late father, who always slept those kinds of hours, probably as some kind of revenge for writing yesterday about wearing my old coat instead of the leather jacket that he bought me). I got up, had a bath, had breakfast, checked my emails, went back to bed and slept again for another few hours. And I've spent most of the day lounging around doing nothing, which was great.

You've probably noticed I'm not in Istanbul. I spent quite some time weighing up the good and bad points of going or not going, and ultimately the option that involved not getting out of bed won. And so then I did get out of bed and went to Nottingham, just so that the world wouldn't think I'm lazy. But I only spent a couple of hours there, before coming home and changing into my pyjamas again - it sounds weird, I know, but I really DO need to spend a day in bed after a memory championship (which I didn't do yesterday, because I went out to do an interview with Radio Derby and spent most of the day hanging around in the city). Sitting around for three days remembering numbers physically exhausts me.

I might still find the best last-minute price and fly out there tomorrow - tomorrow is just the optional sight-seeing tour of Istanbul, the competition's on Saturday and Sunday - but I think it's more likely that I won't. Haven't completely decided yet, but here's my thinking behind it at the moment:

It occurred to me today that my number one reason for going there is because there's a pretty good chance that I would win $4,500. And if I'm doing something mainly because it would involve getting money... it just offends my sensibilities somehow. I got lots of money from the World Championship, enough to pay off those credit cards that keep sending me rude letters and have a bit to spare for future credit card splurges, so I don't need an extra two or three grand. And I'm very much not a professional memory man. Sure, there's also the hanging out with people aspect, but it's only Gunther, Andi and Boris from the memory world, and I saw them last weekend, plus the mental calculation people, who I mostly don't know all that well. And there are people right here (okay, mostly on the internet), who I haven't hung out enough with over the last couple of months. And then there's the wanting-the-Memoriad-to-be-a-big-success aspect, but I don't really think my presence or otherwise is going to make an impact. It's always going to get a lot more coverage in Germany than over here, so it'd probably be a good thing if Gunther or Boris win gold medals. Besides, I took too much of the prize fund at the WMC, it'd be greedy not to let them have a share.

And there's the rather embarrassing reason not to go - I find that I genuinely care about my job. And if I fly back from Istanbul on Monday and go into the office on Tuesday, I will be rubbish for the rest of the week. I will make a horrible mess of the monthly wastage analysis, which I care about even if nobody else does, and I'll be falling asleep at my desk and wishing I was at home. Whereas if I spend the next four days lounging around, I'll be fed up with being at home and positively delighted to be at the office!

So, it's about 75% probable that I won't go to the Memoriad after all. We'll see how I feel tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I really, really will write about the World Memory Championship! At great length! Tonight, or tomorrow, or both!

And it's cold, cold, cold, and we'll soon be old

Naturally, the British weather decides to punish me for going away to sweltering-hot Bahrain by being horrifically cold when I get back. But I found it quite a pleasant change to go out early this morning (I'm still three hours ahead of GMT) in the chill. Besides, I wore my old coat that I haven't worn for years, and was amazed by how warm, cosy and snuggly it is! Why did I stop wearing it? I've always worn my leather jacket in winter, and many years ago I realised that I just had this coat lying around but never did anything with it, and resolved to give it away to someone at work who was collecting winter clothes for the homeless. I put the coat in a safe place so I'd remember it, and like many other things I've put in a safe place over the years, never saw it again until I moved house. But now I think I'm going to start wearing it again, it's great! And it's reversible, so if I ever become a criminal and stop being a nationally-famous memory man, I'll have a perfect disguise!

Still, I imagine most of my readers didn't tune in to this blog to read about my coat (it really is a great coat), so don't worry, memory talk coming later tonight. I just wanted to record that I'm wavering about my decision to fly to Turkey tomorrow. I'm utterly exhausted, and another weekend of travelling and memorising followed by going back to the office the day after I return will literally kill me. I really do want to go along and support the Memoriad, but it's not going to do my mental and physical health any good at all. I think I'll just see whether I can get out of bed tomorrow morning, and if I can't, send my apologies.

Brief trailer

I've just got back, I've got squillions of emails and messages to read through, and it's after midnight, Bahrain time. Tomorrow, assuming I get out of bed at any point during the day, you can expect a full travelogue!

