Aunt Kitsie

In a really awesome development all round, I found Bobby Bear's Annual 1933 in the Oxfam shop in town today, for only £3! More than a hundred pages of comics, stories, puzzles and instructions for making a book-table with two leaves from a wooden packing case! Two of the filler stories are even early works by Norman Hunter that I've never read before! This completely surpasses even the 1950 Toby Twirl book that I found in another Beeston junk shop last year, and proves that I'm living in the land of antiquarian anthropomorphic animal annuals!

Now, please go out and buy some Kiwi boot polish.

On an unrelated note, if you eat a lot of cherries, do they each count as one of your five a day?

Dumplings

Here's what I'm going to do. I did like the idea of going on X-Factor as a singer in Brazilian Mystery Cloak, but I don't think it's quite the career move for me - I disapprove of X-Factor (the TV show, I approve of the superhero comic, although the original incarnation was a lot better than the current one), but I did always enjoy Stars In Their Eyes, so I'm going to wait for that to come back. I could never decide whether to be Paul Simon or Meat Loaf (I don't think the world is quite ready for my Cher, which is the voice I do best).

No, what I'm going to do is learn to cook. I think I'm actually not a bad cook, for a bachelor - many of the meals I cook involve mixing two or even three packets of foodstuffs together - but I think I could be better. I haven't had proper suet dumplings since my dad died, and I'm sure it can't be difficult. I'm going to have proper ingredients in my kitchen cupboards, like flour and eggs and sugar and things. Maybe even spices! I've got a spice rack, after all, it'd be nice to put something on it. And I'm going to make stew. And casserole. That kind of thing. It'll be great!

I think my head's screwed on backwards

I'm having disturbing feelings of optimism about the new government of this country (I'm sure I'll get over it, don't you worry), and equally disturbing feelings of pessimism about memory competitions, mental calculation competitions and so on. I need to either find something else I can strive to be world champion at (because let's face it, life is meaningless unless you're at least trying to be some kind of world champion) or really make more of an effort to hold on to the memory title. But I'm still not really feeling like it. Consequently, tonight I'm watching the football and quietly enthusing about several very nice bits of the coalition agreement. Possibly I'm sickening for something.

I don't like being surveilled

There's a van that's always parked around here, with "Survey Solutions" written on the side. While it might be perfectly innocent, I prefer to believe that it's actually some shady government agency surveying my every movement and using an elaborate double bluff to try to cover its shady activities. I need to invest in some kind of lead-lined windows. Which will also help with insulation, it's cold around here at the moment.

Wails

It seems to be becoming an annual tradition that the Welsh Championship is where I realise how very badly out of practice I am. Only last year, the Welsh Championship was in March or something (I don't remember exactly, my memory is bad) and the World Championship was in November. Now if I want to do any good in China, I've got three months to improve from 'rubbish' to 'good' (to use my own scientific terminology for how well I can memorise things).

It's a stamina thing, pure and simple. I hadn't spent a full day memorising competitively for six months, and by lunchtime I was done for. I got entirely acceptable scores in the first four disciplines, then it went 10-min-cards: 4 packs. 5-min numbers: 203 (only attempting 243 because I was very, very slow and I knew I couldn't do more than that without making a mess of it). Abstract images: 150 (again, that was all I attempted). Historic dates: 60-something. All a long way below what I can do if I can just stay more awake in the afternoon.

I set myself a modest target of at least beating Christian's score from Cambridge last week, and a 96 in the spoken numbers just put me over that level with one discipline to go, so I could safely attempt two fast packs of cards, safe in the knowledge that I had no chance at all of getting them right, but not really minding. And yes, I did make mistakes - just a couple in the first pack, and then found I couldn't even remember the first pair of cards in the second attempt. So I ended up with a final score in the low 6000s, which I suppose could be worse. But that's not the performance of someone who wants to win the world championship.

I don't think I do, to be honest. I'm seriously asking myself which is less offensive to my fellow competitors - not competing at all, or competing and doing badly. If I was one of my rivals, I wouldn't want to beat an obviously out-of-shape Ben, but I wouldn't want him to drop out and not give me the opportunity to beat him, either. I could get back up to world-number-one standard with three months of solid work, but... I can't see it happening.

Anyway, enough about me. We had seven competitors in Newport - John Burrows and Antonio Campo forming the Welsh contingent (yes, he's Welsh, despite the name. They have burrows in Wales too and there are at least as many Welsh people called John as people who call themselves Ieuan), me by myself as Team England, Idriz and Mattias from Sweden, Conor from Ireland and Roy from Hong Kong. Mattias continues to get great scores, improving on his Cambridge performance with 3000-points-plus to take second place - John was third and the new Welsh Champion. Arbiting was professional and excellent as usual, courtesy of Dai, Phil and Warren. Congratulations to everyone, and long may the Welsh Open continue!

Getting to Bahrain was easier than this

Original plan - leave work early, get train all the way to Ebbw Vale, stay with Dai overnight, go to Newport tomorrow for memory competition.

I just about managed to get away from work early enough (leaving myself ten minutes to pack a bag before having to leave for the station), only to find that the first train on my journey had been cancelled, for no reason that anyone at the station saw fit to share with the travellers. Since Ebbw Vale is an almost impossible train station to get to, and now I wouldn't be able to get there till about half past ten, I re-evaluated my plans and decided to just get a hotel in Newport and turn down Dai's kind offer of hospitality. So all went well until we were in Gloucester at half past eight, and the tannoy announced "I'm sorry for the delay and any inconvenience it may cause. We're now moving to the end of the platform to wait at the signal, and we'll be there for some time. It seems a cow was struck by a train, and a vet's on the way to see what can be done about it."

Half an hour later, the conductor came down and told us that the situation with the cow hadn't improved, and our best bet might be to hop on the 9:15 to Bristol, then get another train back down to Newport and Cardiff. It'd take about two and a half hours, but it was probably better than just waiting here in Gloucester. I was inclined to agree with that, since the woman in a nearby seat had spent the whole thirty minutes talking to someone on the phone about the situation (spending ten minutes of this time telling her friend how to spell Gloucester - I think the idea was that the friend would look up on the internet how long it took to get to Cardiff, but the conversation didn't go beyond repeating "G-L-O-U-C-S-T-E-R" over and over again). But then the conductor returned to his little compartment and thirty seconds later announced that we were moving again. There was no further update about what the vet had been able to do about the cow.

So then I just had to (shudder) take a taxi to the Holiday Inn on a road inexplicably called "The Coldra" - do a search on this blog for "The Wardwick" to see my feelings about roads like this - and hope that I was pronouncing it right and the driver wouldn't realise I'm a foreigner and take me the long way round. I thought I was safe when the driver turned out to be Asian, but then he turned round and said "You did say the Coldra, right, guv'nor?" in the broad Welsh accent you can only get by living in Newport your entire life, and pronounced it differently to the way I'd said it, so then I had double feelings of guilt for a) secretly harbouring racist views, and b) offending a Welshman by not pronouncing place-names right.

Still, I eventually made it to the hotel, and now I suppose I should get some sleep in preparation for the competition tomorrow. Because, after all, I've done no other kind of preparation, and at least a period of unconsciousness might help a bit...

Election fever

Hooray, it's election night. I can't stay up to watch it, since I've got to start work early tomorrow so that I can leave early and then trek down to the distant wilderness that is Ebbw Vale tomorrow evening, but I'm still very enthusiastic about the fact that it's election night.

As I've mentioned before, this is the first general election where I've been in a constituency where my vote could plausibly make any difference, so I've been quite gripped by all the twists and turns of this campaign. I'll be sorry when it's over with. In 1997, I was living in East Lindsey, under the dominion of Sir Peter Tapsell, who'd been Conservative MP for the rural wilds of Lincolnshire since long before I was born, and who is still MP there now (although boundary changes mean he's now MP for "Louth and Horncastle" instead). He'll be Father of the House when Parliament reconvenes, now that the even more ancient Alan Williams has retired. At eighty years old, he knows he can say and do whatever he likes, and still be guaranteed well over fifty percent of the votes in his constituency, so expect to see him continue to vote with his excessively right-wing conscience against any modern Conservative policies that come his way.

In 2001, I was in Boston (with Skegness), where it was thought for a while that Labour might take the seat from the traditional Conservative majority (Sir Richard Body, who everyone either voted for or would-have-voted-for-if-only-he-wasn't-a-Tory was retiring, and the new candidate was very young). But then their campaigning, which consisted of driving a loudspeaker van around the towns and villages constantly blaring "Vote Labour! Vote Labour!" made everyone hate them, and the yuppie-ish new Conservative Mark Simmonds won it easily enough.

By 2005, I'd moved to a safe Labour seat for a change - in Derby South, nobody really liked Margaret Beckett, but it was understood that everyone would be voting for her anyway. And indeed they did. Politics can be strange.

This one, though, I still don't know who'll win. Probably the Conservatives. But we'll see tomorrow morning.

Eeg.

That's the sound you make when a small lobster jumps down your throat unexpectedly. But that didn't happen to me today, so don't worry. What did happen is that I got up early and went down to London on the train packed with commuters who presumably do that every day, the poor things. Then it was into the Japanese crew's minibus like some sort of Cliff Richard and out to Greenwich, where Dominic monitored my brainwaves by means of sticking electrodes to my head.

