Pumping Iron

Well, I'm back home again after a longer-than-usual car journey - to avoid a big traffic jam on the M6, the drivers among us opted to sit through a series of smaller traffic jams on a lot of minor roads, getting lost three or four times along the way for good measure.

But apart from that, it's been quite a fun week. I actually went swimming before breakfast twice. The first time it very nearly killed me - after six lengths I got out of the pool and went back to the changing room not feeling too bad, then tried to restore my breathing rate to something close to normal and realised I was on the point of having a heart attack, or at least being sick all over that nice hotel's floor. It was about five hours later before I felt more or less okay again. But this morning I swam a bit further and recovered a lot quicker, and I think it's more or less done me some good, probably.

Not that I'm quite the slob I do my best to convince people I am. It's one of those secret skeletons in my cupboard that I don't tell people about, but I do thirty press-ups a night, whenever I can be bothered (about four times a week on average), and as many sit-ups as I can manage whenever I get a spare moment on my own. It started out a couple of years ago as part of a secret plan to become huge and muscular and impress people when I took my shirt off. It never really worked out like that, but on the other hand I suppose I could look worse. I've got a pot belly that I don't imagine I'll ever get rid of, but I'm not what you'd call fat. And maybe the swimming will build up some muscles, although since I'll be stopping after next week when I'm not in a hotel with a free pool any more, maybe it won't.

I'm coming home on Thursday night next week, and working in Burton on Friday, so only three more days without a blog entry before I get back on my surprisingly reliable schedule.

Anyway, I haven't just been pushing my body to the limits of physical effort this week, I've been really doing great with the memory training too. It's not having the internet or cable TV to distract me in the evenings that does it, I think. I beat my personal best time at speed cards twice in a row - 30.23 seconds is my new record. Which is quite encouraging, since I normally do better in competitions than I do at home, so I might well beat my official record next time I'm competing, fingers crossed. Also did quite a bit of training on numbers, and I think I've got past my minor mental block there. I'm really in the mood to win the world championship now - if only I didn't have this documentary thing ready to annoy me out of it...

Hey ho, away we go

Sigh, another week in a nice hotel, all expenses paid. I shouldn't moan, really, but I think I'd still rather not have to work for a living at all. Although when I've tried that in the past it turned out to be excruciatingly boring. Anyway, since work's reducing me to only blogging on the weekends, this will be the last one till Friday. I'd like to say I've had a flood of emails and phone calls, letters, smoke signals and messages conveyed via swarms of locusts telling me people missed reading this thing every day last week and begging me to come back and entertain the masses, but I don't honestly think anyone but me has really noticed it was gone...

Perhaps if I actually wrote about something it would be more interesting, but then nothing has really happened to me. I could talk about my magic rubber duck, Mandrake, but he's the quiet type and wouldn't really fill much more than a paragraph or two.

I think I'm going to get one of those little pocket DVD players with the tiny little screens. They're really cool, and I need a new CD player since the one on my computer doesn't work properly, so it's a completely justifiable expense. The really top-of-the-range ones are only about £200, anyway, so it's hardly any money at all when you're as rich as I am. And, you know, the starving millions in the world will probably be okay anyway...

Oh, for anyone who's following my progress in memory training, I topped 3000 in half-hour binary practice today, which was great. I'm still a way short of my best (exactly 700 digits short, to be precise), but I love to see an improvement in my scores like this. My problem, though, is that I should be practicing with decimal digits, where I'm much further off the pace, rather than binary (only me and Gunther have done 3000 in competition), but I like binary more. I'm going to force myself to practice some speed decimals this week in the evenings and hopefully get my mind thinking they're fun too.

Unexpected sweeties

I've just found half a tube of cherry drops down the back of my settee. They're a bit sticky and difficult to separate from the plastic wrappers, but it's always good to find something like this that I'd forgotten about. Especially since I always consume sweets as soon as I've bought them, so gawd knows how I didn't scoff these ones.

