Very quick update

I got a disappointing 1756 or something like that in Hour Numbers, but it was still the third-best score, narrowly beating Gunther. But Wang Feng, who I've never heard of before this competition, got a record-beating 1980-something and Su Ruiqiao got 2080. That leaves me in second place overall after three disciplines, behind Gunther (who, as I've said before, is always in the lead at this point) but only fractionally ahead of a whole gang of other people.

Names and faces went as badly as usual for me, speed numbers I got 360, which was the second-best (after Hannes) in the first trial - Ruiqiao, attempting 680, got 52 or something bad like that, so hopefully no sensational new record there in the second trial. Historic dates I got 90-something. Hour Cards this afternoon, I need to do something cool if I'm going to win this competition. Now I've got to go and talk to CBS. I'm not even sure who CBS are - Americans? The man who wants to talk to me is English...

Latest news

Well, I did worse than I expected in Abstract Images, ending up with only 159 and joint 13th place (I think last year that score would have put me in the top five - the scores are going to be scary this year, I suspect). Gunther broke the world record with something like 318. But then I made up for it in the Binary, getting a better-than-expected 4105 (just short of the world record but since when I'd finished I reckoned I'd got somewhere in the high 3000s, I'm not disappointed), while Gunther had a disappointing-by-his-standards score of around 2500. That leaves Gunther in the lead after two disciplines, as he always is, but it's very close behind him - I'm in second, but only just.

When we get the Hour Numbers results tomorrow morning, then we'll be able to see who's really on form and start speculating about the end result. All I can say is that if I didn't make too many stupid mistakes, it's possible (not probable, but possible) that I got a score of over 2000. Gunther, Hannes, Chuanwei, Ruiqiao and probably some others too are also saying they might have beaten the magic 2000 that's eluded us all for so long. I might quite possibly not have made the top ten in this discipline either, we'll just have to wait and see. Boris summed it up nicely just now - "I'm in ninth place, and I think this is the highest score I've ever had after two disciplines!"

Now I'm off to eat something unhealthy and get an early night. Tomorrow, it's Names and Faces (yay), 5-Minute Numbers, Historic Dates and Hour Cards. Stay tuned to memory-sports.com!

London blogging

Written last night in old-fashioned pen-and-paper style:

Evening of day 0. Got to London okay, even enough time to drop my bag off at my cheap-and-nasty hotel before making my way to the expensive-and-nice hotel on the Strand for the registration and competitor briefing. I also stopped in a couple of shops along the way, looking for a towel - unsure whether the cheap-and-nasty hotel was nice enough to provide towels and shampoo, I decided to bring the latter and not the former. A strange decision, but it seemed sensible at the time, as my big towel wouldn't have fitted in my little rucksack. Interestingly, gift shops don't seem to sell Union Jack towels, the M&S on Edgware Road doesn't sell towels, and the useful-household-things shop on the Strand sells pretty much everything except towels. So I bought a cheap 3-pack of teatowels and made do.

Nothing too exciting happened at the briefing. The Japanese crew insisted that I sit right at the front of the room, next to the aisle, but I would probably have sat there anyway (the top ten competitors get big desks at the front, the rest crowd into smaller partitioned cubicles at the back - it's a good turnout, probably record-breaking, and although the room is too small, it's not excessively so). No Tony Buzan, who's not been well lately, but who will be there tomorrow. There was a Ray Keene, which is unusual - his work for the WMSC is normally so far behind the scenes that a lot of competitors don't know he exists. Otherwise, it was Phil, Chris, Jennifer and Dominic with a very impressive computerised presentation explaining the rules. The projector broke down halfway through, but otherwise it went without a hitch, and there weren't even very many questions. No arguments, either!

The most interesting part was the revelation that Su Ruiqiao has requested 4000 digits in Hour Numbers and 680 digits in 5-Minute Numbers. The world records are 1949and 405 respectively, so this seems a little excessive, to say the least. And 680 is a very specific big number to request, don't you think? I suspect mindgames. Or an Andi-Bell-esque approach of trying to memorise enormous amounts and getting 60% of it wrong. We shall see.

Day 1 brings Abstract Images, Binary and Hour Numbers. Gunther is very good at all three and usually expects to take an early lead. But we shall see about that, too.


Scribbled this morning while waiting for Images to start:

Day 1 - Bakerloo line closed, but I managed to get here on time. Left my hat in the hotel room and didn't realise until I was half way there. The usual opening ceremony, Tony's standard speech. Ruiqiao, having picked the seat behind me, was late, but still in time for the Images. Chuanwei keeps moving desks, he's settled somewhere in the middle of the room now. We're just waiting for the start...


Live blogging right now:

It's lunchtime, I've escaped the camera crews for a little while and headed straight for the internet. I'm a geek. After Tony's exciting announcement that in 1994, scientists predicted that nobody would ever be able to remember 30 spoken numbers etc etc, we got into Abstract Images, followed by Binary. Both went pretty well for me, I think I got fairly decent scores, but the fun comes when you see how everybody else has done. Nobody has been going around boasting that they've shattered world records, but nobody seems terribly depressed about their performance either. Time to head back to the Strand Palace to hear the first scores and then see what I can do in Hour Numbers. I would really like to beat 2000 in that, but I never quite seem to achieve my best in this one. We shall, as the saying goes, see. Keep reading memory-sports.com for the latest!

This is why I'm not a writer

Yes, I still haven't finished that appraisal of the top contenders for the World Memory Championship. And it's pretty unlikely that I'm going to finish it now, seeing as I'm working tomorrow and then quickly scurrying down to London for the competitor briefing in the evening, without so much as an hour or two to spare for sitting around blogging. In brief, if I don't win, place your metaphorical bets on Simon Reinhard, who's generally good at everything and doesn't tend to make mistakes, but just maybe lacks experience of the hour-long disciplines. Failing that, Johannes Mallow is a whiz with numbers, unbeatable at historic dates, has reportedly been training very hard and scared everyone last year by being better than expected. Gunther Karsten is always a force to be reckoned with, so don't rule him out, expect world records in names and words from the inevitable Boris Konrad, beware of Guo Chuanwei and Liu Ping and the underrated Su Ruiqiao coming from the mysterious East (where, incidentally, my brother is finally emigrating to tomorrow), hope for surprises from someone completely unexpected, because that's always fun, and wish everyone the best of British luck!

In other news, I had the Japanese film crew briefly filming me at work today. You know, these guys are by far the most likeable TV people I've ever dealt with (and I did actually really like some of the others I've worked with in the past), and they really know how to keep things brief and not waste time - they promised to only be there for an hour, and in the event they were even quicker than that! This is going to be a great documentary, I can't wait to see it.

Bumbershoot

It occurred to me, mainly as a result of reading Chris's annual Mindzine blog post, that I've never actually played monopoly, ever, in my life. I feel like I'm missing out on something here. Actually, I only had a vague idea of what the rules were, so I found them on the internet and read them tonight. Sounds like fun, I must have a game with someone, some time when I've got a few hours to spare.

Actually, I must confess, it's only a few years ago that I discovered that monopoly is actually an American game. Despite it not featuring in my childhood at all, I'd still managed to acquire the impression that it's an original English invention, and the London-based version was the first one. First impressions being hard to shake off, I still find it quite difficult to believe that it's a foreign game.

Oh, and the title of this blog is an old American word for 'umbrella', which many Americans inexplicably believe to be a British expression. You see, my ego can't cope with admitting that I spent the first thirty years of my life mistakenly attributing something American to Britain without compensating for it by jeering at the way those foolish transatlantic types (like the writers of one episode of Frasier, for example) are always mistakenly attributing American things to Britain. What a bunch of oafs they are over there. They all think we measure distance in kilometers, too.

Also, just to reassert how clever and knowledgeable I am (that ego of mine is terribly fragile, you know, especially in moments of stress about upcoming World Memory Championships), can I point out that although this website speculates that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is to blame for the bumbershoot confusion (understandable, seeing as so many Americans do think Dick Van Dyke is an authentic Englishman), there was in fact a character in the popular 1960s war comic "Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos", four years before Dick Van Dyke sang that song, called Percival 'Pinky' Pinkerton, who was the token English character, and who always carried his trusty bumbershoot around with him on his commando missions. Seriously, he did.

It's the final countdown

Okay, I've done a last bit of cards practice today - it's a bit closer to the competition than I usually keep training, you have to rest your brain and your journeys for a few days at least, but I still don't feel completely like I've done enough training, and I wanted to experiment with slowing down a little on the second viewing (I've taken to doing that with numbers, and I think it helps, a bit). But now I'm all done, except for a bit of abstract-image and random-words practice I'm planning to do over the next few evenings, because I'm operating on the dubious theory that it's good to keep practicing those right up to the start of the competition.

I've also devoted a tedious amount of time to shuffling cards and writing labels for them, and realising that I forgot to buy rubber bands (to hold the cards together and stop them falling out all over my bag or the floor). I'll have to see if I can pilfer some from the office, but getting stationery there can be a bit like borrowing gold from Fort Knox. I've got to work on Wednesday, hopefully knocking off early enough to get to the competitor briefing in London at 6pm, and I'm probably not going to have time to pop to the shops and find rubber bands...

It's the trivial little things that cause people to lose the World Memory Championship, you know.

Entertainment like it used to be

I'm listening to the boxing on the radio. Not something I've ever done before - officially I disapprove of boxing, but I like to watch it on TV from time to time - and it seems a strange thing to do, seeing as boxing is such a very visual thing. You'd think that boxing on the radio would be the equivalent of memory competitions on the telly - nobody can see what's happening. But old cartoons, comics etc are absolutely full of scenes of people crowding around a radio to listen to the big fight, so this is my sort of tribute to that, and also to the fact that there's nothing good on TV. I hope Valuev wins - I hate it when a plucky underdog beats the hot favourite.