The scanning apparently showed something interesting, but I don't really get the whole idea behind it. Still, it proves I've got a brain, if I was still doubting it after the MRI in Tokyo. And that's that for this latest bout of TV fame and glory. I can go back to normality now - or at least as close to normality as you can get at a memory competition in south Wales.

Brain drain

London tomorrow on the early-morning train, where brainwave-scanning things will happen for the entertainment of Fuji TV's viewers. I need to go to bed, I haven't had nearly enough sleep lately, with one thing and another. I didn't mention that on Sunday night/Monday morning in the hotel the fire alarm went off at four o'clock. Everybody was just coming sleepily out of their rooms when it stopped, and we all just shrugged and went back to bed.

I'm Martin Sheen, I'm Steve McQueen, I'm Jimmy Dean

Before I talk about the Cambridge Memory Championship, let me just say that I've found a website that's supposed to use super-technology to identify celebrities who look like you:



I have to say that none of those people look terribly like me, or indeed like each other, but I take this as evidence that the person I'm most likely to be mistake for on the street is Jackie Chan, which is extremely groovy.

Anyway, Cambridge! I couldn't go to the othello on Saturday because I hadn't finished all the preparations for Sunday (in my defence, it's a lot of work, and I'm extremely lazy), which is a shame because a lot of other players couldn't go either - the Cambridge Regional clashed with the Copenhagen International, and there were only four players who chose Cambridge. Apparently Iain won again, which pretty much confirms him as BGP champion this year.

So it was on Saturday afternoon that I hauled my big rucksack full of memorisation and recall papers, packs of cards, speed cards timers and my laptop down to Cambridge on the train. I stayed in Cityroomz, having been sensible enough to book the room in advance for the first time in my life, and found it as delightful as always.

I got up super-early on Sunday morning, allowing the maximum possible time to walk (or stagger) all the way to Trinity College from the hotel next to the train station, since the buses don't run so early on a Sunday morning and I'm not going to compromise my principles and take a taxi just because I've got a rucksack that's too heavy for anyone other than Geoff Capes to lift. I got there a bit before 8:30 (start time was nine o'clock, but there are always people who get there early, even if I tell everyone they'll have to wait outside in the rain because the man with the key won't have got there yet) and bumped into Dai and John on the way there. Dave and Nelson were already hanging around, too, and we got suspicious questions from a porter who thought we might be up to no good.

Aubrey turned up promptly, with the key, and let us into the room. I'd asked for the room at the back, rather than the Big Glass Cube, since it's slightly farther away from the loud beeping lift, but it didn't make very much difference - it still could be clearly heard going BING-BONG! at unexpected moments. There were also other games tournaments taking place in the BGC - draughts in the morning and backgammon in the afternoon, which provided a bit of background noise too (especially the latter, with the rattling dice), but I'd say there was an adequate level of silence roughly 75% of the time, which I suppose is acceptable for a cheap little memory competition. The room was also rather too small for the eleven competitors, four arbiters and enormous film crew, but we managed well enough.

Yes, there was the enormous Japanese film crew, which led to another person hanging around too - Trinity College rules apparently require a Fellow or a Porter to be present during any filming. Imre, who arranged the rooms for the Cambridge MSO, is a Fellow (I wish I was a Fellow, it's a really great-sounding thing to call yourself) but was one of those othello players who prefers Copenagen, so Fuji TV had to pay for a porter to stand guard. Trinity College Porters wear bowler hats, which makes it probably the awesomest job in the world. I'm going to change careers.

Eleven competitors, from six different countries. Seven if you count Wales as being foreign! Two of these competitors, the Danish ones, weren't taking part in all the disciplines, which is probably a good thing because I hadn't been able to get a Danish translation for the dates.

Team Sweden - Idriz, Mattias and Oliver - put in a strong performance, especially Mattias, who narrowly won the Words and Names & Faces disciplines. The Swedish championship in September (they're promising 100,000 spectators, which seems a little optimistic) should be interesting. The speed cards was won by all-American hero Nelson Dellis, with a time of just over a minute - he's got to be favourite for the US Championship next year. Runner-up in all three of those, and winner of all the others, often by a vast margin, was the new German superstar Christian Schäfer. His scores included 693 in 5-minute binary, 653 in 15-minute numbers, 260 in abstract images and 81 in dates - world-class results all four. He's now moved up to number 14 in the world rankings and is one to watch out for at the World Championship in August.

Nelson's speed cards was just enough to knock old campaigner and best-of-Team-Britain James Ponder down to third place overall, while Christian's win ensured that the German domination of the Cambridge Championship continues - four of the five winners now have been Germans (nobody's ever won it twice).

Incidentally, Sir John Houblon has been haunting me lately. The Japanese TV crew have been paying for all their incidental expenses with a huge wad of £50 notes (that kind of thing is perfectly normal in Japan, but perhaps I shouldn't be mentioning it here where the chances of being mugged are somewhat higher), and then Oliver paid his entry fee with another fifty. I can't remember the last time I saw a £50 note, and now they're everywhere.

We finished not on time, but not too late, and went to a Chinese restaurant in the evening. I had plenty of time to stand around chatting to people, not too much time spent talking to the cameras (they continue to be a lot of fun), and everything went more or less smoothly all the way through!

Back to work tomorrow, on Wednesday it's down to London where Dominic will do something with my brainwaves, another couple of days of trying to get my real job done, then Wales on Saturday for my first competition (as a competitor) of the season. I haven't done enough training, as per usual.

He's a Japanese boy

That was a fun afternoon's filming! My flat hasn't had so many visitors in all the time I've been living here - most TV documentaries in my extensive experience send a crew consisting of director, cameraman and sound man (either or both of these 'men' can be female, obviously, but 'cameraperson' just sounds silly), but Fuji TV had a team of eight charged with capturing evidence of my amazingness (it's a hard thing to track down and capture, I'll admit, so clearly we need as many people as possible working on it). There was the presenter of the show, the completely awesome Ken Mogi; a director, cameraman, sound man and producer; another (female) cameraman with a smaller camera; the British-based Japanese woman who's been making all the arrangements for schedules and things; and a driver who stayed in the van all afternoon. They all hung around the flat performing their various roles and giggling in Japanese about my untidiness (I happen to know that the Japanese word for 'pants' is 'pants', and since I had several pairs strewn about the floor of my bedroom that I somehow forgot about while tidying up yesterday, I could catch the gist of what they were giggling about).

But the filming was really awesome. The crew all already knew everything about memory techniques, competitions and all about me, so I didn't have to answer any of the usual boring questions, and I think I came across as quirky, eccentric and likeable as well as an amazing person who can remember cards. Mind you, I normally think I come across as a complete berk, only to be told that I wasn't that bad, so possibly I'm going to horrify and disgust the Japanese audience.

It's a complicated business

There comes a time in everyone's life when you think to yourself "Right, that's got my flat clean enough that I won't be hideously embarrassed when the Japanese TV crew come round tomorrow, as long as they don't look in the spare bedroom or the bathroom... now I'd better get on with stapling all those memorising and recall papers together and putting them in big brown envelopes ready for Sunday." And then you generally think "You know, I haven't seen my stapler for a very long time. Not since this time last year, probably. I don't have much call for stapling in my general everyday life. Never mind, I'm sure I put it back in the top drawer of the desk in the spare room, with all my stationery."

Obviously, I didn't. And obviously, that means I dumped it on the floor of the spare room the last time I cleaned up my flat (about nine months ago, I think it was). And after that point, my brother left all his worldly posessions in my spare room when he went to live in China. And after that, I'd just dumped all the rubbish from the rest of my flat on top of the general pile in there. I clearly wasn't going to find the stapler without mounting the kind of expedition that would lose me for weeks and involve discovering whole new tribes and sharp pieces of glass. It's a shame, because it's a very groovy stapler, made of see-through plastic (I also own a very groovy phone, made of see-through plastic - got to be good looking 'cause they're so hard to see), but I'm sure I'll see it again some day. When I clean the spare room.

So, since I needed to go out and buy big brown envelopes, I bought a new stapler as well. You might say that this anecdote doesn't really merit a three-paragraph blog entry, especially one which only mentions in passing the clearly more interesting fact that Japanese TV are filming me tomorrow and doing no end of doubtless exciting things that I'm not telling my readers about, but hey, that's the way I do things. And I do love transparent plastic office supplies. If I get my own business some day, everything will be transparent!

Greatest advertising slogan I've ever heard

"We use real ingredients" - advert for Hellman's mayonnaise. That even beats that advert for some yoghurt or something that boasted that it only contained two ingredients.

An Unforgettable Winner

There's a transcript of a radio interview with me available on the internet, apparently recorded immediately after the world championship last year, in which I answer the usual range of questions for the benefit of Americans. The particularly interesting thing about it is that I have absolutely no memory whatsoever of doing this interview. I obviously did do it, because it's all exactly the kind of thing that I would say, and anyway who would want to make up an interview with me, but this is a fine example of how mentally drained I always am after a world memory championship. I'm fairly certain that these things aren't good for your memory.

Cambridge draws nigh

I realise that I haven't blogged so much as a tweet (as the cool kids are saying nowadays) for the last couple of days, but I've been busy getting everything ready for the Cambridge championship... well, technically I've spent most of the weekend not getting ready for the Cambridge championship and feeling guilty about it, but that also takes up a lot of time. Procrastination is really hard work, I'm quite exhausted.