Blogging temporarily suspended

Well, I probably won't have internet access while I'm away in Bahrain, so you might have to wait until next week for an update from me. I got told off last year for not going into enough detail about the world championships, so even if I can't get online, I'll make notes and write about the whole thing at excessive length when I return. So that's something to look forward to!

Mindwipe

Woo! This has been one excellent weekend's training for the world championship! I feel fully prepared for the rigours of competition! The only thing that worries me is that I might have crammed this final practice in a little too close to the championship itself - I really needed the training, so I'm still pretty sure this was best in the long run, but there's always a problem of my journeys not being fresh enough next Friday when I need them again.

So what I need to do now is blank out my brain completely. Not memorise a single thing between now and the competition. In fact, not even THINK about remembering anything, at all! That might cause a problem or two at work and in any social situations where remembering to wear clothes is a requirement, but I think it'll be worth it in the end. Just as long as while I'm remembering not to remember anything, I do remember to go to Bahrain.

We be bad!

Today I've done a final practice run of 30-minute binary and hour numbers, had a haircut, done some shopping and won an Online Memory Challenge, and it's only seven o'clock!

Let's talk about the OMC first, because we haven't had one for a while, and it's returned, better than ever, thanks to that statistics whiz and website-creating genius, Simon Orton. The website now has an excellent training system as well as regular online competitions, so it's well worth checking out - you need to email Simon to register, so check out this page for the details. There's another Challenge tomorrow morning at 11:00 British time!

And now let's talk about hour numbers, because I'm feeling very happy about that all of a sudden. Last year I didn't train on the final weekend before the WMC, because I had an annoying TV crew following me around, but that's not a problem this year - the BBC are safely packed off to America, filming somebody else, and I've only had one late-night phone call from Michael with a query about memory techniques (he really is enthusiastic about it, it's great! He can memorise a pack of cards already!) - and I'm very confident that it's going well this time round. I got a 3630in binary this morning, which isn't bad because it could have been much better with a little more effective time management and fewer silly mistakes, and then this afternoon a whopping 1960 in hour numbers. Would have been a nice round 2000 if not for a stupid error on the penultimate line - I memorised the right image but somehow wrote down the wrong numbers and didn't notice (I did go through and double-check what I'd written at the end, but my mind had obviously started to wander a little after 58 rows of numbers).

I credit this better-than-usual score (it'd be a world record, just barely, if I did it in the competition, although I'm expecting Gunther/Andi/Dr Yip/someone to beat that record by a bigger margin next week) to a slight change in technique. After reading through each journey's worth of digits (234) once, I normally whizz through them very quickly again, but this time I closed my eyes and went through what I'd memorised carefully in my head, only looking at the paper when I couldn't remember an image. It was quite a bit slower (4 minutes per journey instead of 2½), meaning I only went through the digits three times, but my recall was a lot more accurate. I think I'm slowing down in my old age, but that seems to not necessarily be a bad thing.

If tomorrow I manage to do another OMC plus an hour cards, and maybe a bit of spoken numbers, I will be fighting-fit for the world championship. I'm on form and (fingers crossed, touch wood) hopeful of winning!

Bahrainy sports

I notice that there's a new snooker ranking tournament in Bahrain in November, just a couple of weeks after the world memory championships, but several of the world's top snooker players can't be there because of a clash with that stupid Premier League Snooker thing that nobody cares about. Insane though it is that something like this might happen, it makes me wonder just how long it'll be before the same thing happens in the memory world. We've had a near miss this year with the Memoriad the week after - what do you bet that next year someone'll organise a competition in Europe at the same time as the world championship in Bahrain?

I'm not ready!

I'm jetting off to Bahrain next Wednesday and I'm struggling to get everything done at work before I go. I'm having two whole weeks off, rather than go back there for the brief couple of days between returning from Bahrain and jetting off to Turkey (which would kill me - I'll need to catch up on my sleep), so I'm stressed and working too hard right now. Which, of course, is exactly the right frame of mind to be in for a World Memory Championships, so I'm quite hopeful that it'll do me some good!

See Zoomy Play!

Click here! Click here! (only one clicky-thing, I'm just so excited I had to say it twice)

It's the video of our day at Alton Towers! And here's a viewer's guide for the benefit of those who want to know who's who. All the bright-sunshine scenes are of some other day, all the gloomy-and-cloudy scenes are real footage of yesterday.