Interlude

While we wait for me to finish writing that WMC competitors analysis I promised you yesterday (that's a weekend job if ever I saw one), let's keep up the memory theme by telling the world that Sainsbury's want to use me in some kind of "PR story", helping staff memorise the location of their products so as to help customers. It sounds like fun, although in the email they asked me to 'please let me know your rate for PR activity', which is a question I never enjoy being asked. It's sort of embarrassing to reply that I haven't got a standard rate, because I very rarely do that kind of thing, and when I do I normally don't get paid. I'd do this for free Sainsbury's own brand groceries. This is why I really need an agent, you see. They could price me right out of the market and reject all this kind of offer without even telling me about it! That would give me so much more free time!

Also, I notice we haven't got any British people in the semi-finals of the World Othello Championship. It's another nearly-all-Japanese affair again, including one Japanese player who pretends to be from Singapore nowadays, and also Matthias Berg, who probably counts as an honorary Japanese player by now, since he always gets to the semi-finals of the world championship. Maybe next year I'll qualify and show them all how it's done.

Runners and riders

Well, it's a week until the World Memory Championship 2009 kicks off, I've just spent the evening experimenting with a new approach to memorising binary digits (which is, of course, a ridiculous thing to do a week before a world championship, when you might argue that it's a bit too late to be trying new things, but hey, I'm a ridiculous kind of person), the WMSC have just made an announcement about prizes, interestingly not mentioning the prizes that Memory XL have promised to provide on top, and I'm feeling like this would be a good time to do that run-down of the top competitors in this year's event, so all my faithful blog-followers know who to look out for. Well, it's that or go out and watch the fireworks, and I'm doing that tomorrow. I've written part of it already, the finished article will be with you at some point over the next seven days.

(Incidentally, you probably also want to know where to look out for them - up to the minute coverage will hopefully be available on the ever-awesome memory-sports.com. Sorry, everyone who keeps asking me this question, it's not going to be on telly. Not even on some obscure cable channel.)

But let's talk about those prizes before we start - in the absence of a sponsor for this year, the coolest prizes are the promise of free trips to next year's championship, in China. Free hotel rooms for places four to ten, free flights and hotel suites for the top three (hotel SUITES? Okay, not all the competitors are working class heroes like me, but I'm sure all the potential top-three would be happy to take a normal room, and have the spare cash go back into the prize fund for everyone. The entire German team this year are crowding into about three rooms, last I heard, we're used to non-luxurious accommodation!). Still, these prizes are extremely groovy, and I hope they do come about. It's generally a good idea to be sceptical about plans for future world memory championships at this stage, but the Chinese organisers seem very keen to put on a good show.

There's also a promise of lots of prize money for 2010, but I'm not going to be making plans for that money just yet. A lot of things could happen in the next twelve months.

Anyway, the point of memory competitions really isn't the prizes - it's the fun of the competition. Prizes are a nice bonus, but we'd all compete if there never were any, and we'd still have a good time doing it. (Well, unless there was a wealthy sponsor spending lots of money, but the organisers were pocketing it all. Then we might complain a bit.) But I'm completely in the mood for an exciting World Memory Championship now. Roll on next Thursday!

WOCaday

The World Othello Championship kicks off tomorrow in Ghent. In accordance with tradition, the draw for the first round has been made the night before, and you can see it here if you want. Our British contingent (and our Australian chairman) mostly seem to have drawn opponents in the good-but-beatable-players kind of range (Miroslav Voracek, Marcel Peperkamp, Henry Aspenryd), while David Hand and Helen Starkey are up against players I've never heard of before, so there's a chance of a good start for our lads (and ladette) if everyone's on form.

It really is high time we had a British world champion, or even just a British runner-up again. Come on, you Brits! Flip those discs!

Who's going to win?

I am, that's who! You know, I'm just now finally starting to feel confident about the world championship. It's going to be close, but I think I can do it...

A bit more Japan

Remember that "Windows 7 Burger" I mentioned? Boris found pictures! Pictures from the very same Burger King we were in, in fact!

Also, you know how American lightswitches are weird (you flick them up to turn the light on and down to turn it off, as opposed to the normal way of doing things)? Well, Japanese lightswitches are sideways! It really is a strange and scary country, and I think I'm going to have to avoid international travel in future, because things like this really do alarm me.

It's funny what you think of at odd moments

I own a hacksaw, or possibly a coping saw, I'm not sure what the difference is. Anyway, I've got one, in one of my old cardboard boxes. It just occurred to me today, apropos of nothing, and I dug it out just to make sure I wasn't imagining it. But I can't for the life of me remember why I bought the thing. I'm not a DIY kind of person and I'm sure I've never used it. I can't think of anything I've ever done that would have required a hacksaw, but I know there was something once upon a time. I wonder if I made a good job of it...

Positive thinking

I'm almost certain that by far the biggest problem with my preparation for the World Memory Championship this year is that I just don't feel like I've done enough training. I'm sure if I could just snap out of that mindset, I would do much, much better at the competition, without actually doing any more training. I've often wondered whether hypnosis would help in this kind of situation - as I always say (usually to justify eating junk food at memory competitions), if I'm in the right frame of mind, I can always memorise a lot better. So having someone wave a shiny watch in front of my eyes and tell me that I believe I am fully prepared and confident that I can win the world championship... might actually make a huge difference.

Where does one find a hypnotist, anyway? I've never looked for one before. Blimey, there's about a million hynotherapists in the Nottingham Yellow Pages alone! Maybe I'll give one of them a call...

Techno-toilet go!

Yes, the toilet in my hotel room in Tokyo had a huge electronic control panel and a variety of hi-tech functions. When you sit down on it, there's a great gurgling sound of water and a green light marked "Preparation" starts flashing. You can then control the seat temperature and spray strength of the "bidet" and "shower" functions. I'm not sure what the "shower" one does, I didn't dare to try it. The toilet at the university we went to for our experiment on Monday had another function as well, marked "Flushing sound". Yes, when you press it a recording of a flushing sound plays from a speaker. I'm not sure exactly what the point of this function is. For those moments when you want to pretend to flush a toilet, but not actually flush it? Perhaps it's one of those cultural things that you have to be Japanese to understand.

Anyway, going to the toilet was only half the fun of the trip, so let's do a more chronological account of what I've been up to for the past week. As I whined in my last blog, my flight was three and a half hours late taking off, and when it's a twelve-hour flight anyway, you really want to minimise the amount of hours you spend sitting around waiting for it to start. Also, it was an overnight flight, and I can never sleep on planes, even though I got upgraded to a slightly nicer still-economy-class-but-better-than-normal-economy-class seat. Still, there was a reasonable range of in-flight entertainment - I got to see Bolt for the first time, and although the 'kids' section of the videos was very sparsely populated, it did contain the downright awesome (and not at all intended for kids) animation "La maison en petits cubes", which was fun.

I did finally arrive in Tokyo at about 7pm, Japanese time (after half an hour spent waiting for my luggage) to be greeted by the very friendly film crew - director Naoko and the camerman and soundman, whose names I can't remember, and there was also a driver who generally just stayed with the minibus and didn't join in with our various adventures. We drove into central Tokyo, checked into my very nice hotel right in the city centre, met up with Boris (who'd arrived a day or so earlier, despite missing the plane he was originally supposed to get, and had got upgraded to a really luxurious business-class seat as a reward) and we went out to eat. At the cameraman's suggestion, we had okonomiyaki, which I was very enthusiastic about, and explained that I was familiar with the concept because it featured prominently in the popular Japanese comic "Ranma ½". The camera crew already knew I was something of a comics and cartoons nut, but hadn't quite realised the full depths of it until I came to Japan and couldn't shut up about them, my tongue having been loosened by the lack of sleep and surfeit of sake (our Japanese hosts were all drinking beer, but I insisted on having a 'real Japanese experience' and drinking sake - it's possible I didn't make the best impression overall, but they all seemed entertained). By the time we'd got to the end of the evening, at about midnight, I had moved on from discussing comics and showing off my ability to read the katakana parts of the menu and had taken to loudly singing songs from Japanese cartoons I enjoy.

You'd think that I would have slept well after all that, but actually I woke up at about four o'clock and couldn't get back to sleep. Throughout all the time I was there, in fact, I had really terrible jetlag, even worse than when I went to Malaysia six years ago and famously missed the start of the final day of the world memory championship. Still, that gave me an opportunity to walk around Shibuya before the shops opened (most shops there don't open till ten or eleven in the morning, but stay open very late), then go back to bed and sleep until two in the afternoon. This set something of a pattern for my stay there, of going to bed when I felt tired, sleeping for three or four hours then getting up and going out again. Probably not good for me, but it seemed to work.

There are plenty of great sights to see in Tokyo, even if you don't go to the temples and museums and stuff and prefer to just tour the city centre. I did go to see the statue of Hachikō the faithful dog at the train station, but that was all the traditional sightseeing. I preferred to admire the many video game arcades (the buildings tended to be taken up mainly by pachinko machines, but there were also some cool places with a wide range of games - the arcade as a concept may be basically dead in Britain, but it's still surviving over there), bookshops (including the invitingly-named "Book Off", which has more manga than I thought even existed in the world) and department stores. All of these were great fun!

In the evening, Boris and I went for a traditional Japanese meal in Burger King, where they were selling a "Windows 7 burger", with no less than seven giant-size meat patties in them. Didn't have one myself, but I saw some people eating them. It's the kind of meal that would probably kill you, but in a fun way. Incidentally, despite the metric system, a quarter pounder is a quarter pounder in Japan.