But I'll have it all done before Friday, when I have Japanese TV descending on me again to film me at work and at play. Then it's othello on the Saturday, and a day of exciting memory on the Sunday, all in the beautiful surroundings of Cambridge. I must admit that the interesting politics around here has been a big part of what's been distracting me this weekend - I've just been to the hustings down the road, which was really quite fun, with lots of interesting and occasionally childish bickering from all the candidates. They're all splendid people really, obviously. But Cambridge has already got a Lib Dem MP, so presumably it's now a super-safe seat, so there won't be any local fuss to distract me from running the competition. Or does it work the other way around, and all those students will be determined to vote against the established power and will be campaigning wildly for someone else outside the window? I don't really understand the whole concept of politics, so I wouldn't know. Anyway, I'm not blogging about it.

You know what I miss? The Bridge!

It's years and years since my favourite-ever website disappeared into the limbo of lost internet chat rooms (which is a scary kind of place, possibly haunted by the ghost of Chiquittita), and I still, on going into a lesser forum tonight, almost introduced myself with "Zoom Zoom skips onto the Bridge..."

So I thought I'd post a blog that leaves all the non-Bridge people out there scratching their heads and wondering what I'm talking about. Let's hear from those surviving VPSers out there! Throw your stick into my comments section and let's stand in a state of catlike readiness, waiting to see what happens!

Sporting triumphs

I'd forgotten about this, but I was reminded of it recently somehow - I once represented my primary school in the annual inter-school sports in the egg and spoon race. I came last, but I had properly qualified for it by beating all the other third-year-junior boys in the school (there were about six of us, it was a smallish school). That's a really quite impressive achievement and I ought to make myself some kind of medal or trophy.

The backlog is building up

Sorry, everyone who's waiting for an email or just a hello from me, I've been a bit rushed just lately and I'm getting behind with everything. I'll catch up with you all tomorrow, and that's an Official Zoomy Promise.

More numbers

I think I might have to start posting my training scores on my blog again - that really seemed to motivate me to practice every day, without slacking off. So there's something for you all to look forward to.

What a lovely weekend!

All nice and sunny and warm, perfect playing-outside weather. I really hope next weekend is full of rain and hail and sleet and snow and volcanic ash, because next weekend is Printing Things Out Weekend, that most tedious weekend in my memory-competition calendar, when I sit around indoors for at least several hours making sure I've got all the memorisation and recall papers and other accessories ready for the Cambridge Memory Championship.

Speaking of which, confirmed competitor list (TWO people dropped out today, but it's still a healthy number - let's just hope the planes are flying again by May 2nd...):

Nelson Dellis (USA)
James Ponder (England)
John Burrows (Wales)
Mark Aarøe Nissen (Denmark)
Idriz Zogaj (Sweden)
Mattias Ribbing (Sweden)
Taras Bulgya (Ukraine)
Christian Schäfer (Germany)
Nicolai Lassen (Denmark)
Oliver Strand (Sweden)
Dave Billington (England)

Have I missed anyone? There are also unconfirmed competitors who might well be there too, Mike from America, Sam from England, there are probably others I've forgotten, so please do let me know, if you're out there.

Sod it, I'm going to talk politics

I know I've got that self-imposed ban that I only break on rare occasions, but it's general election time, so I'll just get it all out of the way tonight and then go back to my usual drivel. But I've got to write something, just to remind you all that I've been voting Lib Dem since long before it was cool. I don't know, all you bandwagon-jumpers, I suppose it's my fault for being such a famous celebrity and role model for the people of Britain, but you don't really have to copy everything I do.

Also, I characterised this constituency on Wednesday as "going to be a fairly comfortable Conservative win with Labour second" (I wasn't breaking the no-politics-talk rule there, that was a blog entry about daleks), and of course a week is a long time in politics if there's a nationwide shift in public perception of the third party on the Thursday night, so I thought I'd better post something new in case my prediction turns out to be wildly wrong and everyone laughs at me.

Because I was in the barber's today, traditionally always the best place to pick up on the mood of the local populace, and the word on the street of Broxtowe is unquestionably "Be nice if the Lib Dems did win, be a change at least". And this excellent local-politics blog's (somewhat unscientific) poll is predicting an absolute landslide for David Watts, last week's popular-local-councillor-running-for-parliament-as-a-formality-in-a-constituency-the-Lib-Dems-never-get-many-votes-in, this week's MP-in-waiting. He seems to have taken all the "don't like Labour so I suppose I'll have to vote Tory" contingent, and (more impressively) reduced the ever-popular "a plague on them all" vote down to minimal levels! I think once all the silliness has settled down it's still the Conservative candidate's seat to lose, but it's probably fair to say that it's become a genuine three-horse race now, which is awesome. Last time round I was living in a safe Labour seat (it's not safe any more, thanks to Margaret Beckett's tireless work at shooting herself in the foot repeatedly over the last few years, but it was then), and before that I spent my formative years in eternally Conservative Lincolnshire, so I've never voted in a general election that was actually a contest before.

There's also the horrible possibility that I might vote for the candidate and/or party that wins the election - that's never happened to me before, and I'll feel terribly guilty when it inevitably all goes wrong. But I really do like the public mood at the moment - that "if only people believed the Lib Dems could win, they'd win two-thirds of the constituencies in the country" barrier they've been banging on about for years actually does seem to have been broken. Get Rupert Murdoch on board and Nick Clegg is the new PM. I hadn't realised the people whose opinions make the difference were quite so desperate for a new straw to clutch at, but I'm pleasantly surprised.

In the interests of keeping all my election-themed babblings safely confined in one blog post, here's the comment I threw into Sam's blog after Thursday's debate:

I thought it was excellent! A very British spin on the American tradition, with three confident, articulate party leaders putting across their points in a sensible way with only a minimum of squabbling. We all know really that they'd all make perfectly capable PMs, but it's good to see that actually come across for once. The non-applauding audience was an excellent idea, it raised the whole debate to a more calm and intellectual level.

Gordon Brown tried to play to the audience early on with his cracks about posters and Lord Ashcroft, but when he realised it wasn't going to work like that, he switched tracks very smoothly. Nick Clegg apparently was declared the winners in the insta-polls afterwards, which is no big surprise, but I would have marked him down for repeating himself more than the others did and for apparently struggling to remember Lib Dem policy on the care homes question ("I think we all need to work together on this one", followed by a confused mumble about what his party's ideas were). He did score the biggest victory of the night with the right for people to sack (or, as Brown carefully said every time, "recall") their MPs, reducing Gordon to unconvincingly whining "I support it..." at the end. David Cameron stood out less than the other two, somehow, he never seemed to get his message across convincingly.

The ending was probably Brown's biggest victory - I suspect the hand-shaking, baby-kissing with the audience was against the rules, but it really caught the others off-balance and left them looking like they were thinking "What, we're supposed to talk to the commoners now?"

I'm looking forward to the rest of the debates! I think Gordon and Dave will go after Nick more fiercely next time - Gordon had clearly prepared answers to all the Conservative policies but not the Lib Dem ones, and Dave tried to stick to the usual policy of acting as if there are only two parties, which isn't really going to work when there are three people on the stage given equal soapbox time...

And finally, since it's the 21st century, I thought I'd look and see what the candidates' websites look like. A website that makes a party or a person look like they know what they're doing wins a lot of votes nowadays.

Which is a bit unfortunate, because The Broxtowe Liberal Democrats website is awful! It looks like it was designed by a pair of twelve-year-olds as a school project. The site was designed back in the long-gone days of last week when the general election was of no real importance to the Lib Dems - the front page highlights their success in council elections, but you have to scroll down the page to find a picture of David Watts and a tiny-font note that he's the party's parliamentary candidate. Clicking around the site you can eventually find the link to his personal website, but that too hasn't been updated for a long time. His "blog" contains his "weekly news" from February 12th and a promise to post it every week from then on. His writing style is not good, there are typos and plenty of missing apostrophes. And you all know how I despise misused apostrophes.

So let's go to The Broxtowe Conservative website instead. Will the stereotype of Tories being better educated prevail over the stereotype of Tories being computer-illiterate? More or less, yes. A big picture of candidate Anna Soubry as soon as you click onto the website (she was a local TV news reporter in her younger days and still knows how to strike the pose) and the site looks smooth, polished and professional. Except for the phrase "After 13 years in power, Labours' legacy is...", right there on the home page. Aaaaaaaaargh. How difficult IS it to find someone who can write the English language and ask them to check these things? There's also a box saying "Anna's blog" with no clickable link. I can't find anything that could be described as a blog, anywhere on the website. But it does look stylish. And she promises to claim minimal expenses, which is an improvement on the one tatty leaflet I've had in the post from her, in which she basically asserted "I'm extremely wealthy, so I can be trusted" without making any specific promise about money.

By contrast, our sitting MP, Dr Nick Palmer, has sent out whole rainforests' worth of newsletters, spending vast fortunes on conveying the message that he hasn't got as much money as the Conservatives. Let's see what The Broxtowe Labour website looks like. The phrase that comes to mind is my dear departed father's "Looks like a bucket o' muck to me..." It's also awful, but in a different way to the Lib Dem one. That one looks amateurish and lazy, this one looks like it was created by people who don't really know what the internet is, or what you can do with it. It looks like the kind of website that people were creating in the mid-1990s. But at least all the punctuation is correct. And the latest blog update is as recent as last Thursday. The content is the Labour-spin-doctor-ordered line that he's been doggedly pursuing for months - I don't mind admitting that this man gets on my nerves something chronic, however much it damages the neutral tone I've been trying to hit throughout this blog. I think I'd better stop now. The end, all the politics out of my system, blog-wise, until election night. And even then I'll probably blog about Thundercats instead.