At the 40-second mark it's me on the right in the hat, Jabba on the left in the groovy shirt and then Ace comes round the corner dressed in black. At about 1:25 you can see Argo front-and-centre with the greenish shirt and black jacket, and Crispy at the front on the right looking at him, then behind them it's me with jumper tied around my waist, Kitty level with me with the long hair and groovy black outfit, Gilly in front of him with long black coat, and it's hard to tell for sure, but I think it's Sleepy just behind my left shoulder, and Jabba peeping out over Kitty's.

On the rapids, clockwise from me it's Sleepy, Crispy (in matching raincoats), Jabba and Gilly. The others didn't want to do the water rides, but they missed a lot of fun. I stayed almost completely dry on the rapids, while the others all got soaked.

On Rita, it's Jabba next to me, Kitty behind me and I think the others except Ace and Mik went on the previous one. Fast! Zoomy! Scary! The Flume is, front to back, me, Gilly, Crispy and Sleepy. With five grown-ups in a tub and it spitting with rain, we got splashed LOTS more than the sunny stock footage shows. And Spinball Whizzer has Kitty next to me, and Jabba and Ace behind. I'm still terrified of that thing, and I've been on it twice now. My ambition is to open my eyes a crack next time.

Best birthday ever!

And even though Jabba's still here, I'm going to do a blog tonight to talk about it!

Nine of us on the Big Zoomy's Birthday Alton Towers trip - Me, Jabba, Kitty, Crispy, Sleepy, Gilly, Argo, Ace and Ace's new guy Mik (who seemed surprisingly undisturbed by our eccentric gang). It being Tuesday, and a school day, and mid-October, and cloudy, the place was pretty empty and the queues were non-existent. But the park was still populated enough to have three different people recognising me and saying hello, which was very cool because it's the first time that's happened while I've been in the company of VPS people. Crispy said to the first of these fans "Do you mean you know who he is, or do you just want to shake hands with people with hats and beards?"

Although I'm something of a feardy-gowk, the only rides I was too scared to go on were Corkscrew, Oblivion, Nemesis and Air - I did go on lots of other scary things, and spent the entire time screaming loudly with eyes firmly closed. That's just how I like to do roller-coasters, although Kitty, who was sitting next to me on Spinball Whizzer, didn't seem to enjoy it so much.

And, thanks to the absence of people and Crispy sweet-talking the guy on the control booth, we got to go round Runaway Mine Train (admittedly a roller-coaster for babies, but I still liked it) five times!

Even coolest, I wore one of those magic bracelets that makes cameras point at you all day, and got a fantastic DVD of our adventures! And not just clips of us on the rides (stock footage of the ride, filmed in bright sunshine, edited rather awkwardly together with scenes of us whenever we went past a camera), but a couple of clips of us walking around too! It's brilliant, and I'm currently trying to put it up on YouTube - if I succeed, I'll share it with you.

Ooh, also, Jabba got me a chemistry set and Kitty got me a magic trick! And Ace got me a hand-made glittery card made by Mik's sister!

Okay, I was wrong

Quick bit of bloggery before Jabba arrives to spend the night before our trip to Alton Towers (woo!) tomorrow for my birthday (woo!) to say that, despite my expectations, filming with the BBC today was a LOT of fun! Mainly thanks to the presenter Michael Mosley, who proved an enthusiastic and extremely talented pupil at memorising cards. I'm thinking he's going to turn into a memory star in the future. We did lots of fun stuff in a refreshingly short six-hour session, and I think it's going to be good to watch (won't be on telly till April, but I'll remind you in good time).

Also, it's my birthday tomorrow! Woo!

Oh well

There are times when you feel all motivated and keen to achieve things, and then there are days when you feel it's more important to sit around doing nothing, and cheerfully give in to notions like "You know, I've never actually played original Donkey Kong, ever. I'd better download it and see what it's like." You just have to take days like this as they come and not worry about them too much.

Anyway, tomorrow it's the bleeding BBC coming round to film me. I'm supposed to teach the presenter, whose name I've forgotten, how to remember people's names. Even though I've told the person I think is the director, whose name I've also forgotten, and the other person who might be the director, who's probably called Catherine something (something that begins with W) that I'm not good at remembering names. And that's not not-good-compared-to-certain-other-superhuman-geniuses, that's not-good-compared-to-certain-unusually-intelligent-bricks. But people never take me seriously when I say I've got a bad memory, they assume it's my adorable putting-myself-down act.