If my memory was as good as everyone seems to think it is, of course, I would have known about these cherry drops all along, and finding them would have been much less fun. What always bugs me a bit about the memory thing is that everybody who hears about it assumes that it's some kind of natural genius on my part, rather than something I've had to do a heck of a lot of work to achieve. The question I get asked most by people (even more than 'why the heck would you want to do it?', which is a perfectly good question that I'd like to hear more often) is "How do you practice something like that?" whenever I mention that I've been practicing memorising cards or numbers or things.

I think I'd rather be sort-of-famous for achieving something by virtue of years of training and hard work, rather than by being freakishly clever. It's certainly closer to the truth, anyway, although of course I only do the 'work' because I find that kind of thing fun.

In other news, Hideshi Tamenori did win the Othello championship, although Takuji Kashiwabara gave him a scare in the semis - they drew the first game (it's best of three) and Kashiwabara won the second before Tamenori came through and won the last by a higher margin. After that, the finals were comparatively easy. That's Hideshi's sixth win in nineteen years, which is a heck of a long time to be at the top of the world like that.

I bought a lottery ticket tonight for the first time in ages. I don't know why, since I've already got more money than I know what to do with, but I didn't win anyway, so I don't have the burden of additional wealth to worry about. But that did remind me that I haven't decided what to do with that pile of cash sitting in my savings account now. Saving it for a rainy day seems contrary to the Zoomy philosophy. I'm still delaying the decision until I'm sure I'll be at this new job for a while, but now I'm rather less worried about being sacked for gross incompetence (I'm pretty sure I can at least bluff my way through the job) I probably should start making my mind up. Any suggestions would be gratefully received!

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig!

Hooray for the weekend! I didn't have a chance to keep the blog updated while I was in the wilds of Cheadle this week. I did write an entry every night with pen and paper, intending to type them up when I got home, but I can't really be bothered. Sorry. Maybe if I'm bored tomorrow.

Anyway, the World Othello Championships have been happening while I've been incommunicado - Britain's star players Graham Brightwell and Imre Leader both narrowly missed out on making the semi-finals, and so did reigning champ Ben Seeley. The semis and grand final are tomorrow, and I don't think anyone would bet against Hideshi Tamenori winning for the sixth time. And not just because bookies don't take bets on othello championships.

Incidentally, anyone wanting to come to the Cambridge 'Christmas' championship on November 26th might end up on the documentary I've been moaning about for the last month or so. If that encourages you rather than scares you off, we could always use some more othello players.

Hmm, what did I write about this week? I could put the edited highlights here... nah, it wouldn't be much fun for anyone. Except the bit where I call Sam a blithering idiot, since he was complaining that I don't insult him enough.

I'm So Tired

Staying up till 6am drinking and having a deep discussion about my identity/identities ("Is Zoomy the same as Ben, or is Ben the same as Zoomy?") seemed like a good idea at the time, but I probably should have considered that I needed to pack my stuff and get things ready to get up early tomorrow and go to Cheadle for the week. No time or energy to write anything more...

It was four hundred years ago today...

I'm going to Crispy and Sleepy's for fireworks tonight, so I'll get the blogging in a bit early while I've got a moment. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to keep up the daily updates for the next three weeks - as I mentioned a few days ago, I'm going to be staying in a hotel in Cheadle during the week, so as to maximise the time I can spend in the soon-to-be-closed Cheadle office, learning what everyone does there. Whether I'll be able to get internet access from the office, the hotel or a handy internet cafe, I don't know.

What I am going to do is take my trusty narrow-ruled A4 pad with me and try to write a bit of How To Be Clever. I often write best when I'm using pen and paper rather than typing, for some reason. I'll take some cards and random numbers with me too, and try to practice memory rather than slumping in front of the telly all night, every night.

As for the review of the week's work that I vaguely promised to write, it's gone pretty well. Yesterday was fun - the Cheadle people all had the day off to celebrate finishing the annual accounts, or being made redundant, or something like that, so I was in Burton helping out with anything anyone could throw at me, which mainly involved impressing people with my Excel skills. This I think could turn out to be a problem with the job, actually - I've found in the past that the further removed I get from number-crunching and more into the realms of deciding which numbers need to be crunched, the worse I am at my job. But people always assume that because I'm good at the former, I must be great at the latter, so they keep promoting me. Is a mindless, repetitive job with no prospects too much to ask for? Anyway, we'll see how it goes.