Thomas Rivers invented the orchard house

Groovily, they're showing "The Victorian Kitchen Garden" on "Yesterday" (the TV channel that used to be UKTV History). My dad used to love that programme. He had them all on video, along with a huge number of programmes about steam trains. Wonderful person though he was, he really did love boring things on TV.

Actually, though, it's really quite fun to hear elderly gardener Harry Dodson demonstrating how Victorians kept the earwigs off their peaches. I might have to tape it myself.

So many words

As I think I've moaned once or twice before, the most difficult part of organising a memory competition is writing the "historic dates" - short, snappy descriptions of a ficticious historical event. And entirely thanks to Hannes keeping on breaking the world record, I have to provide 142 of them for the Cambridge event. It drains a fellow's creativity.

Also, I need some translation help. I'm all sorted for Swedes, but I would be eternally grateful to any native speakers of German or Danish who could volunteer to translate 142 short phrases and 140 random words. Possibly Ukrainian speakers, too, if there are any such people among my readership, but Taras hasn't told me yet what language he wants. Please drop me an email if you wouldn't mind helping out. Otherwise I'll just ask one of the Germans who I know will do it if I really beg. And start pestering all the Danes I'm vaguely acquainted with. It's fun being a competition organiser.

Why would anyone vote for a dalek?

You just know they'd be dishonest about their expense claims. But despite this, the Radio Times cover this week has decided to celebrate the upcoming general election and the upcoming dalek appearance on Saturday's Doctor Who (alongside, apparently, Winston Churchill played by an actor who doesn't resemble him even slightly) by proclaiming "Vote Dalek!" (again - they did exactly the same thing in 2005) and having three different variant covers with a red, blue or gold dalek.

The funny thing is that I haven't seen a single gold dalek cover in the shops around here. Did RT proportionately represent them in smaller quantities, or are they just the most popular? Or have they cleverly distributed the different colour schemes according to the latest opinion polls in each constituency? I live in a seat that's going to be a fairly comfortable Conservative win with Labour second, and the Co-op down the road had four blue and two red daleks on the shelf. It's a real puzzler, and it's probably a good thing that I've vowed never to buy RT again, since they've made it 'bigger and better' by stopping listing all the programmes that I like to watch.

So let's talk about a different kind of campaigning instead. I got a great leaflet through my letterbox today, advertising STAYwarm hot water heating systems (yes, it's written "STAYwarm" as if to claim that while other heaters might make you temporarily warm, this is the only one with a permanent effect). The blurb starts "We all accept that fuel price increases have reached a frightening level and will continue to spiral upwards. Once, we had no choice but to accept this. NOT ANYMORE. At last you can take control and have a say in your fuel prices. Why be held to ransom by Foreign owned energy companies?"

I just love the bold, underlined, capitalised word 'foreign'. Obviously they're hoping for a reaction along the lines of 'My God, I'm giving money to foreigners! I must give this implicitly British company all my money instead, quick!'

Actually, they probably will get a lot of reactions like that around here. That's why the blue daleks are going to win this election...

Sorry for the shortage of bloggery lately

But I went to bed early last night, and I think I'm going to do the same today. Didn't get enough sleep at the weekend. See you all when I wake up.

Jings!

I found the 1973 Broons book on the Sunday book stall on the High Road today, for only a pound. Not that anybody would call that a real bargain - it's in a condition that any dealer would class as 'poor', before ordering you to get it out of their sight and stop wasting their time, it's falling apart at the seams and several of the pages have been carefully but only partially coloured in with felt tip pens, probably by someone whose name starts with J (I can't make out the name, but he/she was apparently presented the book, with all her love and four kisses, by Phyllis). J saw fit to give all the female characters, including the Bairn, bright blue eyeshadow and bright red lipstick.

Still, I don't care about the condition of the book or the garish makeup on the characters, I just like the stories. And, well, they're okay. Unexceptional, maybe, but the Broons are always fun to read, even the late-sixties-early-seventies ones reprinted in this volume. The funny thing is spotting which ones have been decimalised and which ones haven't - after original artist Dudley Watkins died in 1969, they reprinted old 1950s strips for a few years until they found a new permanent artist and started up all-new adventures again (well, as all-new as the Broons ever gets, anyway; they did keep up the much-loved tradition of using the same three plotlines over and over and over again forever). But during this reprint period, Britain switched to decimal currency, and so the reprinted strips after 1971 had all references to shillings replaced with new pence - taking inflation into account, too, so 'a bob' in the originals generally became '10p', and a half-crown was changed to 50p (sometimes they even re-drew the coin to make it heptagonal, which was a nice touch). But this book I've bought today doesn't follow through this logic, and just grabs the usual random selection of strips from the last few years to compile. So about half of them use decimal currency and half of them don't. It's a bit jarring.

Some of these reprints also redrew the more glaring anachronisms - I suspect the bus in this one was a tram when it first saw print. But I'm mostly posting it here so I can remind myself not to exclaim "Help! It's a Chinaman!" at the next memory championship. It's not really very polite.

Fun fun fun in the Sun Sun Sun

They've cleverly redesigned the layout of the Kings Cross St Pancras tube station so that it takes five times longer to get to the trains than it used to, but even so, I managed to get to our new London Regional venue, the Sun public house, with plenty of time to spare. In contrast to previous London pubs that have hosted othello competitions, there was also somebody at the pub with a key to let us in at the agreed time.

David had booked the room but then been unable to be there and act as tournament director, so there had been a bit of a flap on the mailing list for the past week about who was going, whether it was worth having the competition at all, how we'd get clocks and boards there, etc. (the British Othello Federation does own lots of boards and clocks, but has yet to invent a good system of arranging to leave them with somebody who can bring them to the next tournament - when last heard of, half the clocks were in Imre's office and the other half in Steve Rowe's house). But everybody and everything that had been worried about turned up at the Sun. Lots of boards and pieces, lots of clocks (albeit most of them old-fashioned analogue ones and not the groovy digital clocks that we prefer), enough players to exactly cover the cost of the room hire (this is inconvenient for me, because it means I don't have to bank any money, and so when I come to put together the BOF's accounts in the autumn I'll think I've lost the London Regional's profits somewhere, forgetting that there weren't any), a laptop with a pairings program and everything we could possibly have needed.

Except transcript sheets. The tournament director brings transcript sheets for people to fill in, and nobody had so much as mentioned this on any of the internet forum discussions, so nobody had thought to bring any with them. Still, it turns out that modern technology allows us to create them and print them out at a place down the road from the Sun, so all was well in the end.

We had nine players, which is exactly the worst possible number for a seven-round swiss-system tournament. There's a bye, which nobody likes, and everybody plays all but one or two of the other players, which is just silly. But with not enough time to make it a nine-round round-robin, we just had to put up with it. And it all went very smoothly, we finished in ample time and there was a lot of excitement and intriguing results. Iain won, with Ian second, and I played uniformly badly throughout.

Lunch in the pub was interesting, too - the pub "does food", limited to a choice of pizzas or baguettes, but it turns out that when you order it, the pub phones up a pizza place down the road and orders a delivery for you. This unnecessary middleman did lead to us getting completely different pizzas from the ones we'd asked for, but never mind, pizza is always good food.

There was a bookie's just across the road, but I still didn't have a flutter on the Grand National.

London calling

Othello in the Sun tomorrow, in more ways than one. The pub we're going to is probably called the Sun, unless I'm misremembering, and the weather's nice. And maybe there'll be a major tabloid scandal that'll make the front pages, too.

Cambridge again

I sent the following to Florian to put on memory-sports.com, but he seems to not be around at the moment, so here's a sneak preview. Stop-press news - we've got really quite a lot of competitors, a surprisingly large number of them being from Sweden and Denmark, but also at least one, possibly two, Americans and one Ukrainian! There might even be some British memorisers there too, although I can't promise any miracles...

Oh, and also, the competition will be filmed for Japanese TV!

What is the Cambridge Memory Championship?

The Cambridge Memory Championship is the coolest memory championship in the whole universe, because it’s organised by the World Memory Champion and his extremely cool friends.

I’m just being silly. The Cambridge Memory Championship is a small, friendly, annual memory competition, ideal for beginners to have their first experience of a real-life memory championship, or for seasoned veterans to relax and have fun with the weird and wonderful memory competition people.

So is it a real memory championship?

Completely and totally ‘real’! And ‘official’ too! It’s arbited by top WMSC-approved arbiters Phil Chambers and Nathalie Lecordier, it follows the official ‘National standard’ memory championship format, and everyone who competes in it will get their official place on the world ranking list (or, if they’re already on the list, have the chance to improve their position).

When is it happening?

Sunday, May 2nd. It starts at 9:00 in the morning, promptly (unless we have to wait for someone to arrive with the key to the competition room. It’s the kind of competition where that might happen.) and finishes at around 6:00 in the evening. There will be a break for lunch at around 12:00.

Where is it happening?