Also, they want me to memorise barcodes in the supermarket again. And since I haven't yet signed anything promising confidentiality and not being downright rude about this latest documentary... I'm not overwhelmed with enthusiasm about this one.

A successful but unconvincing display

I think my memory performance in all aspects of my life today mirrors England's performance on the football pitch - it got the job done, but it could have been better. It suddenly occurred to me in the bath this morning that I'd completely forgotten on Friday afternoon to email some figures to my boss, who needs them for a meeting at 7am on Monday. So I sneaked into the office for five minutes (remembering to put on some clothes first), printed them out and put them on his desk in a probably futile attempt to pretend they were there all along and avoid all the memory jokes.

With that out of the way, I checked the Radio Times to see if the England game was on proper telly, saw that it wasn't on BBC1 and concluded that it must be on Sky. I considered going to a pub to watch it, but you can't really watch a game in the pub without drinking a couple of pints of lager, and I do need to memorise stuff tomorrow, so I decided to stay at home and memorise some binary digits instead.

Having done that (a pretty decent result, but still not up to my absolute best), I came back into the living room, glanced at the Radio Times again and thought "D'oh! Of course, ITV have the rights to England games these days! I did know that, I'd just forgotten!" And sure enough, they were showing the game. As luck would have it, though, I only missed the first half, which by all accounts was dull and goalless, and saw the second, which was fast-paced, exciting and had six goals, five of them scored by England.

So, all in all, a pretty good day, memory-wise, but not one that's going to win me the World Cup. Sorry, World Championship.

The Man Who Wouldn't Be King

Thanks for the interested comments about me becoming King, but I'm pretty certain I haven't got a drop of blue blood in my veins. Nothing but working-class Yorkshire folk in my family tree, I'm afraid, so you'd basically have to kill everybody else in the world, probably including yourselves, if you wanted me to end up on the throne. And I'd only abdicate and give all the money to charity anyway.

Still, it's the weekend, and that means it's memory time! All work and no play makes Zoomy a world champion, fingers crossed, touch wood.

Seriously?

There's an advert on telly in between all the cartoons I watch for a Fisher Price pink fantasy castle kind of thing, and the narrator enthuses that "Princess Sarah-Lynn and Prince Andrew are getting ready for the party!" or something along those lines. Princess Sarah and Prince Andrew? Do they expect small girls to re-enact a thrilling fairytale divorce hearing?

Actually, is Prince Andrew even still alive? I don't seem to have heard anything about him for decades. If he is still alive and just not being in the newspapers, I approve wholeheartedly and think that the rest of the royals should follow his example. Especially if he's quietly doing some kind of charitable work instead of sitting around watching telly all day. Hey, maybe he's also a fan of Ben 10 and also giggles at that fairy castle Prince Andrew!

First, a couple of adverts

Co-op own brand mint humbugs are delicious! Possibly the best humbugs I've ever tasted! Go and buy some, and share them with me!

Secondly, go and watch channel 4 tomorrow (Thursday) night at 9pm - a Cutting Edge documentary about narcoleptics, directed by Nick "The Mentalists" Holt.

And now our feature presentation - let's talk about the World Memory Championship! The "official" list of registered competitors now stands at 63 people (33 of them Chinese), which even if the usual 50% of those are no-shows would be a decent turnout. Who knows, if Team China really is that big, it might even do what the press releases inaccurately promise every year and have the most competitors ever! (Despite annual 'biggest ever' claims, the record still stands at 46 entrants in 2003 - and even then the press releases after the event claimed it was 53.)

So let's have a look at a few of the names that stand out on that list of 63. And let's start with Astrid Plessl, returning to competition for the first time since November 2004! She's still ranked number 5 in the world, it's just a question of how much she's been practicing since all those years ago. She came within a whisker of winning the world championship in 2003, really deserved to win it in 2004 instead of me, and was for a couple of years one of the absolute best. She always merited more than that lengthy list of second places in competitions (just one win to her name - Austrian championship 2003, in the middle of four runner-up medals, each one behind a different winner! Andi in the WMC 2003, Gunther in Prague 2003, me in the WMC 2004 and then Clemens in Austria!) and it'll be great to see her back again.