The following day, it was time for "the experiment". We added a translator to the gang of us in the minibus (not really necessary, since Naoko's English was actually a bit better than the official translator's) and went out to the university, where we were greeted by the very mad-scientist-esque professor who had arranged to scan our brains while we memorised things. This procedure involved being strapped into a big, scary MRI machine, which was quite an experience in itself, complete with mirrors so we could see a computer screen on which were displayed names and faces and then numbers. Being famously bad at names and faces, I was worried about disappointing the professor, but it turned out that that part of the test was really easy, involving multiple-choice answers, and I breezed through it with only one mistake. I even got the same score as Boris, which shows how easy it was!

The lab assistant responsible for strapping us into the machine, incidentally, looked quite strikingly like my brother. Not so much so when you saw him standing up, being more than a foot shorter, with a rounder face and also being Japanese, but when you can only see his face while he's leaning over you and strapping your head down in a very scary plastic cage, the resemblance is quite uncanny. I did wonder if possibly I was having some very strange freudian dream about my brother strapping me to a bed and sealing me in a tubular coffin. Anyway, the next bit of the test was numbers - 30-second numbers, with 50 digits to remember and a fill-in-the-blanks recall test. It was going to be 20 seconds, but Boris thought that wasn't long enough, the big chicken. Actually, even with thirty seconds on the clock I had a few mistakes, but all but one of them came from forgetting which button was which digit (not being able to see a keyboard due to being strapped into the machine, we had control panels with one button under each finger, and it took a bit of getting used to).

It'll take them a week or so to analyse exactly what my brain was doing and whether it's different from what normal people's brains do, but they did generate an extraordinarily groovy 3-D model of my head on the computer screen, which you can sort of slice open to see a cross-section of my brain. I tell you, it was very cool to see. I didn't realise I even had a brain, let alone one that you can analyse with computers.

After that we had another free day, which I spent travelling around all the different parts of Tokyo. It had been raining for the whole time I was there, but the sun started shining that day, and I completely wore myself out walking around the big city.

Next day was part two of the filming, but this was the rather more fun kind of filming that involved playing, eating and singing. We went to Odaiba, where an officious person told us that we weren't allowed to film documentaries without permission, so we spent the day disguised as tourists, with a hand-held camera. We went to Joypolis, the big Sega indoor theme park kind of place, and had a great time. There's a 3-D animation called "Dark Chapel" which is by far the best 3-D I've ever seen - things jump out of the screen and bite you! And lots of fun rides and attractions too!

Then we went back into the city and ate lots of sushi, while trying to memorise the names. As memory performances go, it wasn't very good, but the food was mostly nice (personally, I don't think that paying a surprisingly large amount of money for an octopus tentacle on a little pile of rice is a good idea, but I wasn't paying, so it was okay. Didn't taste good, though).

And then, because you can't go to Japan and not do this, we went to a karaoke bar in the evening. Not the kind of karaoke bar you get in this country, but a place with private rooms and electronic ordering of songs and drinks and foodstuffs. And also a book literally the size of the yellow pages containing nothing but karaoke versions of songs from cartoons. This really is my kind of country.

I am going to have to improve my singing voice if I go there again, though - I do like a bit of karaoke, and normally when I go out singing, people say I'm quite good compared to some of the people who go up on stage. In Tokyo, though, I was completely put in my place by the director and cameraman, who are both really amazingly great singers. And they even performed the Gatchaman and Evangelion theme tunes for my benefit, and did it really amazingly well! I had a stab at singing "Konya wa Hurricane" from Bubblegum Crisis, which went down well even though I can't read Japanese fast enough to sing it and I could only remember half the words.

And that, sadly, was that. Back home again the next morning, another much-too-long plane journey and then back to work today (I should have been sleeping all day, really, but I had to go in because practically everybody else in the company had the day off and they booked it first). This has been a hugely abridged account of my stay in Tokyo, missing out lots of fun adventures, but I hope it gives you an idea at least. I wish I was still there! Somebody give me another free trip, quick!

Kaerimashita!

Yep, I'm back home with no problems or delays - even getting from the aeroplane at Heathrow to my front door took no more than three hours! Still, I'm extremely tired, so you're not going to get a travelogue tonight, I'm afraid. Just suffice it to say that my trip to Tokyo was by far the most fun I've ever had being filmed for a documentary, and I wish I could stay there for another month at least!

Yes, I know that would mean missing the world championship. I had that much fun. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow!

Ho hum

Well, since my flight's been delayed by three hours (so far) and I've got nothing better to do than hang around Heathrow all night, here's a blog for you.

I'm not short of good books to read, at least, having gone on a shopping spree this morning and bought anything in the Oxfam bookshop that looked like it might be interesting. And also one brand-new book that I couldn't resist - "Return to the Hundred Acre Wood" by David Benedictus, all new Winnie-the-Pooh adventures in the style of A A Milne. I picked it up, thinking 'sacrilege!', but opened it to a random page, found a conversation between Christopher Robin, Pooh and Rabbit that was perfectly, 100%, in character and very funny too, and now I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Hopefully I've still got enough reading matter to keep me going until I eventually end up in Tokyo. This flight is the only one that's been delayed, you know. Apparently the plane's broken down or they forgot to put the wings on or something like that. Still, I get a free meal voucher.

ベン・プリドモーは東京へ行ます

Or words to that effect, anyway. My grasp of Japanese isn't anywhere near sufficient to have a conversation or to read a road sign, but at least I can entertain people by making an attempt.

Rather than planning what sights I'm going to see (I understand Tokyo has a lot of really cool department stores, and that's what I always gravitate towards when I'm in a foreign city - I can see the historical landmarks on telly, thank you very much), I'm wondering whether I'll be able to watch Liverpool play Man Utd in my hotel room. The match starts at 10pm, Japanese time, on Sunday night, and we're doing what they describe as 'the experiment' at the university on the following day, so staying up late at night on top of the jetlag probably isn't a good idea, but I'd quite like to be able to watch a big game like that with Japanese commentators, if possible.

Ooh, I'm excited! Probably won't be blogging while I'm there (haven't decided yet whether to take my laptop - it does mean buying some kind of plug adaptor, and I'm not sure I can cope with all that hassle), so I'll see you all in a week!

PS Nyah, I'm going to Tokyo and you're not.

I demand a recount

The memory-championship rundown won by two votes to one, so I promise I will eventually get round to that. I can't tonight, though, because I need to talk about my alarm clock.

I've been going through alarm clocks at a rate of knots since I moved to this new flat a year or so ago. My trusty old alarm clock (which was bought for me as a joke present by my work colleagues after I was repeatedly late in to work because my previous alarm clock had broken) stopped working shortly after I moved in here - or at least it kept working in the sense that it told the time and the date and temperature and no end of other nifty things, but it stopped making any noise, and I find sound to be an important part of an alarm clock's function.

So I dug out my old clock radio, which sort of works, but has a loose connection so it sometimes makes noise and sometimes doesn't. Which isn't ideal when you want to be woken up every morning, not just every other morning on average. So then I bought a cheap analogue alarm clock from Wilko's, which worked for a while but then stopped, possibly as a result of being crammed into my rucksack so tightly that the front cover broke off and the hands bent. And then I bought another of the same kind of cheap alarm clock (only in a more stylish black, rather than blue-green), which has now also developed a tendency for the second hand to get stuck until you hit it.

So at the weekend, I was in the gadget shop in Nottingham and decided to buy a new alarm clock from the range they sell there. I eventually went for a groovy lighting-up clock that glows a different colour for each hour of the day. It's extremely cool, but unfortunately the beeping of the alarm itself is much too quiet to wake me up. I'm going to need to buy another alarm clock, or possibly just hook this one up to an amplifier of some kind.

So, who IS going to win the thing?

That 'who will win the world championship' post last night got me a surprising volume of comments and emails, considering it was such an insubstantial thing. So, would people like me to do a full run-down of all the top competitors, analysing how I think they'll perform in the WMC next month? I'm not going to do it tonight, obviously, since it's late and I've been up all night learning how to ask for a Godzilla T-shirt in Japanese, but maybe tomorrow I could go into sports commentator mode.

Or I could write a story about an innkeeper and a motorised fishing-net instead. Whichever you prefer.

Who will win the World Championship?

There's a poll on www.brainboard.eu, and at the moment I'm winning it, ahead of Johannes Mallow. Personally, though, I voted for Simon - I couldn't vote for myself, obviously, because that would jinx it and ensure that I finish last with minus twelve million championship points. But I suspect he's going to be the one to beat this year, based on the German championship. Still, I expect it's going to be a really close and exciting competition, and I just hope it doesn't turn into a complete disaster for me...

Flying away

I don't remember actually saying here on my blog what dates I'll be in Japan. I'm flying out on Friday evening, arriving on Saturday, and then flying home again the following Thursday. I've got the day off work on Friday, and I've got all sorts of excessive plans for the day, like getting a haircut, acquiring a guide to things to see and do in Tokyo, doing lots of memory training, learning to speak Japanese, and so on. If I was a better-organised person, I would have remembered to do some of these things before then, but I'm not, so I didn't. And it's too late now, unless I also manage to invent a time machine on Friday.

Jacob's Kriek

Sorry I didn't post anything yesterday - there was no reason, I just didn't. But you can take comfort in the fact that I'm posting something today, even though I've been drinking kriek all afternoon with my brother, who's almost called Jacob.

However, it's something of a pyrrhic victory for my blog readers, because all I'm going to write about tonight is my suspicion that Declan Donnelly is being played by a different actor lately - I've just seen him on an advert, not having watched any of their programmes for a few years, and he looks distinctly different. Older, for one thing. Perhaps they ought to stop trying to look young and cool. Of course, I'm not really one to talk, since they don't look as old as me yet, and I'm a year younger than them.

Not my birthday any more

Boo. But on the other hand, it's another 364 days until I have to be 34. 34 is a terrible age to be. It symbolises being in the middle third of my first hundred years of life, and thus being middle-aged. And I'm not fat enough to be middle aged yet.

Happy birthday!