This year’s event takes place at Trinity College, Cambridge, an ancient and extremely beautiful old university building. It’s right in the centre of Cambridge, and easily accessible by public transport – although the Cambridge train station is a very long way away from the city centre, so be prepared for a long walk or a bus journey after you arrive. Cambridge itself is easy to get to from around the world – if you’re on a budget, look for a cheap flight to Stansted Airport, which is 25 minutes away from Cambridge by train.

Once you’ve found your way to Cambridge, find your way to Trinity College, which can be seen on the map here: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&q=CB2+1TQ&fb=1&gl=uk&ei=4MG5S7HuAtKOjAeo5bW2DQ&ved=0CBUQpQY&view=map&geocode=FTeWHAMdg8oBAA&split=0&iwloc=A&sa=X

The competition takes place in Whewell’s Court, through a little gate across the road from the main college gate. Someone will be hanging around to point the way. The W in ‘Whewell’ is silent, by the way – it’s pronounced ‘you-ell’.

More details of how to get there, where to stay (I recommend Cityroomz, right next to the train station: http://www.cityroomz.com/ ) and the other things that are happening that weekend can be found here: http://www.msocambridge.org.uk/

What does it cost to take part?

Participation is completely free of charge for beginners (a beginner is someone who has never competed in any memory competition, anywhere, before) and £5 for everyone else. Which is so cheap that it really doesn’t count as costing anything at all, wouldn’t you say? You’ll also need to pay for your own travel, accommodation and food, of course.

What can I win?

The winner has the great honour of becoming the Cambridge Memory Champion. That’s it, basically. Sorry, there aren’t any prizes. But it’s not about winning, anyway, it’s about taking part, and meeting other memorisers.

What kind of things will we be memorising?

The schedule looks like this:

9:00 Welcome and introduction
9:15 Random words 5 min 10 min
9:45 Binary numbers 5 min 15 min
10:15 Names and faces 5 min 10 min
10:45 Numbers 15 min 30 min
11:45 Lunch break
1:00 Cards 10 min 20 min
1:45 Speed Numbers 5 min 15 min
2:15 Abstract Images 15 min 30 min
3:15 Historic Dates 5 min 15 min
3:45 Spoken Numbers 100 sec 5 min
200 sec 10 min
4:45 Speed Cards 5 min 5 min
5 min 5 min
6:00 Finish


Full rules are attached to this email – Florian, can you host them somewhere?

We’ll explain exactly what each discipline involves before we start memorising, but it’d obviously be a help if you know the rules before you get there. Any questions, please ask and I’ll do my best to answer!

You can ignore about 95% of those rules - all the bits about tiebreaks have never, as far as I know, ever been applied in any competition, ever.

What else could I possibly need to know?

If you want the dates and words to be translated into your own language, please let me know as soon as possible. Otherwise, you’ll get them in English.

The competition is now in its fifth year! Three of the four previous winners have been German – Clemens Mayer, Gabby Kappus and Dennis Müller – with just Ed Cooke’s win in 2007 flying the flag for Britain. There might be a trophy one day, if I get round to buying one, and maybe your name could be the next to be potentially inscribed on this wonderful hypothetical trophy!

See you there!

Never forget where you're coming from

I probably should have mentioned yesterday that it was Grandma's 90th birthday. Happy belated birthday to her!

Here's an interesting fact about Grandma - her grandmother, my great-great-grandma, was Scottish. A Graham, to be specific. And I just found out today in the course of randomly wandering around the internet that the Graham clan motto is apparently "Ne oublie" - Don't forget. I think that's quite groovy, and I'll be representing Scotland at memory competitions from now on.

Incidentally, I hear from a friend in Denver, Colorado, that I was on the radio there last night, in some programme about the brain, or something. Talking at the world championship last year. I talked to a lot of people there, I don't remember which particular interview this would have been, but I hope anybody out there who heard it enjoyed it.

Deal!

I must confess that over Easter I've got quite hooked on Deal Or No Deal. I've never watched it before, but now that I have, I think it's completely awesome. The most feel-good game show I've ever seen! A real celebration of the people of this country all getting together to support one another. I'm going to watch it every day after work from now until I get bored with it!

Don't warn the tadpoles

I had a dream last night that woodlice were stealing my sharp kitchen knife. There was a missing floorboard in my flat somewhere, and the woodlice were (somehow) manhandling the knife down it and into their secret lair. I just rapped my knuckles on the floor a couple of times, the woodlice scurried away and I retrieved the knife, thinking to myself "I'll have to keep an eye on those woodlice, I'm sure they're up to something..."

So just be careful, everyone. Watch your backs.

The joys of Easter

It's great to have spent three days doing absolutely none of the important things I was planning to do this weekend, and still have a day left to do them before I have to go back to work. I don't feel remotely guilty, and I can lounge about on my settee, listening to Jive Bunny with a clear conscience!

That said, I really do need to do a lot of stuff tomorrow. It's going to be a busy day...

Kensington!

Hey, remember that blog post a couple of months ago when I found out that the tenth-best-selling toy of 1981 was something called "Kensington", which I'd never even heard of? Well, guess what I saw staring at me from the top shelf of a charity shop in Long Eaton today!

Kensington Registered Trade Mark Applied For

It's actually not a toy, as such, it's a board game! Packaged in a flat, square, cardboard sleeve exactly the size and shape of an LP record, the front cover proclaims it to be "Game of the Year" (it doesn't say which year) in five languages, lists the seven languages the instructions are translated into (Chinese and Arabic readers don't get to know that it's the game of the year) and lists various impressive catchphrases:

AGES 7 to 107
2/6 PLAYERS

A minute to learn - A lifetime to master
Quick to pick up - Slow to put down

Capture small shapes to frustrate your opponent.
Construct large shapes to defeat your opponent.

"Kensington is a really fascinating game, offering a formidable and potentially victorious challenge to such classic rivals as Chess, Backgammon or even Cards. Excellent value!"


© World Copyright 1979 Forbes-Taylor Patents Pending

I think the judgement of the last thirty years is that Chess, Backgammon and Cards have seen off the challenge from this formidable opponent. But hey, that slogan about a minute to learn, a lifetime to master sounds a little familiar, doesn't it? Othello had been launched in Britain just a few years earlier, using that same phrase. Does Othello merit a mention as one of the games that were destined to be blown away by Kensington? Nope, not a word. Indeed, the back of the pack, which tells the story of Kensington's creation in great detail, makes it out to be something entirely new, different, exciting and unprecedented in the world of games!



"Kensington," it modestly begins, "is the brilliant outcome of arduous research by two eccentric British friends to develop a game of pure skill that can be easily learnt and as enjoyably played by children and adults in each and every country of the world, irrespective of language or way of life. Not since chess and checkers (draughts) first appeared from the East a dozen centuries or so ago has there been such a remarkable breakthrough in the games world, where lately most of the running has been made by the trademarked leaders, Monopoly, Scrabble and Mastermind, all of which depend on a measure of luck."

It continues in this vein for a long time. What it doesn't mention is that in the late seventies and early eighties, the games market was completely deluged with "brand new" games of skill that were going to be much more popular and exciting than chess and draughts. Othello was the one that has stood the test of time, in its own limited way, but there were many, many more. Kensington's blurb ignores this completely. It doesn't even mention Nine Men's Morris, the traditional game that Kensington turns out to resemble very closely indeed. No, it attributes its innovative genesis to Brian Taylor and Peter Forbes, "the Rolls and Royce of 1982", depicted on the back cover playing Kensington on the steps of the Albert Memorial with very 1982 hairstyles:



The inspiration for the game, apparently, came from "a volume of ancient Islamic patterns" found on a second-hand bookstall in Kensington, hence the name, and the rest of the description of its origin and creators is actually quite fun to read, so I shouldn't really be so rude about it. It's just that it clearly does believe that they've invented something that would completely revolutionise the board game world.

Open up the double-album-style packaging, and you get the instructions and an interesting photo of people of all ages and cultures playing the game:



There's an old man smoking a pipe, a trendy young woman wearing a trendy young dress and a policeman's hat, a hatless policeman whose face is completely obscured by a hexagon, a young girl with pigtails, a vicar portrayed by either Robert Lindsay or someone who looks strikingly like him, and a black man in a rasta hat. They all look like they're having tremendous fun, except the man with the pipe.

I'm sure it can't actually be Robert Lindsay. Citizen Smith had just been cancelled, it's true, but he can't have been so hard-pressed for acting work that he had to pose as a Kensington-playing vicar.

The rules can be found on the internet, here (the only thing it doesn't mention is the four-player or six-player variant, which simply consists of dividing the players into two teams and taking alternate turns). That website says that it's an excellent game, although the wikipedia page says it's somewhat flawed and one-sided once one player has gained an advantage (exactly like Nine Men's Morris, which it was based on).

So there you have it, that mystery's solved. It was a very brief flash in the pan that beat othello to the top-ten-games-of-1981 list, but disappeared into the limbo of lost board games quickly afterwards. That'll teach them to steal othello's slogan.




Edit: Hey, that's weird. That website I linked to, tragsnart.co.uk is mainly devoted to board games, and especially Kensington, but also has a page devoted to the comic book art of John Byrne, who I mentioned in my blog just yesterday. It praises Byrne rather more highly than even he deserves (even more highly than Byrne habitually praises himself!), but hey, he is a great artist and writer and he deserves some excessive adulation here and there.

Well, now I'm depressed. But in a good way.