And to forestall the many queries I always used to get on the subject, I don't know if she's seeing anyone right now, but I doubt I would be able to set you up on a date with her. Of course, I haven't seen her for four years, she might be a hideous toothless crone by now.

Let's move on. Also registered is good old Andi Bell, three times former champion, unquestionably the best in the world in 2002-2003, but not quite able to keep up the championship temperament since then. I'm hoping that if he's prepared to travel all the way to Bahrain (an idea that he scoffed at the last time I spoke to him), he's planning to win. I don't think he'd make the trip if he didn't believe he could end up on top, it's just a question of whether he really is as prepared as he thinks he is. If he's on form, and doesn't give up half way when things aren't going well, you'd have to bet on him for a top three position (something he achieved for nine consecutive years from 1995 to 2003). If he's really at his optimum performance level, you'd bet on him to win.

Running down the list from top to bottom, we see Ronnie White, the American who, not aware that anybody had ever set a world record for memorising numbers before, claimed on national TV to have broken a record by memorising something like 23 digits. Since being enlightened as to the existence of memory championships, he's been promising to come to one for quite a while now. I'd say there's a sporting chance he'll be a no-show again, but I'm still hoping to meet him. He sounds like a nice guy.

A strong German team includes reigning champion (but how out of practice is he, and how's his motivation to try to win it again now that he's finally achieved it?) Gunther, German Champion Johannes (who I'm still extremely worried about, since he seems to have improved hugely since last year, and he was pretty good to start with), Boris (always hovering somewhere near the top of the scoreboard) and many more - Germany are my bet for team champions this year again.

Dai Griffiths and James Paterson are listed as representing 'Wales', while the rest of the British competitors are down as 'UK'. Well, if they've seceded, then I'm jolly well going to be Team England this year, and squish them like... I want to say Edward I, but whichever king it was who particularly squished the Welsh.

Yip Swe Chooi (the venerable Dr Yip - memory sports is a first-name-terms kind of thing, but there's something about Dr Yip that just demands the title) will be there again, I'm glad to see, although he doesn't seem to have an accompanying entourage of little students any more. He's capable of blowing anyone away when he's at his best, despite the comparatively lowly world ranking of 17th. One of these days it'll all come together for him and he'll be the shock world champion.

And now we're into that list of Chinese names. I don't know any of these people, and we really need to rectify that this year. Liu Ping was the pick of the bunch last year, with Guo Chuanwei not far behind, but I couldn't even tell you which ones they were if I was confronted by the whole Chinese team (admittedly this is more because of my difficulty with names and faces than because I've never spoken to them - we did hang out a little bit last year). But, the need for more international socialising aside, either one of them could be a winner this time round with only a little improvement on their 2007 results.

And let's mention Chen Yu Juan. She has been 'officially' stripped of her time in the speed cards last year (or at least it's been taken off the statistics website) after the widespread accusations of cheating, and it'll be interesting to see how she does this time round. Personally, I'm hoping she can prove her detractors wrong and do something amazing.

I think the top ten this year, in no particular order, will be made up of me, Andi, Astrid, Gunther, Hannes, Boris, Ping, Chuanwei, Lukas and Ed. But I'm rather hoping that someone I haven't even considered will come through and amaze the world. It's always great to see a new superstar!

Oops, nearly forgot to blog

That doesn't bode well for the memory championships, does it? Well, since I haven't left myself enough time to write about it tonight, here's a quick trailer: tomorrow I'm planning to talk about all the people who are apparently going to the WMC! Astrid! Andi! Gunther! And many more!

It's derived from the English words "MENtal math", "MEMORy", "ReaD" and "olympIAD"

At least that's what the website says. Personally, I suspect the name "Memoriad" is just derived from "memory" and "olympiad", like it was when other people coined the name years ago. Apart from that, though, I'm all in favour of the Memoriad, which happens in Istanbul on the 1st and 2nd of November, practically as soon as we get back from the WMC.

The coolest part of the Memoriad, which also involves a mental calculations competition identical to the world cup, which will nicely make up for me missing that earlier this year, is that everything's going to be done on computer. And they've got a software available for download which is very, very good indeed! Better, I would go so far as to say, than anything anyone has created before. Apart from a couple of little bugs, it works perfectly, and I think this is the future of the memory championships.