So very many people have said that to me today, either face-to-face or electronically, that I really have no choice but to obey and be happy. Thank you, everyone! Special mention to my number one fan, Mike, for this:

And to Steve of the Fact of the day blog, who has made me today's fact, albeit with the assertion that I was born in 1967 rather than 1976.

And, for that matter, that I was born in Derby rather than Boston - my wikipedia page used to say I was born in Derby until Tim the Enchanter deleted all my birth details earlier this year because they were unverifiable. Perhaps I should post my birth certificate online, a la Barack Obama, but I can't really be bothered.

Toothpasteadverts

One of the many things in this world that irritate and infuriate me beyond belief is adverts for toothpaste or toothbrushes where they cut out the little pauses in the professional-sounding person's speech so that they can cram just a tiny little bit more dialogue into it. It just sounds weird.

I was going to write a long speech about the concept of qualifying for the world memory championships, but I found that I couldn't be bothered. Hey, it's my birthday tomorrow, I can do what I want. It's the law.

I... remember... everything!

There really is no need to nag or persecute me about memory training, because I can safely report that this weekend I did a full practice run of abstract images, 30-minute binary, hour numbers and hour cards. First time in a long while that I've managed to do what I used to think of as a full weekend's training.

I really had to force myself to do it, though, and the results I got still weren't up to world-championship-winning standard. In the hour cards, which I did late last night, I seemed to spend the first few packs not fully concentrating on what I was seeing, and being more interested in keeping track of how much time it was taking me, so my recall was pretty poor. I didn't click into proper memorising mode until about a quarter of the way through, and even then I had a lot of gaps. I'm hoping I can click back into real form before the competition - it's just a month away!

And I've got a trip to Japan in between now and then, but that's probably a good thing - I'm going to do an hour cards on the Friday before I leave to catch my plane, and take a lot of numbers along with me to memorise in my hotel in spare moments (I've often taken numbers with me to foreign climes before and never yet found a spare moment in amongst all the sightseeing, but I live in hope...)

Sign up, sign up

Registration for the World Memory Championship is closing tomorrow, so make sure you go to the website and register, otherwise they might not let you in. They probably will, but it's best to be on the safe side. The list of 'registered competitors is nearly a hundred people now, so even if you apply the usual rule of somewhere around 50% of them actually competing, we might just still beat the all-time record!

Come on you reds!

Bahrain could only manage to draw 0-0 with New Zealand in the first leg of their play-off today. So it all comes down to the game in Wellington on November 14th, with a place in the World Cup at stake. I might skive off the World Memory Championship to watch it - we'll probably have finished everything but the speed cards by the time they kick off, and I always mess that up at the WMC anyway.

Slave-driving

This weekend, I'm planning to do a huuuuuge amount of memory training, and also learn to speak and read fluent Japanese. And get my central heating fixed, and read some books and buy a new comb and cheese-grater (might make a good musical instrument, now I come to think of it). It's going to be a very busy weekend and I expect you people out there to give me no end of grief if it turns out that I don't do anything after all.

Someone needs to reinvent the Japanese alphabet

I'm a busy man, and it takes much too long to learn how to tell the difference between シ and ツ. Maybe I'll just be one of those tourists who go around shouting loudly in English instead.

Speaking of beards

I can't believe I didn't notice Aubrey was on telly yesterday, on a brand new BBC4 series, "It's Only A Theory". Luckily, it's available on BBCi, and if you hate and fear the internet, it's also on real TV again tonight at 10:30. Check it out, he's very convincing and also rather a lot more funny than the people on the show who are supposed to be making the jokes.

Also, you're very lucky I don't blog about politics, because I got the most infuriatingly hypocritical and dishonest 'newsletter' from my MP pushed through my letterbox today. Really, it annoys me so much that I'm inclined to send it back with a note threatening to put it in some painful part of his body if he's planning to send this kind of stuff to me constantly for the next seven months. Someone should do something about politicians. I'll write to my MP about it.

Has he a beard, Mr Godot?

There's no denying that my beard is more white than black these days, at the sides at least. I suppose I could disguise it by shaving the side bits and just having one of those annoying semi-beards that trendy people have, but I'm not going to do that. I've never understood people who grow beards but still shave certain parts of their face every morning. What's the point of having a beard if not to save you the hassle of shaving? It's not as if the silly little things look good. There's nothing more stylish and attractive than a full beard. Particularly on bald, chubby, short men. With big noses, and glasses. Really, I'm extremely handsome, if you come to think about it.

Do you think...?

... that I could learn Japanese in the course of the next couple of weeks? If I made a proper effort and didn't do anything else in the evenings? I think probably not, but it's probably worth giving it a go. I hate visiting another country and not being able to make some token attempt to speak the language.

Back from Blackwater

My presentation was quite fun, considering it was essentially written in the 45-minute period immediately before I had to go on stage. As it turned out, I didn't get to most of my carefully-prepared enlightenment on the subject of memory competitions, since the surprisingly large audience of Mensa members (I was on immediately after the discussion forum with the committee, and the only entertainment available at that time for those who didn't want to pay £20 for a trip out to see Concorde or £8 for a trip out to see Bath) bombarded me with questions after I'd recited the first thousand digits of pi almost flawlessly as a thrilling opener. Despite the fact that I forgot to bring my lucky hat, the whole thing seemed to be well-received (very few people walked out halfway through, although again this might be because there wasn't anything else to do and the seats were quite comfortable), although I don't think I really persuaded anyone to take up memory competitions. And since that was essentially my only purpose in doing this presentation, you might argue that the whole weekend was wasted, if you were really the pessimistic type. Luckily, I'm not.

The person solely responsible for my last-second preparation, my hat-forgetting and my general failure to do anything productive on Saturday morning is, of course, Wilkie Collins. The big-bearded, compelling-book-writing, Victorian scoundrel. I've been so completely wrapped up in The Woman In White this weekend that I've ignored everything else as much as possible. Still, it was well worth it, it's a fantastic piece of work and I can see why it was such a sensation back in 1860. Although I was hoping Walter would ditch Laura and just marry Marian. Still, having finished the book, I'll now refrain from buying any more cheap classics until after the WMC. That way I might actually get some training done.

Oh, and remember me mentioning that I ordered some books from Amazon that I thought had got lost in the post? I checked, and actually they were sent to my old address in Derby because I forgot to change it. The punchline to this should probably be that they were books on how to improve your memory, but of course I never read books like that. They were actually the awesomely-illustrated "Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready For Kindergarten" and a couple of its sensational sequels. It occurs to me that I have quite a wide range of tastes in literature.

Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires

My passport expires in June next year, and what with lots of countries insisting you've got six months still to go on it before they let you in, that means I need to sort a new one out as soon as I get back from Tokyo.

It's rather sad, you know, because this current passport of mine was the first one I've ever had - just ten years ago, I never considered that I might ever go abroad. Nowadays, of course, I'm hopping on a plane every week and zooming off to some far-distant land, but back in 2000, going to Washington DC was scary and exciting. Turned out to be fun, though, which is probably a good thing, because I might have never gone anywhere ever again if it had turned out to be nasty. I should write to the city and say thanks.

I'm not going to win the World Memory Championship

Just can't get into training at the moment. I've got to do something this weekend before I set off for the Mensa thing in... Tamworth? Telford? Somewhere that begins with T, anyway. I hope it's Tamworth, that's much closer. But anyway, I need to find the time on Saturday morning (conditional on me having prepared my presentation, although I can always do that on the train or in my hotel room on Saturday night) for a good long memorising session. Because I'm conscious that I haven't practiced enough, and when I feel like that, I do badly at memory competitions. Positive thinking is essential for good memorising. I should mention that in my presentation.

Tell you what, let's save a bit of time by looking up right now exactly where I'm going at the weekend (for a gala dinner on Saturday before the 'Ben Pridmore demonstrates his spectacular talents' bit on Sunday lunchtime - I hate gala dinners, and since that's the only payment I'm getting for this beyond doing a favour for the old acquaintance who's organising the whole event, it makes me wonder why I agreed to it in the first place...) so I don't have to spend Saturday morning making travel plans...

Bristol. Why did I think it started with T? And Bristol is bleeding miles away! Okay, that settles it, I'll do an hour numbers practice in the morning and spend the long train journey preparing my speech/slideshow. Pictures drawn by hand, with the mouse-pad on my laptop.

Starting to believe my own hype

I have planned out the general kind of thing that I'm going to do at this stupid Mensa presentation, but I haven't written it down. It occurred to me that speaking with notes at a presentation about memory is probably a bad thing, but really, that's exactly the kind of misconception I'm intending to try to debunk - do people assume Usain Bolt never needs to catch a bus, because he can just run everywhere? There's a better analogy out there somewhere, but I haven't worked out what it is yet. Anyway, I need to go on some kind of campaign to stop people asking me how to remember where they put their car keys. It really annoys me.

I've still got a cold

And I've also got the slight annoyance of having promised to do an hour-long talk/presentation on the subject of memory for Mensa members on Sunday, and haven't prepared anything for it. When asked if I'd like accessories like a laptop and projector to aid my presentation I said yes, sure, why not, so now I've got to create something on Powerpoint too if I want them to think I know what I'm doing. It's a hard life, being a celebrity.

Reading and sneezing

I've got a cold and would appreciate sympathy. I've also got a new old book, as part of my continuing quest to actually read some books that edumacated people have read - "The Woman In White", cost 50p from a charity book stall. I have a vague idea that they did a BBC adaptation quite recently, so I might be jumping on the bandwagon like some kind of dreadful wannabe-intellectual, but I'm hoping that I'm thinking of someone else, and the book is still known and cared about only by stuffy old people with too much time on their hands. It's quite good, actually.

I'm rubbish at memory

Sorry for not blogging yesterday, but I was hanging out with my imminently China-bound brother. If it's any comfort, we did spend the time productively, including thinking up an advertising campaign for a beer targeted at sissies.