Looking for something completely different in the comic shop today (it was sold out, but never mind), I came across the best comic I've read for absolutely ages. It's called "Whatever Happened To The World's Fastest Man?", by Dave West, and it's hugely recommended to everyone who's reading this blog, whether you like comics or not. Especially if not. What are you doing reading my blog if you don't like comics?

It's a very downbeat kind of story, and it did leave me feeling depressed, but only in the sense of having read a real masterpiece. I'll make up for it by reading something more bland and cheerful (I've started on my complete collection of Alpha Flight, like I said I would - John Byrne's initial stories are not at all bland, but certainly cheerful enough to cheer me up, and the unrelenting misery of the Bill Mantlo issues that come after it is something I've got accustomed to by now, so there's no need to worry there).

Know what I'm going to do this Easter weekend?

I'm going to read the entire 130 issues of the Alpha Flight comic. I haven't done that for a fair few years, and it's always good fun.

I'm going to do other things too, but I thought I'd share that particular ambition with you. And now, even though it's late at night, I'm going to go and memorise some binary digits. I've just very nearly got a perfect 468 decimal digits (two images I was blank on, both on the same row) in very nearly five minutes (stopped the clock at 5:00.34, which is close enough really), so I'm happy.

Arsenal!

Wow, that was a good game of football. Arsenal-Barcelona, I mean. Great result, too - yes, it was never in a million years a penalty, but all in all I don't think they deserved to lose. They played really well, against possibly the best club in the world.

Also, it's nearly Easter, and I'm in the mood to spend the long weekend doing some marathon memory training. I'll also do some memory competition organising too, since Cambridge is bearing down on us...

Double Deck 'r Bust

ie "Double deck or bust" and "Double-decker bus". That was the weird original name for the final event in the US Memory Championship in which the contestants have to memorise two decks of cards in five minutes. Then they recall them, taking it in turns to say the next card, and the last one to make a mistake wins. Nowadays they call it "Double Deck o' Cards", which is still weird but perhaps slightly less so. Of course, the top memorisers, if they weren't so polite, would scoff at the concept of memorising only two packs in five minutes, and say that it would need to be at least five packs, maybe more, for there to be any chance of anyone making a mistake. And actually, we're getting to the point where the top Americans are going to be flawlessly memorising their double deckers in five minutes soon, too. They'll have to change it to a triple deck o' cards.

The weirdest two-packs-of-cards record, though, is the one that I've been asked to try to break at the Mental Calculation World Cup's evening show in June. The rules are unusually precise - you have two separate packs of cards in front of you, and you have to simultaneously turn over one card from each pack at a time, and memorise them in the fastest time possible. Single sighting only, spoken recall. Dominic invented it, and holds the world record, set in 2001, of 3 minutes, 37 seconds.

I did think, until I looked it up just now, that this was a record that Dominic and Gunther exchanged between themselves for a while, knocking a second or two off it each time, but it seems I must have been thinking of something else. I did attempt to break the record back in 2004, also at the MCWC, but I was still relatively new to my card-memorising system back then, and I couldn't do it. But I think I've improved a little over the last six years, and I could probably do it this time without making a complete public spectacle of myself. The time to beat is really, really easy and it only stands as a record because nobody else has ever tried to break it. Although I probably will make a complete public spectacle of myself anyway. I'm rubbish at memory performances in front of an audience.

Enough with the numbers

36.03(X), 28.30, 25.80; 2:57.03; 5:04.90/432/200; 7:58.53/1245

Okay, I'm going to stop posting my training scores every night now. I think I've got into enough of a rhythm with the daily practice that I don't need the motivation of potentially having to reveal to the blog-reading millions that I skipped a day. Thanks for your tolerance, people.

Hmm, I've just been watching the last five minutes of "Wonders of the Solar System" while waiting for Match of the Day, and I notice that the presenter is credited as "Professor Brian Cox". From the presenting style and what he looks like, I'd assumed he was some kind of teen idol pop singer who'd been drafted in in an attempt to make astronomy more appealing to The Kids. I must be getting old.

My untidiness is my achilles heel

My heel is also something of a weak spot. I had a certificate of some kind - not a memory competition thing, some kind of work-related rubbish, that was in a glass frame, which got buried under a pile of old papers and things in my spare room, and a little while ago I accidentally trod on it and shattered the glass. I didn't bother to pick up the pieces, because I decided they were safely trapped under the general refuse in my spare room and wouldn't bother anybody until I was in more of a tidying kind of mood.

But there's a sort of slow tectonic movement to the darkest depths of the junk in my room, and a big pointy glass shard ended up protruding from the pile of papers, and stabbed me in the heel while I was sitting at my desk today. It really hurt. So I've been forced to clean the place up a bit, and get rid of the deathtrap.

27.77(X), 26.63, 30.44(X); 2:54.93; 5:27.03/405/80; 8:11.07/1225

Assorted announcements

1) My mention of the abstract-image-shuffling-Excel-spreadsheet-practice-tool-thing a couple of days ago has provoked a worldwide response from the USA, Germany, China and Wales, so if anyone else wants it, you can download it here.

Files uploaded by people who are too cheap to pay rapidshare.com for 'premium membership' can only be downloaded ten times, I think, so it's first six come, first six served, and if you're too late, let me know and I'll upload it again. Or maybe you could upload it to your own website, if you've got one. It's shareware, or freeware, or whatever the word is. Underware, maybe.

2) Should I stand for election as a Monster Raving Loony Party candidate in May? I was looking at their website earlier, and frankly I don't think they're anywhere near loony enough these days. I think I'd be a great success.

3) 31.61(X), 29.03(X), 31.38(X); 3:44.53; 5:17.30/414/200; 8:28.06/1350.
Definitely starting to burn out a little, made mistakes on all three speed cards, and lots and lots of blanks in the speed numbers. But my theory is that if I keep going, I'll get through this barrier and out the other side to a magical land where I'm better than ever before.

4) I think I'm going to have to go to the Mental Calculation World Cup, just because I almost decided not to today, in case it interfered with my memory training. I used to have a reputation as someone who competed in everything, whether I'm good at it or not, but it's ages since I took part in a mind sports competition that wasn't memory or othello. So Magdeburg here I come (in June). Who lives in Magdeburg? I know someone who's from there, I'm sure. Oh, hey, it's Johannes! Groovy, that's another good reason to go there!

It's still working

I should have thought of posting my training scores on my blog before, it's really succeeding in making me force myself to practice even when I'm not entirely feeling like it. Maybe I'll stretch the excessive-training experiment out for another week, until the Easter holidays. Or maybe I won't. I'll see what my brain's feeling like. But I'm definitely back in the mood for a bit of regular practice in the evenings again. I'll get on with the marathon disciplines over Easter and see how long it takes me to get up to speed with those.

29.44(X), 27.09, 32.53; 3:25.93; 5:40.28/453/345; 7:59.22/1440

Gah! It's on telly!

That's what I just said to myself upon glancing at the Radio Times and noticing that the Spurs/Fulham game is on ITV tonight. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that it would be, but never mind, there's still 40 minutes left, and if I'd thought of that straight away I wouldn't have done any memory training tonight, and that would have been terrible.

By the way, 29.94(X), 30.59, 31.09(X); 3:31.28; 5:37.06/448/240; 8:53.15/1370.

I'm very undecided about who I want to win this game. On the one hand it would be funny if Fulham won the cup and took the Europa League place that would otherwise go to Liverpool, leaving them Europeless next year, but on the other hand I've been rooting for Tottenham this year despite my longstanding dislike of Harry Redknapp, and I'd love to see them win the cup. I think I'll go with the positive feelings rather than the jeering-at-Liverpool's-bad-season approach, and cheer for Tottenham. Go Spurs! Woo! They've just scored! 2-1 up with half an hour to go!

Also, let me just say three cheers for Christian Schäfer, who won the North German Memory Championship at the weekend, with some really impressive scores - 240 in 5-minute numbers, 585 in 5-min binary, 68 seconds in cards and 236 images (dammit, that beats my best score in competitions!) This is yet another graduate of the Junior Memory Championship scene in Germany who's going to start threatening the top rankings now he's officially an Erwachsene. When is someone going to organise a real junior competition in this country? I'd do it myself, but I'm lazy and have no money. But without it, the days of British dominance in memory sports are going to die with me...

Fear my memory

Day two of the forcing-myself-to-do-more-memory-training-than-is-sensible-considering-I'm-out-of-practice, and I genuinely think I'm clicking into gear. And even though I accidentally watched the first five minutes of an intriguing Stargate:Universe episode (never watched the series before, but it started out with a murder mystery and I really wanted to find out who dun it) I had enough willpower to turn it off and go and memorise numbers.

I'm not going to blog about memory every night, by the way, I'll revert to general nonsense tomorrow, but I'll post my daily scores as promised:

35.08, 31.84(X), 30.31(X); 3:54.09; 5:31.56/453/360; 9:21.97/1360

(That is, three speed cards attempts, the last two of which had errors - my excuse for the slow times is that I've switched to my brand new, slippery cards and I need to break them in before they get to the kind of state that flutters effortlessly between my fingers; 15 rows of abstract images in just under four minutes (all correctly recalled); 468 digits in five and a half minutes, good enough for a score of 360 in a competition if we'd had an extra 32 seconds; and a better time than yesterday for 1500 binary digits. By the way, I only give myself 15 minutes of recall time for that, which is barely enough to write them all down, to test my immediate short-term memory)

Eye of the tiger

Okay, I've decided to get serious about memory training again. I know I said I was thinking of dropping the whole memory thing for a while, but in the end I've concluded that life is basically meaningless without long periods of sitting at a desk, memorising 1s and 0s. And all that talk about money yesterday probably helped, too. So I've resolved to seize this momentary enthusiasm and force myself back into a training schedule.