Interesting fact I learned yesterday - it's illegal to set off fireworks after 11pm, except on Bonfire Night, New Year's Eve, the first day of Divali and Chinese New Year. So now you know.

I am the Weakest Link

Apparently my Weakest Link appearance was repeated tonight, but I didn't hear about it until after it had finished. Still, it's always nice to know thousands of people are laughing at my difficulty with pronouncing the letter R, or remembering what word means an item used in cleaning and a student charity week.

Still, this very appropriately reminds me that I'm not Anne Robinson, and so shouldn't go around being rude about people. With that in mind, here's a corrected version of part of last night's post:

I've just discovered a great webcomic I haven't read before - Mullein Fields. I've only read the first few strips, and it's (entirely coincidentally since the artist has never even read the comic I'm comparing it to) very like Ozy and Millie - which is a good thing to be. Go and read it, I'm sure you'll like it.

Actually, MF is only like O&M in the sense of humour and the general friendly feel to it - while Loretta is a similar kind of character to Millie, there isn't an equivalent of Ozy there, so the implication I put across by casual use of the word 'clone' is entirely wrong. As I said in the comments to last night's entry, I do apologise, and I won't do it again.

Ozy and Millie, of course, is a Calvin and Hobbes clone in the first place.

Which brings me onto the subject of the comments attached to these blog posts of mine. If you don't read them, you really should, because as they're not generally written by me, they're often a whole lot more entertaining than anything in the main text! But just in case anyone doesn't read them, I'll throw in another apology to Peter Davidson, whose art (on The Broons and Oor Wullie) I completely unfairly described as 'rubbish' a few weeks ago. Check out his website and see how great he actually is. He's still not as good on the Sunday Post strips as Ken H Harrison was, though.

And also, check out the comments to October 13th, where there's a plug for Aubrey de Grey's SENS thing. Get involved and live forever!

But the moral to all this story is that I really do like reading comments. If you're reading this, post a comment and let me know! Don't wait for me to insult you! It kind of bothers me that I only got to have a really fun discussion on the subject of the approach artists should take to drawing The Broons because I was rude about somebody. Is that the way the world works? People don't talk to people about the things they like unless the people they're talking to don't like them too? Well stop it, all of you!

I was going to summarise my first week's work at the new job tonight, but I seem to have been blathering on about other subjects for ages already, so I'll save it for tomorrow. I should also mention, after my whining last night, that both my trains were on time today. I'm not quite ready to feel guilty about complaining about trains just yet - I think that's a part of British culture, and I never poke fun at the French or Americans (which is also completely acceptable, and indeed encouraged, in this country) so I've got to vent my spleen at something. But on the other hand, I do actually really appreciate the train service. I should be nicer about it in future.

One more thing - this is me and my younger brother when we were that age. So comparatively speaking, I'm a very nice person nowadays!

I hope this old train breaks down

I've now been commuting to Burton-on-Trent for three days, and I've yet to go there or back on a train that was running on time. Today was particularly good - the 8:27 this morning was cancelled, "due to a fault with the train", and the 8:38 was five minutes late, but that doesn't count as late as far as the train companies are concerned (their statistics showing how many trains run late only count those delayed by more than ten minutes), so they didn't bother with an explanation, let alone an apology. Then tonight the 5:20 was 27 minutes late, "due to vandalism and trespassing on the line at Chepstow". So I got the 5:43, which was running on time, but I'm not counting that.

I don't have to go up to Cheadle tomorrow, so I get to work in my actual office for the first time. They have dress-down days on Fridays in Burton, which doesn't really thrill me. It's not that I like dressing up in a suit and tie, but if I don't dress like an accountant, I have a hard time pretending to be one. Besides, everybody else will have cooler casual clothes than me. And should I wear my Zoom-Zoom t-shirt, or one of the ones without big holes in?

I've just discovered a great webcomic I haven't read before - Mullein Fields. I've only read the first few strips, and it's a bit of an Ozy and Millie clone, but done well enough that I don't mind. Go and read it, I'm sure you'll like it.