However, I'd set aside today for some more long-distance memorising training, but I just haven't been in the mood to do anything. I've had a sore throat for the last three days, and I feel fed up. And also, I think some books I ordered from Amazon have got lost in the post. It never rains but it pours. But never mind, I'll spend some evenings this week doing nothing but memorising stuff, just to get me more in the mood...

How to contact me

People often seem to have trouble working this one out. Just find my email address, it's dotted around the internet in various places if you look it up. It's zoom_zoom_ben and it's a UK Yahoo account, you can work it out from that unless you're an evil blog-scanning, email-address-harvesting computer.

I tend to ignore people who add me as a friend on Facebook if I don't know who they are and they don't leave any kind of message (actually, I sometimes ignore people I do know, who do leave a message - I quite rarely get round to visiting Facebook and updating my friends list). Also, please don't send a message to the other Ben Pridmore on Facebook and tell him you're a big fan of his memory skills, because he doesn't like it. And you definitely shouldn't add me as a contact on LinkedIn - I joined the site because someone told me to, years ago, never did anything with it and now I've finally deleted my account. Nor should you really contact the World Memory Sports Council, or the Alzheimer's Society, or anyone else I've been vaguely associated with in the past and ask them to pass a message on. It's much easier to just find my address and drop me a line directly.

Oh, and it's a really, really bad idea to find my phone number in the phone book and phone me. I'm never in, and I never listen to my messages. Also, I hate phones.

Mister can you tell me where my love has gone?

Those super-cool Japanese TV people are inviting me to Tokyo for a whole week! Flying out on October 22nd or 23rd and back home again on the 29th! This is very cool, because I was planning to take some time off work for a bit of memory training, and it'd be cool to do that in a hotel in Tokyo, with occasional breaks to see the big city. Now I just need to learn Japanese, and possibly buy some souvenirs to give to the Japanese people, seeing as whenever Japanese TV crews film me they always give me a goodie bag of really nice little gifts...

Indescribable!

Nestlé are relaunching Cinnamon Grahams cereal as if it's a new product, calling it Curiously Cinnamon, descending on office buildings and giving out free samples to the workers and holding a competition in which you can win £250 of Tesco vouchers (possibly the least exciting prize ever offered by a breakfast cereal) by describing the 'indescribable taste' of Curiously Cinnamon. The tagline for the "new" cereal is apparently "the indescribable taste of toasted cinnamon squares".

Now, it may just be me, but when I hear the phrase "indescribable taste", I automatically assume that we're talking about something that tastes awful. Since when is "indescribable" a flattering way to describe food? To me, the only thing "indescribable" describes is these guys:

Come to think of it, it probably is just me.

And on an unrelated note, aargh! I've just seen a trailer for a film called "The Invention of Lying" that uses the same basic idea as the first chapter of my unpublished masterpiece "The Adventures of Jayce and Alex"! Ricky Gervais stole my idea! And now I'll never be able to offer the story for publication until everyone's forgotten this latest movie!

Not enough hours in the day

Not if I want to fit in a great deal of lying around watching telly in the evenings, anyway. So I haven't typed up my transcripts from the othello yet, and nor am I going to write a big long blog tonight either. But on the other hand, I am enjoying watching How I Met Your Mother on E4 every night.

Still, I should probably be spending more time memorising things in the evenings, what with the world championship being so soon. I'll do that tomorrow.

Hello To Othello

The good thing about the Nationals is that although they take place over two days, they don't start until the Saturday afternoon, so even if they're in Frimley Green it's possible to travel down on the Saturday morning without getting up early. So I did, and what's more the weather was really nice, so even the walk from Farnborough Main station to the venue was entirely pleasant. And I didn't get lost in the slightest! I can follow Google Maps "walking" directions with no difficulty at all, it seems, even when I'm walking and not cycling! And what's more, walking between the two Farnborough stations takes no more than fifteen minutes, not the 22 that thetrainline.com tells us.

Since there hadn't been any delays in the trains on the way there, I even had time to drop into a nice-looking pub for lunch, and bumped into Adelaide, Geoff and Imre, who'd had the same idea. The highlight of lunch was concluding that it would be really brilliant if being brain-scanned in Japan (which is definitely happening, by the way) accidentally stripped me of my memorising ability. There would be no end of documentaries about that! And I'd never get tired of it, because I wouldn't remember having made any before!

Anyway, the competition took place at Frimley Green Football Club, which has got a whole lot of football pitches either in it or next to it, I wasn't quite sure. The main pitch is right outside the room where we were playing othello, and FGFC were at home on Saturday afternoon (they lost), so it wasn't a perfectly quiet place. But it did mean I could just step outside the door between rounds and watch the game, which was great. On Sunday I had to walk down the path to the big park with four more football pitches on it to see the action. And then I always seemed to get there just as they were stopping for half-time, or at the moment when one of the teams in a women's game decided the referee was being unfair to them and all walked off the pitch en masse.

I don't whine about this very much, preferring to just project an air of noble suffering, but if I didn't have bad knees, I would be out every Saturday or Sunday afternoon, playing football (badly) for a small local team. Being World Memory Champion is only something I do because I can't play football. If someone came up with a miracle cure, I would ditch the whole memory thing straight away and devote myself to a career as an unsuccessful amateur footballer.

Anyway, the usual prelude to the Nationals is the AGM of the BOF, at which the real excitement came from a text from France (who were also having their nationals on the same day), informing us all that Bintsa had been apparently caught cheating with a PDA, and had been doing this for the last year or so. Now, I'm not a technical person - to me, "PDA" means Pocket Dragon Adventures, my favourite cartoon, but I think in this context it means some kind of little computer or mobile phone, presumably with an othello program on it. Opinion was divided on whether this whole thing was a joke of some kind or not, and on exactly how it would be possible to cheat at othello with a PDA in your lap without anyone noticing. Still, it gave everyone something to talk about, and made our AGM's resolution to buy four new clocks seem quite tame and unexciting.

We also played some othello, but I don't remember much about that. The interesting thing about my games was that they were either extremely close or completely one-sided thrashings - no scores in the 20s for either player in any of my nine games, and only one in the 40s (I was desperately trying to maximise my disc count in the last game, against Roy, so that I could say 'no 20s and no 40s' to my uninterested blog-audience, but only managed to win 49-15 in the end). I did also have two draws, which is pretty unusual in othello - and what's more, the second draw was against Julian, who had himself also had another draw in a previous game. How many times has that happened in the British Othello Championship? Probably no more than two or three at most.

I ended up on five points - four wins, two draws, three losses - which isn't too bad, although I was never really in the top part of the leaderboard. I did get slaughtered 63-1 by Imre in my first game on Saturday, and then annoyingly beaten 33-31 by Michael in my first game on Sunday - annoying because I counted the ending with about ten moves to go (it was one of those cases where there's only one vaguely plausible ending) and worked out that I ended up with 33 discs, then a couple of moves later re-counted and realised I'd made a mistake and I actually only got 32, then another couple of moves later noticed that I'd missed another disc and I only got 31. I doubt that I had a win anywhere, but it's still annoying.

Anyway, those two ended up in the final and Michael won, so yay for him because he's never won it before. And I was eighth once you work out the tie-break, so I'll qualify for the world championship if five of the people above me find some good reason not to go to the worlds (and if Geoff, who finished 9th but is entitled to play for Britain in the WOC by virtue of winning the BGP earlier this year - we really love those three-letter abbreviations in the othello world, don't we? - ends up playing for Australia). I'm not holding my breath.

Which reminds me of another thing - Geoff's moving to Denmark, so now the chairman of the British Othello Federation will be an Austrian who lives in Denmark, an extremely groovy and eccentric state of affairs that is very much what the BOF is all about.

Home from the green green grass

What a fun weekend, I'm glad I decided to go after all. And the five-and-a-bit-hour journey home wasn't too unpleasant either. But I'm still too tired to write about the competition, so I'll wait till tomorrow to talk about it, except to say that I was generally mediocre and Michael Handel won the British Championship for the first time, in considerable style.

Frimley Green

They play darts there, as I understand. But tomorrow and Sunday, they're playing othello there instead. And by 'they', I mean me and the rest of the British othello posse. I actually decided yesterday that I wasn't going to bother with the nationals this year, because getting a train back on Sunday night is a long, tedious process that is almost certain to result in me being marooned at midnight somewhere en route, probably Penicuik, when the various trains are delayed, diverted and cancelled.

And have you ever tried getting a train ticket to Farnborough North on thetrainline.com? It sends you to Farnborough Main, and then the last leg of the journey is walking, 22 minutes (exactly) from the one station to the other. I haven't checked the prices, but I expect it costs more, too.

Anyway, after telling everybody I wasn't coming, I thought that maybe I could cope with a five-and-a-half hour train/tube/walking journey if I leave fairly promptly at four o'clockish (I'm expecting the tournament to run ahead of schedule as usual and me not to get to the final as usual - although I did end up in the 3rd/4th play-off in 2004, I remind you), as that'll get me to London before the last train of the night that stops at Beeston leaves (all the later trains force me to get off at Long Eaton or even, heavens forbid, East Midlands Parkway, and get a bus).

But I still wasn't entirely sure about whether to go or not, so I decided to go to playok.com and play (ok) a few games of othello, to see if I was in good form. If I ended up winning, I reasoned, I'd go to Frimley Green and long journeys be darned. Having then lost five games in a row against mediocre opposition, I decided to go to Frimley Green anyway, because I wanted to. Never put your fate in the hands of your othello-playing ability, people.

Now all I need to decide is whether to stay up and watch the first of the new series of Peep Show, or go to bed early in order to be good and refreshed for the competition tomorrow. Choosing the first option forces me to find something to do for an hour to avoid Derren Brown on telly, but I'm sure I can manage that if I really try. Anyway, wish me luck, and I'll resume bloggery on Sunday. If I get home early enough.