So, today I did three packs of speed cards before work, 15 rows of abstract images using my handy-dandy Excel abstract-image-shuffle-o-matic on my lunch break, and 468 decimal digits and 1500 binary this evening, all in as fast a time as possible. And I even checked my recall to see how many I'd got right, which is a tedious process but useful for motivation purposes when I see how much I've improved. I could of course circumvent this marking process by doing my memory training on the computer, but I prefer to work with pen and paper. There's less temptation to click onto the internet, for one thing.

And now I'm intending to do the same routine every day for the rest of the week. This is, according to my long experience of memory training, much too heavy a schedule which will lead to bad results by the end of the week as I start to burn out, but I think it would be a good thing to do for a few days, just to get my brain up and running properly again. And given the times I've recorded today, I can expect to see some quick improvements if I keep up the schedule. I'll post my times and scores nightly on my blog, so that a) everyone can know to nag me if I fail to post anything and b) all my rivals can see what kind of form I'm in and try to do better.

Today's results - speed cards in 28.75, 36.68 and 29.61 seconds. All correct, but all three of those, even the awful 36-seconds one, were me trying to go as fast as possible. This is the kind of slowing-down that I suffer when I haven't done any training for months.

Abstract images in 3:57.04 - not too bad a time at all, I aim for an ideal of three and a half minutes. One mistake where I didn't notice that there were two identical textures on a row and had to guess.

468 decimals in 6:09.56 - which is dreadful. Five minutes is the time I normally try for with this one. 452 digits correct, or a score of 328 in championship scoring (including 20 points lost for one extremely careless wrong digit written down after I'd memorised it correctly). I can do better, but that's not bad. If I keep to my training schedule, I would expect to see the time get better and the scores get worse, then when I get down to around the five-minute mark, the number of numbers I remember will gradually start going up.

1500 binaries in 10:11.38 - atrocious. Eight minutes is the time I have in my head as 'good' for this exercise, but there was a time when I was doing closer to seven very consistently. Hopefully some fast improvement to come here, too. A score of 1415 in the recall (one careless memorising mistake when I used an image that nicely fitted the story I was telling, rather than the one-digit-different image that I should have used instead, and the final image in the final row was one I couldn't remember, as it very often is, for some reason).

Improvements to come tomorrow. I don't know if I'll have the time to do the cards first thing, because I start work early on Tuesdays so I can take a long lunch and do my reading-volunteer thing, but I'll fit them in somewhere.

Who wants to be a thousandaire?

A groovy announcement went out today, confirming the prize money distribution for this year's World Memory Championship:

The 2010 World Memory Champion will receive US$20,000. Silver Medallist receives US$10,000 and Bronze Medallist, US$ 6,000
Tee 4th to 10th place competitors will each receive US$2,000.
In addition, each of the ten memory disciplines attracts further prizes. Gold US$ 2,000 Silver US$ 1,200 and Bronze US$1,000
The top three competitors in the 2009 World Memory Championships in London have already won free flights and a luxury hotel suite for the week of the competition. The 4th to 10th placed winners in 2009 also receive free hotel accommodation.

This is pretty awesome, obviously, and it's already nearly the end of March and the arrangements don't seem to have changed at all since they were announced last year - this is almost certainly a good sign. There have only been, what, two world championships that have been cancelled and rearranged at short notice later in the day than this, and this one sounds like it's got a lot of enthusiastic people involved. I'll still reiterate my usual advice not to book your tickets yet, but I think we've got good reason to be excited about it now (also, don't leave it till the very last minute, people - you need to apply for a visa at least a month in advance).

As for the prize distribution, it's nice. I like the big amounts going to the top three in each discipline - that'll give a lot of people a decent share of the cash, rather than it all going to one or two competitors. If we'd had these prizes last year, actually, just eleven people would have shared the prize money between them (everyone getting $3000 or more), but I think this year might be even more closely contested, and there might be more people taking home big wheelbarrowsful of cash.

It would have been nice to see some cash prizes for the juniors and kids competitions too, and I would still be very happy to swap my 'luxury hotel suite' for a normal cheap room and have the extra money put to some more practical use, but hey, if there are people out there who are prepared to give us ninety-two thousand dollars just for remembering a few numbers, I really shouldn't complain. I'm not going to say another word on the subject that isn't glowing and positive. Starting now. Unless the organisers have another falling-out and cancel it. Right, properly starting now. I love these people, really.

Buying things = happiness

I went into Nottingham today in the hopes of finding some cool recorder music in the music shop there (see my recent recorder-themed blog post), only to be remembered by the sales assistant who sold me my ukulele (she recognised me from the telly) and made to feel terribly guilty about not having played the thing for a long time. I considered buying another, more expensive, ukulele to compensate for these feelings of guilt, and because they had a really top-notch-looking one that cost hundreds of pounds, but I'm gradually coming to the realisation that buying ukuleles will never turn me into a real musician overnight. I bought some Beatles and Abba recorder sheet music and resolved to practice with my old ukulele some more. I'm really awesome with the recorder, though - some things you never forget. I may have to buy a new one, though, because my antiquated instrument (which I've had since I was about six) just can't manage the high notes as well as it once did. Maybe on my next trip to the music shop, by which time I will almost certainly be able to hold my head high when Rachel asks me how I'm getting on with the ukulele.

My day was then further enlivened by a trip to the comic shop, when I realised that a complete collection of Chris Giarrusso's indescribably brilliant "Mini Marvels" comics has been available since December, but nobody told me about it. I blame this shocking omission on everyone reading this blog, but I'm prepared to forgive you, because I've just had an afternoon's hilarious entertainment from the escapedes of Elephant Steve and his comrades. If you've been so inconsiderate as to not even read the comic yourself after deciding not to tell me about it, I heartily recommend it to everyone (although especially those with some knowledge about superhero comics in general and Marvel comics of the last ten years in particular, because otherwise most of the jokes will go right over your head). Also, please do check out everything else Chris Giarrusso has ever written. You won't regret it.

Times tables

I'm trying to decide whether or not to go to the Mental Calculation World Cup. It only happens every two years, and I couldn't go to the last one because I didn't have any money, so I haven't actually done any mental calculating since 2006. I'll be completely rubbish and come last, most likely.

On the other hand, it's rather groovy to be there anyway - it's much more elitist than the World Memory Championship, they only allow a maximum of 40 people to compete, and they reserve the right to choose which applications to accept ("they" is a guy called Ralf, by the way), and I'd get in by virtue of my amazing memory skills and my less amazing mental calculation skills, so I'd get to look down my nose at the people (if any) who wanted to compete but couldn't.

Still, I'm undecided. I'd have to do a whole lot of practice, and frankly I've still got that motivation problem with the memory stuff, so I don't need anything else to distract me. I've got another week-and-a-bit to make my mind up, I'll see how I feel...

What is the matter with Virgin TV?

"We're reorganising your channel line-up to make way for new exciting services."

So now E4 and E4+1, which used to be channels 143 and 144 (although a couple of years ago they were 144 and 145) have now moved to 144 and 146 respectively. I mean, what are they going to put on channel 145? E4+½? And ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4 have moved from 114, 116 and 117 to 115, 117 and 118. They're still leaving room for the inevitable ITV2.5.

A thought occurred to my conscious mind

About last night's blog. Every eighteen months, give or take, I feel inspired to write a story about three people called Cecil, Phillip and Samantha, who apparently all live together in some undefined relationship, in which Cecil attempts to assume a position of authority over the world's population, Phillip tries to stop him out of an apparent feeling that it just isn't right and Samantha half-heartedly assists Phillip, while constantly eating and caring for nothing but her own pleasure. I don't mind at all that nobody reads these things, but nonetheless I like to post them on my blog.

After writing yesterday's fourth episode of their interesting lives, I thought to myself that if anybody asked me what it was all about, I could maybe come up with some silly explanation that the three characters represent my ego, super-ego and id, and their adventures are metaphors for the darkest secrets of my own psyche. And then I thought about it some more and realised (based on my very limited knowledge of Freudian theory and skimming the article on wikipedia) that that interpretation completely and totally fits. Cecil's the ego, Phillip the super-ego and Samantha the id. I'm almost afraid to go back and read those blog posts again now, in case they really do shed light on the innermost workings of my mind. Maybe I'll just send them to a psychiatrist and see what they make of it.

The waters of life

“Phillip,” Cecil said, kicking Phillip in the small of the back to wake him up, “I need a favour.”

“Wha? Who? What? Who?” Phillip asked, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, why am I asleep in our treehouse?”

“It’s a long story,” Cecil answered. “But the only relevant bit of the story is that you couldn’t sleep last night because a bat was snoring in your bedroom, so you came up here this afternoon for a quick nap.”

“Oh yes, I remember,” Phillip sighed. “What’s the rest of the story?”

“The list of things medically wrong with the bat that caused it to be indoors, sleeping and snoring during the night,” said Cecil, taking a sheaf of handwritten papers from his pocket. “The vet was very thorough.”