Distant future, of course. There's always the question of being able to arrange the necessary computer technology in large enough quantities for all the competitors to use, and I can't see that happening at the world championships for some time. But, barring software errors, this will make arbiting a lot quicker, easier and less prone to mistakes.

I objected to the idea of computerised memory competitions when they were first suggested to me, long ago, and I'm still not really comfortable with the idea of forcing competitors to stare at a screen constantly for an hour, but I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works. And that software is extremely nifty. Go and download it, even if you're not planning on going to Istanbul!

Also, go to Istanbul. There's prize money!

Memory, memory, memory!

I am so completely in the memory competition mood right now, it's fantastic! I've just finished an hour cards practice, without even caring that I was missing the first ten minutes of Match Of The Day, and I'd go and memorise something else afterwards if I wasn't aware I've got to go to work tomorrow. This is the first time I've done what I used to call 'a full weekend' of training (30-min binary, hour numbers and hour cards, all in one weekend) for I don't know how long. And I'm buzzing with things to write about the WMC and the Memoriad. I think I might devote the whole of next week's blogging to memory talk. Unless something else comes up.

I should also apologise for the way I'm neglecting the people I regularly talk to/hang out with, but I am really hitting the right frame of mind at exactly the right time this year, and it's exciting me. I'm starting to feel like I might win the world championship if I keep this up. Woohoo!

I forgot Blue Peter, and also that Canadian thing

If the Canadian thing was ever on telly - they didn't tell me about it or send me a DVD if it was. I think they probably told me the name of the show at one point, but I don't remember it.

Anyway, I've done a healthy load of memorising today, and if I do the same kind of amount of work tomorrow, I might just start to think I'm in with a chance of winning the world memory championship. I'm still very much not up to speed - I did an hour numbers today and only got 900, which isn't even up to grandmaster standard, let alone the sort of super-ultra-grandmaster standard I expect of myself, but I was deliberately attempting more than I know my brain is capable of, just to see what my limits are and whether I can keep that concentration going for a three-hour period. And it all went pretty well. Also did a 30-minute binary and got the kind of score that would beat everyone except possibly Gunther if he's at his very best, so I was happy with that.

Of course, my trouble this year is that I don't know which of my main rivals are going to be at their best. I'm assuming Gunther won't be, just because I wasn't the year after I won the world championship, and he hasn't competed at all since then, and he hopefully won't be thinking he can beat me again (and positive thinking is 90% of memory competitions). What's Andi going to do? I'm thinking maybe something exceptional. Just how good is Hannes these days? He's the dark horse that's scaring me the most, after the German championship. And what about all these Chinese people I don't know? We really need to spend more time hanging out with the Chinese competitors, exchanging emails, chatting on forums and so on. The only one I'm in any kind of contact with is Haizhan, and he's not even coming this year. The memory world is seriously in danger of turning into an 'us and them' kind of situation. Maybe I'll learn mandarin and go to the next Chinese championship. If they let me in the country after my previous joke on this blog about overthrowing the government.

And speaking of jokes and governments... I know I have a rule about not talking politics on here, and I know I have another rule about not quoting news stories and commenting on them, and I know I'm nearly thirty-two years old and shouldn't giggle at things like this... but I love the headline "Mandelson Return 'A Risk' - Balls"

What TV shows have I been on?

I always seem to forget that episode of Child Of Our Time. I just remembered today that I was on it, and I never include that in the list whenever someone asks me which TV shows I've been on. Which doesn't happen as much as it should, incidentally. What's the point of being a star of probably more than ten obscure TV shows if people don't ask you to list them? So, I figured that since I must have fans out there who keep detailed notes about my celebrity exploits, I'd see if there's anything else I've forgotten. By my current reckoning, the list goes:

Central Tonight (a couple of times)
East Midlands Today (possibly only once)
Weakest Link
Child Of Our Time
This Morning
Richard and Judy
The Mentalists
Extraordinary Animals
Superhuman: Genius
The Panel (Ireland)
Caldeirão do Huck (Brazil)

Eleven of them! Are there any others? I have a feeling there might be, but my memory's letting me down...

(Note: tomorrow's blog entry will contain less boasting about how famous I am and more of 'that self-deprecating thing you do, you know, your usual patter', as the BBC documentary person I've been talking to kindly described it)

Ooh, ooh, that thing on Current TV, "He's The Memory Man"! Twelve!