There's just one thing I don't understand

Why is there a Sea Life Centre in Birmingham? Who goes to Birmingham wanting to see sharks and giant sea turtles? And isn't it really inconvenient to ship all that sea life overland to the middle of a big city? And what do they do if the big tank springs a leak and they need to fill it with more sea water?

It's a working man I am

Sorry I didn't blog anything yesterday, but I was tired after a day of stacking shelves, and I didn't realise I hadn't blogged until after I'd turned my computer off for the night. My memory is bad, you know. However, after another day of hauling a wide range of desirable products around a store that strangely keeps its stock three storeys above the salesfloor, I'm feeling quite invigorated. I think everyone who knows me knows that I'm not really what you'd call a manual worker - I've never had a job that involved anything other than sitting at a computer, and I'm really quite feeble as a result - but it's good fun to do something different. I could quite happily change careers and haul haircare products from one place to another all day long, provided they still paid me what I get now for being an analyst, of course.

Also, on an unrelated note, I've noticed lately that the best way to get a reply from me is to send me an email and not a Facebook message. I think it's because I'm terribly lazy, but since I don't use Facebook very often, I only see the notification-email and replying to it involves at least another two or three clicks of the mouse, so I tend to put it off until I can be bothered. Whereas if I've got an email, I go through my inbox at least once a fortnight or so and make a point of replying to everyone who's expecting me to...

Brum

I'm going to Birmingham for the next couple of days, working in the big High Street store. Just for a change of scene, you know. I can't remember the last time I went to Birmingham, actually - I used to go there fairly often, but it's about twenty minutes longer on the train from Beeston than it is from Derby and somehow that tips it over the edge of 'too far away to be worth the trip'. So I'm hoping to find the city so enthralling that I want to visit more often in future. Hopefully there will be fireworks and escaped zoo animals of the non-violent kinds, and balloons.

I'm memorable!

Also memorable are 2808 decimal digits or 36 packs of cards in an hour, I'm sure of it. Didn't have much luck memorising them today, but the important thing is that I attempted to, and every time I do that it gets my brain more accustomed to the hour of solid concentration and the extensive mental imagery involved. If I can find another weekend or two to practice before the WMC, I'm hopeful that I can do something world-record-breaking there.

Not that I'm going to have many free weekends over the next couple of months, what with the British Othello Championship, the Mensa Annual Gathering (remember that I promised to do some kind of presentation there? I seem to have forgotten to weasel my way out of it...), that potential trip to Tokyo, an important bon-voyage kind of get-together with my brother, a birthday party (York, weekend after October 14th, anyone?) and probably other stuff too. Maybe I should quit my job again.

It's officially Christmas

The shops are filling their shelves with seasonal merchandise, the 2010 comic annuals are out, it won't be long before everywhere is full of decorations and the merry sound of carols! Which makes it all the more inappropriate that it was hot and sunny and lovely today. I feel like I'm living in the southern hemisphere, although that might also be something to do with the fact that I'm standing on my head as I write this.

Mysteries of the Orient

Japanese TV want to fly me out to Tokyo to have my brain scanned! A free trip in return for some tedious documentary filming sounds like a good deal to me. It'll be some time in October, assuming they don't change their minds or find a cheaper way to do it without buying plane tickets for me. Maybe I can go and visit Ayumu the chimp while I'm there!

It's good that I'm going to Japan, because my brother's threatening to outdo me in the globetrotter stakes - having never in his life so far been farther away from home than Wiltshire, he's now got a job in Harbin, China for the next year at least. And I don't know if you've ever checked on a map, but that's a heck of a long way away. Still, hopefully next year's world memory championship will be in that neck of the woods (I forget whether anyone's told me yet exactly where in China they want it to be) so I can visit.

Anyway, it's the weekend and if I don't do lots and lots of marathon memory practice over the next two days I'm going to lose the world championship this year and be banned from competing ever again due to general rubbishness, so I'd better get on with shuffling cards. Also, I need to learn Japanese...

V.F.D.

I've signed up to become a 'volunteer reading partner' - spending an hour a week helping primary school children with reading. It's one of those 'corporate social responsibility' things that Boots is keen on, and the idea behind me volunteering is that, much as I like my job, I do sometimes feel like I'm not exactly helping people or making the world a better place on a regular basis. I mean, at best I'm tangentially contributing in a minor way to enabling Boots customers to enjoy reasonably-priced cosmetics, but somehow that just isn't as fulfilling as it could be. And improving small children's reading skills might turn out to be fun as well as beneficial to the world in general. It's also a scary kind of prospect that I might well back out of at the last minute, but we'll see...

Forget that Northern Ireland thing

I've decided that it makes more sense for me to support Bahrain. They're playing Saudi Arabia tonight, with the winner going on to play New Zealand for a place in the world cup finals. And the second of their two games against New Zealand is on the last day of the World Memory Championship in November - it would have been a great double sporting event if only they hadn't changed the venue. Just picture it, we could have had all the excitement of the speed cards, then sat around watching the footy and impressing the press people with memorisation of international football trivia. It would have been in all the papers.

Except I would doubtless have gone to bed early, because I'm always dead on my feet after the final day of the world championships, and missed everything.



Postscript: Bahrain scored an equaliser in the last minute of injury time to win on the away goals rule! Yay! Go... whatever the national football team of Bahrain are popularly known as!

Red card

I need to get some new cards. I've had my current load for a good few years now, and they're getting to the point where they're too old for proper memorising - they might well start to stick together when I'm trying to nimbly flick them between my fingers in the space of twenty seconds or so, and that would be really annoying. Of course, it's too late now to get new cards for the world championship, because brand new packs are too slippery and I'd be liable to drop them. I'll just have to reward/condole myself after the competition with a big pile of brand new playing cards, and break them in over the course of the winter break.

Hey, maybe I could ask the organisers to just give me lots of cards instead of a trophy or whatever the prize is?

Because you demanded it

A regular reader (and I didn't even know I had any) has pointed out that I haven't mentioned my sainted grandmother on this blog for a long time. This is quite remiss of me, since I only saw Grandma last Saturday, and she's still alive and well and as brilliant as ever. Considering that, as she often likes to point out, she's eighty-nine years old, she's actually in great shape and likely to carry on having my visits to and conversations with her go unreported in my blog for years to come. I'll make more of an effort to give her a passing mention at least, seeing as I know she's got a lot of fans out there.

Apparently people do see her on the street, recognise her from the telly and stop to chat about whatever I've been up to recently. It's the price of fame, you know.

International affairs

Does anyone know anything about the upcoming Slovenian Memory Championship? There's a website, but it's all in some foreign language (I don't actually know what language they speak in Slovenia nowadays) so I don't know any details about it. It clashes with the British Othello Championship, in the even more exotic and mysterious locale of Frimley Green, so I can't go along and see what it's like, but I hope some information about the event will somehow leak into my consciousness. I've never heard of anyone Slovenian even taking an interest in memory competitions...

Come on you greens!

I've become Northern Irish. I was watching their game against Poland tonight, and it was terribly exciting - much more so than England's boring friendly match. I'm going to get some kind of green hat and follow their remaining games avidly.

And because that sounds a little low-brow and I wanted to give the impression that I've also done something worthwhile and educational today, I decided to wander randomly around the internet until I found a significant historical character I'd never heard of. So now I'm extremely interested in the life and times of Taira no Kiyomori. Wow, he was cool. Although I feel sorry for his unfortunate grandson...

Turn on the radio, daddy-o

I think I've mentioned it before, but I always buy the Radio Times. It's the one thing I'm snobbish about - I can't stand the idea of someone coming into my flat and seeing one of those nasty, garish, cheaper TV guides sitting on my coffee table (I don't think I've ever mentioned that I've got a coffee table in my new flat, now I come to think of it - there's no avoiding it, I'm turning into the middle classes) and thinking I must be the kind of person who exclusively watches soap operas and reality shows. So when the Co-Op down the road didn't have any RTs left tonight (and I'm not going up into town, my leg still hurts) I decided to do without knowing what's on telly for the next week. I suppose I could always look it up on the internet, but I doubt I'll get round to it. But if I miss the football, it'll be the Co-Op's fault. I'd stop shopping there, only that would be betraying my socialist principles even more than buying the Radio Times and owning (well, renting) a coffee table.

1404

I happened to notice that this is blog entry number 1404 in this thing of mine. By an interesting coincidence (well, maybe not interesting, but definitely a coincidence), that's the number of digits I attempt to memorise in 30-minute numbers. It's a strange number, but that's because it works out to 6 lots of 234, and my journeys all accommodate exactly 234 digits. If I'd put any kind of forward planning into my journey design, I would have made them 25 locations long, instead of 26 (or maybe even 40, to fit nicely in with the 40-digit rows of numbers we're given), and given us some nice round numbers, but it's too late now. Seriously, it is too late - a few years ago I tried to design some new journeys that were something other than 26 locations, but it didn't work at all. I'm completely stuck in a 26-location mindset, just because the first thing I used a journey for was memorising a pack of cards, and before the "Ben System" came into existence it took me 26 locations to memorise a pack.

Anyway, long disciplines like the 30-minute numbers are on my mind at the moment, because it's time for me to get stuck in to hour numbers and hour cards training whenever I've got a free weekend. It takes a good few trial runs before the WMC before I can really produce a good result, and we haven't actually got that much time left now.

The only trouble is, I haven't been in the memory-training mood just lately. I had quite boundless enthusiasm early in the year, and I'm sure it will return (I think possibly it's influenced by the movements of the planets), but it's probably going to be a real struggle to sit down and memorise this weekend, even if I'm not doing anything. I don't think I've got plans, but to be honest I can't remember. I'm not that kind of memory man, as I keep trying to explain to people.

Rain!