“So you need a favour?” Phillip asked, tearing the papers to shreds and eating them, hoping to turn the conversation back to Cecil’s reasons for waking him up and maybe generating some kind of apology.

“Yes. I’m getting married in half an hour, and I need a witness. The men next door were going to do it, but then they remembered that they’re both the same person, and we need two different witnesses or it’s not a real wedding. I didn’t want to ask you, because you’d only say no, but I don’t know anyone else.”

“No,” said Phillip, lying back down and closing his eyes. However, at that exact moment, give or take half a second or so, Samantha had gone into Phillip’s bedroom, seen the bat eating her favourite expensive eyeliner and screamed “Yes!” in the way that her psychiatrist had advised her to do whenever she meant “No!”. The sound reverbrated around the house and echoed into the treehouse outside, where both Cecil and Phillip mistook it for Phillip agreeing to witness Cecil’s marriage.

On the way to the church, Phillip asked Cecil a few pertinent questions about the upcoming wedding, while Samantha grumbled ceaselessly about being forced to wear her second-favourite eyeliner, which she despised (she wasn’t terribly keen on her favourite eyeliner either, but at least it wasn’t quite as revolting to her as her second-favourite). “Who are you marrying, why are you marrying them and what’s a church?” Phillip asked.

“I’m not marrying anyone, I’m just getting married,” answered Cecil. “And I’m doing it because I want to be emperor of the world, and the people just won’t accept an unmarried emperor. There are a lot of old-fashioned people out there, and I just can’t afford to upset them. And it’s a building like that one over there, only bigger and not a fire station.”

“Oh, I see,” Phillip said. He then frowned and sat in silence for two hours, apparently thinking about something, before getting up from the pavement again, walking the remaining five yards to the church door and going inside.

“Dearly beloved,” the vicar began. “We are gathered here today – my God that’s a terrible eyeliner – to join Cecil in holy matrimony. If anyone knows why I shouldn’t, speak now or forever hold your peace, do you, Cecil...”

“Hang on a sec!” Phillip whined. “You’re supposed to pause after the ‘speak now’ bit! I was going to say something!”

“Shut it, fat-face,” said the vicar. “... take Cecil as your lawful wedded self?”

“I d...” Cecil began, but Phillip grabbed him by the knee and prevented him from finishing the word, while Samantha opened a packet of salt-n-shake crisps and ate them noisily and the men next door discussed their pet dog’s obsession with tennis racquets.

“Cecil, I’ve realised why you want to be emperor,” Phillip said. “It’s about your third cousin Brenda, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Cecil admitted. “In another fortnight, give or take, it’ll be twenty years since she vowed to destroy me once and for all in twenty years’ time. Only by becoming emperor of the world can I stop her.”

“You could just kill her with a knife,” Samantha suggested, eating fish and chips that she’d had noisily delivered to the church during Cecil’s heartfelt confession. “Or a bigger knife.”

“Killing people is against the law,” Cecil said. “If I was emperor, I could just make it so that she never existed in the first place. But that’s all out the window now that Phillip’s figured it out.”

“I now pronounce you Cecil,” the vicar said, having taken the ‘o’ in ‘another’ to be the completion of Cecil’s ‘I do’, “and also the emperor of the world. You may kiss anyone you see fit.”

“No no, it’s okay, I don’t need to be married any more,” Cecil said. “We’ve sorted it all out. Brenda can’t destroy me now that Phillip’s worked out why I wanted to be married. It’s a shame, really, I would have quite liked to be emperor of the world anyway.”

“Well, you are the emperor of the world...” the vicar protested.

“Shut it, vicar,” chorused Phillip, Samantha, Cecil and the organist, and they all went home for tea.

The Entertainer

It occurred to me today, after the grand prix (I really need to get into memory training again, if only to give me something to do on Sundays), that instead of learning to play some cool new instrument like I keep trying to do every now and then, I should just dig out my old recorder, which I can actually play quite well. I can still remember how to play a wide range of three or four tunes I used to play at school, and I could probably play a whole load of groovy modern tunes if I could dig up some sheet music for them.

I tried looking for free sheet music on the internet, but the only free stuff is the kind of boring old stuff I used to play at school and don't still remember because it's boring. Works by the likes of John Loeillet, whose name I will always remember because it inspired my recorder-playing schoolmate David Stevenson to giggle "It looks like 'toilet'!". He was about 15 at the time and that was by far the rudest thing he ever said.

Looking him up on the internet today (Loeillet, not David), incidentally, it turns out his name was actually Jean-Baptiste Loeillet, usually known as Jean-Baptiste Loeillet of London so as not to confuse him with his cousin, Jean-Baptiste of Ghent, who was also a composer. And Jean-Baptiste of London was also occasionally anglicised as John Lully, but shouldn't be confused with another composer called Jean-Baptiste Lully of France. And he in turn shouldn't be confused with his composer sons, Jean-Louis Lully and Louis Lully. It just seems to me that if these people really didn't want to be confused with each other, they should have just not all had the same name. Really, who calls their son "Louis Lully"? It's a tongue-twister. And who, having called their son "Louis Lully", calls another of their sons "Jean-Louis Lully"?

Which seems to have drifted away a little from my original point, which was that I wondered if anyone knew where I could find cool recorder music on the internet. Written by people without silly names.

The driver is essentially ballast

I haven't watched a grand prix for years, but I'm currently watching the "action" in Bahrain and it's nice to know that nothing has changed. The TV cameras still miss all the interesting bits, the commentators somehow fail to notice the things that they do see on screen ("Oh, Alonso's got ahead of Massa somewhere," two laps after the first corner where it happened) and don't know which car they're looking at, and it's still the car that starts first on the grid that wins, because it's still impossible for a faster car to overtake a much slower one.

I was inspired to watch it by an article saying that three of the four top teams this year have two good drivers racing for them, rather than the traditional one good driver and one less-good one under orders to finish behind his teammate, so we at least get to see which driver of the pair is able to get the faster time in qualifying and thus measure who's the best. And also to see how the Mercedes team sabotage Schumacher's teammate while conveying the impression that he didn't just let him win. But since it's still as boring as ever, I don't think I'll be watching the rest of the season.

Turned out nice again

After all my whining yesterday, the weather was actually quite nice today, and almost warm - certainly nice enough to cycle from Leicester to Oadby without dropping dead. The othello was fun, too, we had eight players, more clocks than we knew what to do with (we could have built them into a little tower, now I come to think of it, but that didn't occur to me at the time) and I won most of my games, drawing with Iain in the first round and just making a mess of things against Andrew to ensure that I ended up second instead of joint-first.

There was also the traditional lunch in the excellent pub down the road (The Old Library, which is right next door to the current Oadby library, so I don't understand why they bothered to move it), where I impressed our newcomer Rob with my status of world memory champion, and then even more so when a stranger at the bar recognised me and said hello.

And, since it's so nearby, I got home nice and early and didn't have to get up early in the morning. All othello tournaments should be like this.

Winter sports

It's the Oadby regional tomorrow, and I traditionally (ie for the last two years) take my bike on the train to Leicester and cycle out to the Baptist church where the competition is traditionally (for the last four or five years at least) held. But it's still really cold out there, and it's been spring-like for the last couple of years by this time. It's disgraceful. Still, I'm sure the tournament will be fun. I'll also make an effort to break with tradition and remember to bring my clock.

Drat those Germans

England lost to Germany in the semi-final of the hockey world cup today. You'd think they would have been more considerate, knowing how I love to find bad omens in minority-interest sporting events and relate them to the world memory championships. I tell you, if I don't win this year it won't be because I haven't done any training, it'll be because of bad omens. Evil spirits, that kind of thing.

Weight a minute

I've been trying to lose weight for the last couple of weeks, in a half-hearted, still-eating-lots-of-sweets kind of way. But it just occurred to me today that the one time in recent memory when I did genuinely lose a lot of weight and become really quite slender was back in early 2003, when I was particularly devoted to memory training and developing my systems. It's apparently true that mental athletes' exertions make them lose weight, and obviously I just need to mentally exercise some more to get the pounds falling off...

I'm bored!

I haven't been on TV for ages. This must be what it's like to be a normal person, instead of a major celebrity. Unless that other Japanese company decides to go for it, there's nobody even considering making a documentary about memory competitions at the moment, is the point I'm seriously making here. It's about time somebody came along and wanted to film the 2010 world championships. Come on, TV producers, the public wants to see the exciting spectacle of a group of people sitting in a basement looking at numbers!

Unclean!

I got a computer-virus thing on my laptop today - one of those fake security tool things that takes over your machine and tries to persuade you to download bad things and/or give people money. Luckily, I'd heard of them before when someone I know got something similar last year, but less luckily the thing stopped me getting onto the internet and finding out how to get rid of it. But it all worked out happily in the end, because I could still get Yahoo Messenger to work and I got a helpful friend to look it up on Google, and now I've got a clean bill of silicon health again. But I've never had a virus/trojan/whatever before, and now I can't be scornful towards people who get them and say that only stupid people are at risk from computer viruses. Well, I can, and will, but I probably won't sound so convincing.

Also, congratulations to Ron White for winning the US Memory Championship, and Nelson Dellis for nearly winning it and achieving some really cool-by-the-standards-of-American-memory-competition things. I expect both of them to become even more cool, memory-wise, in the future. Let's have an American invasion of top-notch memorisers, to fight off the Chinese and Europeans!