Multiple subjects

I don't think I really plugged Ed's book as much as I should have done yesterday. Rather than sort of mentioning it in passing, I could have pointed you to the website and told you all to check it out. Now that I've heard a little bit more about what it's about, I think I can safely guarantee that it's worth buying. As anyone who saw The Mentalists (and that's all of you, right?) knows, Ed is tremendous fun, and this book is going to be a great read for anyone, whether they're interested in memory matters or not!

You can listen in to what Ed and I had to say on Radio Derby today, here if you click on "listen again" and find the Aleena Naylor show for today (Thursday) and fast-forward to about 1 hour 25 minutes into the show. It was good fun, although taking time off work was inconvenient - busy there at the moment.

Which is particularly annoying when Harry Hill wants you to make a cameo in a sketch on his show, but they want to film it next Thursday, which is a day when I really can't not be in the office, because my boss is on holiday and there's stuff that needs doing that only I can do. Hilarious-sounding sketch, though. I'm really going to hate not to do it, if I end up missing out. And I'll tell you this, if I don't get to be on Harry Hill, which I would love, I'm not going to do this BBC documentary thing they want to do with me next week, which I'll dislike.

But anyway, I'm finally catching up with some of those moving-house tasks I've neglected in the nearly-a-month since I've been here. The gas here is supplied by eon, and the electric is supplied by edf, so I decided to play the field a little before putting them both under the same supplier so I can get some kind of discount. And I was expecting to end up ditching eon, because they supplied me at my last place and I had no end of hassle with them. eon now think I'm called Benjimin, and had my address slightly wrong, while edf just call me B Pridmore, and have the address slightly wrong in a different way.

But in the calling-to-set-up-a-direct-debit stakes tonight, with eon the phone was answered immediately by a friendly and helpful operator, who took all my details, fixed the address, would probably have fixed the name had I remembered to mention it, and sorted out all the technicalities without any hassle. Rather strangely interrupted the proceedings to tell me I was speaking to Janice halfway through the conversation, but otherwise a perfect example of customer service. edf, on the other hand, I gave up on after ten minutes of an endlessly-looped weird cover of "It's not easy being green" interrupted every thirty seconds by an assurance that my call will be answered.

It's good to be home!

It's weird, but having two days in Sheffield immediately followed by two days in Birmingham feels like being away from home for much longer than when I go away to one place for a week. I feel like I haven't set foot in my flat for years! Maybe it's having gone to Paris the weekend before, and being at work all the time I've been at home...

Anyway, it's going to be extremely nice to have a weekend off. Or a weekend of memory training, as it should hopefully be. And also a weekend of catching up with all the other things I've been needing to do for weeks now. I definitely have to get a haircut, because it just looks stupid when it gets to this length, and the three hairs on top of my head are long enough that you really notice them (and point and giggle).

But before any of that, I'm dashing away from work for a couple of hours tomorrow for an interview on Radio Derby. 11:30-ish, if you want to tune in. Ed Cooke's promoting his book on local radio stations, and Derby thought they'd have a word with their more-or-less-still-local memory man while they were on the subject.

Expectations

If I don't perfectly remember something I've made an effort to memorise, like for example a store's credit claim values, I'm annoyed with myself. The people I'm showing off to, however, are usually just as impressed by an imperfect recall as they are by a perfect one. It's rather irritating, really. I'd like to raise public expectation of memory performers, so that they won't be satisfied with mediocre achievements. We need a nationwide media campaign, with the message "If someone doesn't memorise every single thing they said they would, throw rotten vegetables at them!" That way I'll feel properly appreciated if I do get things right.

Incidentally, my memory stuff today mostly did go perfectly. And it's nearly done with now!

Making an exhibition of myself

Well, here I am at the Hilton in Birmingham, being a professional memory man for the next two days. Ahh, only 48 hours until I can go back to being a professional analyst with a weird hobby. Still undecided what to wear at our stand at the healthcare exhibition - business suit with hat and enormous red tie, probably, although I did bring the Brazilian Mystery Cloak and I might try that out if I'm feeling adventurous. I can't wear my normal office uniform, because I can't memorise when I'm dressed like an accountant. It's a strange psychological hangup of mine...

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.