So, have we had summer now? Is it going to be cold and dark and wet for the rest of the year? Because I feel short-changed by the weather just lately.

Anyway, if you feel that my blog isn't terribly entertaining at the moment, why not go and read My Milk Toof instead? I think it's a work of genius.

Leg up

I didn't write anything yesterday because my knee was sore. What, you didn't know I type this thing with my freakishly long toes? Well, now you do. Anyway, it's somewhat better now than it was - I took the day off work to give it some more rest, although that did mean letting myself in for a mind-numbingly boring day.

It's not like there's nothing I need to do around the house, like cleaning up the place, or arranging for someone to come and replace my gas meter like they keep sending me letters saying they want to, or sorting out an appointment to give blood seeing as I'm out of USA-visit quarantine now, or arranging to get internet banking set up on my new computer for the BOF account (without which I won't be able to compile my treasurer's report for the AGM in a couple of weeks) or even doing some memory training, but I feel that if you're going to spend the day off work sick, you have some kind of moral obligation to lie around doing nothing all day. And besides, I've got a bad leg so you can't expect me to do anything.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I'll be fit to limp back to work tomorrow, so all will be well.

Laid up

I aggravated my old knee injury last night, by falling out of bed while trying to stagger to the bathroom in a hurry because I was feeling sick. I had been drinking to excess, yes, but I prefer to attribute the nausea and lack of balance to some kind of virus, probably affecting the inner ear. So basically, I've spent today lying on the settee with my left leg propped up on the arm, watching telly and recovering from a virus-related headache I'd developed.

It's the first time for a good few years that I've had any serious problem with my knees, and I'd forgotten how painful and inconvenient it can be. Still, at least I don't have to go to work tomorrow, and I should be limping less by Tuesday.

This has been a cry for sympathy from Zoomy's Thing, a subsidiary of Horseradish Tree Productions. Thanks for listening.

Three days off work

It would be a perfect opportunity to do a full trial run of the world memory championship and really kick-start my training for November. But actually, I'm going to spend the weekend hanging out with family members and doing nothing productive at all. And I don't even care.

I will, however, devote the bank holiday weekend to thinking up something interesting to blog about. Look forward to it!

Behold the amazing memory man!

I like when my job allows me to memorise things and not do any work for a period of time. It doesn't happen very often (which is good, because it would get boring if it did), but today I was roped in to help publicise our department's John O'Groats to Land's End charity walk by memorising all the 72 stages of the journey, complete with dates, distances and nearest Boots stores. See, that's a good way to spend a couple of hours of a work day. Also, I was very impressive and everybody thought I was great.

I'm faster than lightning! Well, very slow lightning, anyway...

I do hate to blow my own trumpet, but I am really quite good at memorising a pack of cards quite quickly. If you doubt it, you could check out this video on Florian's awesome website! Complete with trumpet music!

It really is a lot of fun to watch - I look like I'm in fast-forward riffling through the cards...

Doctor Who and the Giant Squid

While I'm still suffering from a lack of blog-subject-inspiration, I feel like I should record that I also recently watched the Doctor Who serial "The Power of Kroll" for the first time ever, and really liked it. Which is a little strange, since the prevailing opinion among fans seems to be that it's awful. It's actually well-written and entertaining, and the bad special effects don't really get in the way of the excitement too much.

By tomorrow, I'm sure I will have thought of something else to write about other than things I've watched on video.

I can't think of anything to write about

So I'll just mention that I watched Pulp Fiction on video yesterday morning, not for the first time, and wow, that's a great movie. I wish I could write something like that.

Return of the pirate

I dug out my old bandana to cover my head while cycling to Nottingham and back today (I felt like the exercise, and the trains aren't running anyway due to engineering works), and on two separate occasions small children pointed out that I'm a pirate. Personally, I think it makes me look more like a space cowboy gypsy beatnik hippy, but I suppose young people nowadays watch nothing but pirate movies. It's a terrible shame. Still, I do think I look groovy with the bandana and shades and leather waistcoast ensemble I had on today - it's the kind of outfit that will look even better when I'm sixty or so, provided I'm also skinny and ruggedly wrinkled by that point, like some kind of really cool aging rock star.

Busy doing nothing

Yep, there's nothing like a lazy Saturday. Gives one time to refresh important life skills, like how to win at Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Doesn't really give you anything exciting to blog about, though...

Ahhh, the weekend!

What with memorising on Saturday and Sunday last week and then being straight back to work, I've been 'working' for twelve days without a rest. It'll be nice to lie around all weekend doing nothing. Although if I'm in the mood, now would be a good time to launch into Hour Cards and Hour Numbers training in preparation for the world championship. It doesn't count as 'working' if I'm doing it at home...

More media madness

Radio Nottingham tomorrow morning - radio people seem determined not to let me sleep in of a morning, what with all the local breakfast shows wanting me. There must be something about me that goes nicely with cornflakes.

Meanwhile, just check out the photo on this Derby Telegraph article! Heeeeeere's Zoomy!

I'm amazed that they managed to dig up that photo. It was taken at the same time as the infamous scary, lit-from-below picture of me that the Telegraph have been using for the last five years every time they run an article about me, in the meeting room at Parkhouse Recruitment, but this photo has never yet seen the light of day as far as I know. It's certainly different, don't you think?

Medusoid Mycelium

My ever-wonderful friend Jemfy made a brilliant discovery today. Did you know that if you run a Spanish article about me through Babelfish internet translator, it renders my name as "Horseradish tree Pridmore"?

This is a fantastic development. You know how the Beatles called their company Apple because the Japanese word for 'apple' is 'ringo'? Well, from now on you're reading a Horseradish Tree Production. I'm going to work this into pretty much everything I do, as much as possible.

In order to repay the favour, I ran Jemfy's real name through Babelfish in as many languages as possible, and turned her into Badger Waldman in Dutch. Aren't foreign languages great?

Misinformation

Talking with someone at Radio Derby today, who wants to arrange an interview having heard about the weekend's competition:

Him: And you came second, right?
Me: What? No, I won it!
Him: Really? I thought the press release said some fifteen-year-old girl had won it...

Either the powers that be have sent out a really misleading press release (the version on the website is pretty clear about little details like the winner of the competition), or Radio Derby have trouble with reading. Still, I'm going on there tomorrow morning, crack of dawn, just because I can't say no to people over the phone.

There's also some inaccurate information in the Derby Evening Telegraph, and this time it's entirely my fault, I'm afraid. The article says that I won nine out of ten disciplines, which for the split-second I was talking to them I genuinely thought I had. I'd somehow forgotten that I completely failed to record any kind of score in the speed cards, as well as doing as badly as usual in the names and faces. Apologies to Ameel and Eva, and for that matter everyone else who might read the article and think I'm cleverer than I actually am.

Okay, that's the last memory-themed post for a while. Time to find something else to talk about again...

Bad omens

I've just realised that I brought 13 packs of cards to the UK Championships - nine that I optimistically thought I might try to memorise in the 10-minute cards and four for speed cards. That's terribly bad luck. It's like having thirteen people at dinner. If I'd thought of that at the time, I would certainly have lost!

In the news

Ben Pridmore, the goalie for Desborough FC, apparently pulled off a very impressive double save to earn his side a goalless draw with Daventry Town on Thursday night. His fans by now are probably used to the annoyance of finding articles about me when they search Google news, but it's nice to know that the Daventry Express match report has sneaked into the little gaggle of articles reiterating the press releases about the UK Championship. You could also find, if you really wanted to, an article in the Sunday Telegraph which manages to wildly misquote everyone who spoke to the reporter - I'm quite happy to be described as someone whose "spectacular triumphs have yet to deliver him from a bachelor existence in a tiny Nottingham bedsit", but to be portrayed as someone who says memory competitions are not fun, but involve nothing but hours of hard work and practice? For shame. And I didn't forget to tie my shoelaces, I deliberately chose not to buy new ones when they broke, and have for at least six months been walking around with stubs of laces protruding from my only pair of shoes. That's a much more respectable thing to do, isn't it?

The BBC, meanwhile, repeat the rather groovy film of me from a while ago for your viewing pleasure. And there'll be an article in the Derby Evening Telegraph, too - they lived up to their name by calling me this evening, just as I got back from London (I skipped the prizegiving ceremony in order to get back home at a reasonable time and get to work tomorrow - I feel a little guilty about this, but I did already thank the organisers for all their hard work in creating a really great event, and pretty much everybody else had already left anyway, seeing as there was a four-hour gap between the end of the championship and the prizes). Neither newspaper lived up to the 'Telegraph' part of their name, though. They should probably change that.

The prizes, I should point out, were awesome - they always do really stylish trophies at the UK Championship, much better than the boring tin cups you generally get. This year's are irregular-shaped big glass paperweights resembling mountains and glaciers. I really must make an effort to get some trophies for Cambridge next year - a couple of spectators are already wanting to know the details about it, which is forward planning of a kind I don't specialise in.

Finally, for the benefit of the anonymous poster who's been asking the question here and on Florian's blogs of memory events - the World Championship will almost certainly be taking place in a very big conference room in the Strand Palace Hotel, big enough to comfortably fit the seventy-plus competitors they're optimistically expecting. So there's no need to worry about that.

Names and faces

The UK Championships are up and running - if you're not following Florian Dellé's live blogging, then you jolly well should be.

There are 18 competitors, I think, from all around the world, and the number of competitors was enough to force a relocation of the championship from the basement room of Simpsons-in-the-Strand to a conference room in the Strand Palace Hotel across the road. I can't imagine how small the original venue must have been, because the new, bigger alternative has no room to swing a cat. Luckily, the UK Cat-Swinging championships aren't until next week, and memorising numbers doesn't take up quite so much space, but even so, we're quite closely packed together in a little room in the basement.

The Japanese TV crew and a couple of very enthusiastic photographers (who for some reason wanted all the lights turned out except a big spotlight at the back of the room in order to take pictures of all the competitors at their desks - possibly they saw what we all look like and decided that a shadowed effect would be the way to go) added to the crowded feel of the room, but despite the delays all the photography caused, we finished more or less on schedule. Not that it was necessary to do so, because we're not sharing our digs with chess players any more, and can spend the whole day tomorrow memorising at our leisure, without having to hurry.

A lot of the competitors are people I've met once or twice before, and knowing how good I am with putting faces to names and vice versa I was quite happy with myself when I walked into the venue and thought "There's Rick de Jong... no, it's not, it's the one who looks a bit like Rick but isn't... Dave Billington!" and was able to say "Hi Dave" with confidence as if there had never been any doubt. And I was particularly gratified when the first thing he said to me was that at least I knew his name, because Gaby Kappus had greeted him with "Hi, Rick, it's good to see you!"

They don't look all that similar, but there is a definite resemblance. However, my confidence in my name-remembering ability was a little dented when, in front of the Japanese cameras, I introduced Ameel Hoque to them only for him to say "No, I'm not Ameel, I'm Toby Caldwell. I'm new." Kanako from Japan said "But you called him Ameel!", just in case any NHK viewers had missed it and we all had a good laugh at how stupid I am.

Then a bit later, when we went into the competition room, Toby came up to me and said hi, and I laughed "Hi, Toby - see, I remember your name now!" To which he replied "What? I'm Ameel, don't you remember me? Who's Toby?" In my defence, they've both got beards. And hair. And faces. And I think they were both wearing clothes. How do you expect me to know who's who?

Anyway, I might not remember what my friends look like, but I can still remember how to memorise things. This is a competition I should be pretty confident of winning - the world's best aren't here and the next-best memoriser here is Ameel, the world number 44 (well, Dominic O'Brien and Gaby Kappus are here too, but they're arbiting and not competing). And I won the two disciplines we've had results for, words and binaries, and got a passable score in 15-minute numbers, I think. A bad score in names and faces, naturally, but I've given up all hope of doing well at that. Anyway, I'm safely in the lead after two disciplines, with Ameel in second and Florian third.

Also in attendance is Eva Ball, the UK Schools Championship winner and possibly the first British junior ever to compete at a memory competition (unless I've forgotten someone). She protests that she's no good and hasn't done any preparation, but she got the second-best score in words and an entirely acceptable result in binary to lie somewhere comfortably in the top ten overall. We have regular internationals like Rick, Florian, Pierre Berbinau, Tomasz Krasinski, Idriz Zogaj, Dagfinn Hammar and Kranthi Raj, comparatively new internationals like Mattias Ribbing, Marco Lombardo and Håkon By, and a British contingent made up of me, Eva, Ameel, Dave, Toby, Richard Bowdler (who competed for the first and only time in Cambridge 2006, so it's good to see him back - I can now add him to the list of people I've enticed into becoming regular memory competitors by virtue of organising that competition!), Bilal Arshad (new from Cambridge this year) and newcomer Antonio Campo who despite the name is from Wales. A good turnout!

I saw him one day as he stood on the Strand, stopped all of the traffic with a wave of his hand

Here I am in London, all set for a weekend of memorising. Had a fun interview with the Japanese film crew this afternoon, although the Irish radio cancelled on me (possibly something more important than a little national memory competition in another country occurred to them). And tomorrow there's a very brief chat with Radio Shropshire (two to three minutes, in an interview shared with Phil) and possibly also talking to the Sun, but there'll be a minimum of being followed around by cameras this weekend, which will make a pleasant change.

I've even gone to the trouble of finding out which disciplines we're doing on which days - on Sunday morning we seem to have a very unrealistically rushed schedule, so expect stirring tales of memorisers barricading themselves in the competition room to keep out the chess players who want to play there in the afternoon. Anyway, wish me luck, everyone. And then also wish all the other competitors luck, because it wouldn't be fair just to wish good luck for me. I'd be happier if it was one of those competitions where nobody keeps score and everyone is declared the winner, really...

A new approach to preparation

I think it sums up my attitude to the UK Championship this weekend to say that I just realised tonight that I hadn't booked a hotel yet. And also that I felt a bit annoyed today when I remembered that I'm going to this competition and so I won't have a free weekend to practice for the World Championship in November.

I think it's just that it's only two weeks since Hamburg - I'm not used to having competitions so close together. I've done no training at all, except for an Online Memory Challenge on Sunday (in which I got perfectly respectable scores in everything, so possibly I'm worrying about nothing).

I also feel guilty about not having done even the most basic preparation (like, finding out what order the disciplines are in and deciding how many cards/digits/whatevers I'm going to attempt) because it's rather rude to the people who've spent a lot of time and at least a certain amount of money organising the thing if I don't take it seriously. They've also been very enthusiastically sending out press releases, judging by the number of people who've got in touch with me this week asking for interviews. Perhaps there's still time for me to get into match fitness. The competition doesn't start until Saturday morning, after all.

I've got the afternoon off work tomorrow - I was hoping to avoid using up holidays for this one, since I've already taken quite a big chunk of the 25 days that have to last me till the end of March (down to London on Friday night, memorise for two mornings, back up again on Sunday evening, £10 each way because I bought advance tickets, bish bash bosh), but then the Japanese TV people wanted to film me, and Irish radio wanted to talk to me (listen to Today FM from 4:30 tomorrow if you're in range. And if you want to listen to my annoying voice.) so I had to take a half-day. Still, that's pretty efficient for a memory competition. I might even have a few holidays left for just sitting at home doing nothing on a work day! I haven't done that for ages!

Weather report

Flying walruses dominate the skies nowadays. Ever since they started growing wings, it's become increasingly difficult to find a good place to sunbathe without the sun being obscured by great flocks of ugly, blubbery creatures performing loop-the-loops and airborne-scissors-box manoeuvres. Anybody wishing to develop a suntan should therefore head as far away from the coast as possible - walruses like to return to the water occasionally in order to check their email, and so don't normally venture more than a hundred miles from the sea.

Alternatively, for those who have difficulty finding a spot in Britain more than a hundred miles from any coast, holidaymakers could also visit Skegness, where the denizens of Natureland Seal Sanctuary have developed a kind of seaweed-based cannon to shoot down passing wing-ruses. The seals and a few of the sealions have developed a competition among themselves as to who can bring down the most flying creatures, and so there are quite often gaps to be seen in the vast, grey, tusked carpet that normally renders the brightest day as dark as a really dark night. Sunbathers who position themselves carefully and manage not to be hit by a falling seaweed-coated walrus can sometimes get as much as fifty minutes of sun exposure on a good day.

Rather a gloomy prospect, if you'll excuse the pun, but to look on the bright side, if you'll excuse the pun, at least it doesn't rain any more since the earwigs found a way to stop it.

One down, one to go

Well, that's Canada sorted for footage of me. All I really have to say about it is that Josh the director looks spookily like my dad. Or like my dad would have looked if he'd been made of something stretchy and someone had grabbed his head and pulled upwards about six inches. Josh is taller and thinner, is the point I'm trying to make here. But he's got the exact same hair (curly and originally black but unevenly fading to grey and white, bald on top and unkempt back and sides), same moustache and nearly the same sideburns (he says he just had them trimmed yesterday, so possibly they used to be the same ridiculous style as my dad's were). It was quite eerie talking to him.

Here come the Canadians

They're coming to film me tomorrow, at the inconvenient time of 4pm, meaning I have to be in work early if I'm going to get everything done. And then they'll probably be here all night recording a tedious interview that will eventually be cut out of the finished program, if the whole project doesn't get abandoned half-way through. I'm in a grumpy mood, but it's probably too late to tell them to get stuffed now. The Japanese are coming on Friday, but I'm less grumpy with them because they've sent me far fewer emails asking for more information.

Still, in more important news, it's just occurred to me that it's roughly ten years since that fateful day when I saw a big black hat in a shop in Sheffield and thought to myself "I might look good in a big black hat, and it will certainly stop people noticing that I'm starting to go bald. What the heck, I think I'll buy it." If not for that moment, I would be known today as 'the one without the hat'.

Never be without a Beano

I'm feeling extremely accomplished, because I've spent the evening cleaning my living room. Some people, I realise, do this every day, or every week at least, and it takes them about five minutes, but I prefer to leave it at least a year between cleans. But we'd got to the point where I literally couldn't see the floor under all the rubbish, and the giant clumps of dust were starting to develop sentience, so I decided it was about time. And, two full bin bags of rubbish and five or six giant piles of stuff I want to keep having been moved to other rooms, I'm pleased to say I'm now sitting in a nice, clean, tidy room! I feel like I deserve a reward of some kind.

Also today, I came across someone selling old books and comics in Beeston town centre, so I picked up a few old Beanos and other bits and pieces. "And the Viz is for you, right?" the man who sold me them laughed, and I agreed that it was, not feeling like getting into the whole discussion that they were all for me - I don't care what the intended age group of my comics is.

There are some good ones in there, too - the one from January 1986 with a competition to win a Raleigh Vektar bike, the coolest bike ever made. I entered that competition, but I didn't win. John Gray had a Vektar, which was typical of him - he was rich beyond the dreams of the average nine-year-old Clinton Park School pupil and his mum bought him anything he wanted - but I never did get one. Life is unfair.

Funnily enough, I also picked up the Beano from exactly 25 years ago, August 11th 1984, which seems like a good opportunity to compare it with this week's issue and see if it really isn't as good as it used to be. I'll do a full review of both, when I get a chance! There's something for you all to look forward to.

Sporting traditions

Live league football on the BBC (admittedly not the games involving the good teams, but it's a start) and England failing dismally in the cricket - I like it when things go back to the way they're supposed to be. Also, if only the selectors had listened to me and not kept on recalling Ian Bell, we probably wouldn't be in this mess, so they've only got themselves to blame.