Go first class or third; marry a duchess or her kitchenmaid

I agree with Mr Hardfur Huttle on this point - I always avoid buying medium varieties of things if I can avoid it. This is one of those hard and fast principles of mine that I violate on a daily basis without thinking about it, but when I do, it bothers me. Cheddar cheese, you see, comes in four kinds - mild, medium, mature and extra mature. And while I would never even consider buying the medium kind, I do prefer the mature to the extra mature. Does that count as buying one of the medium varieties of cheese? Am I betraying my deeply-held beliefs? Am I only writing about this because I can't think of anything else? Who knows?

Anyway, nothing of any great interest has happened today. That lengthy minibus ride has for some reason inspired me to write superhero comics heavily indebted to Kurt Busiek's Astro City, about a couple of morally-ambiguous heroes - I'll have to see if I can find an artist willing to draw them for me. Might be difficult, though. There are a lot more would-be writers looking for artists than would-be artists looking for writers.

Well, that wasn't so bad

Although they want me to stay in a hotel down in Cheadle next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, while I'm learning the job. Funnily enough, one of the other new people is Patrick who used to work at Parkhouse for a few months a year or so ago, so I wasn't entirely surrounded by complete strangers. I've got a headache, presumably as a result of more or less working today for a change, or possibly the stress of a new job, or maybe I'm under telepathic assault by space aliens, I don't know. But for the rest of this week we're going to Cheadle on a minibus every morning and back in the evenings - spending four hours on the road in total and a bit less than that actually at work.

Anyway, enough of this accountant-talk. I've just been watching a new cartoon called Robotboy about, well, a robot boy. It's quite good, if not an all-time classic. There's a new series of Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends too, which is an all-time classic, so I'm happy. And then there's the second half of one of tonight's football matches while playing othello online. Perfect new-job-stress relief!

Witches bad, pumpkins good

There was a really good cartoon called 'Pumpkin Moon' on Sky yesterday, chronicling the great Halloween conflict between pumpkin lanterns and toy witches.

Which is a small comfort, but doesn't entirely stop me being scared about starting a new job tomorrow. What if it's nasty? So, in an attempt to ignore the whole thing and wallow in old childhood memories, I've been embarking on a train of thought set off by Scholiast's train of thoughts relating to her birthday.

It occurred to me that while I can't remember my sixth birthday party, I can remember writing about it in school the following day. Or rather, not writing about it. I got as far as something like "Yesterday it was my birthday. Robert Brown, Robert York, Robert Hodgson..." and then got lost in reminiscences about the party and the interesting fact that my three best friends were all called Robert, and didn't write anything else. The Roberts wouldn't have been the only ones at the party - I always had six guests at these things, that being the number of screaming children my parents had decided they could cope with. And that must have been quite a feat in itself - me, six other six-year-olds and my brother being four and doubtless embarrassing to virtually-grown-ups like us.

I'm pretty sure Juliette Wilson, who lived down the road, would have also been there. Possibly also James Small, if he was at the school at that time and friends with me (I can't quite remember), but I don't know who else might have made my priviliged guest list. It was the done thing to invite Gavin Barnes to parties, but I have a feeling that at the age of six (and having only been at my new school for a month) I hadn't quite realised the importance of getting in with the coolest kid in the class, so I don't think he was there.

This provokes further memories about Robert Brown, who I remember practically nothing about. He and I were both new at Clinton Park school that year - my first year of primary school was at Tumby Woodside school, which closed down at the end of the year and forced its 28 pupils to the schools up in Coningsby and Tattershall. I went to Clinton Park, where my dad was a teacher, while most of the rest went to Coningsby, so I was forced to find a new best school friend to replace Robert Hodgson.

Not being a naturally sociable type even then, at playtime I found a spirally snake painted onto the tarmac playground and amused myself by running around in circles on it until Robert Brown came up and started a conversation: "What are you playing?" "Running." "Can I play?" "Yes." And we were best friends after that. But then he moved away almost immediately afterwards and I never saw him again. Clinton Park's pupils were mostly the children of people attached to RAF Coningsby, so people were always coming and going when their fathers got posted to another base. Even so, most people stuck around for more than a few months, so I don't know what was going on there. I shifted my best-friendship allegiance to Robert York, and we were inseparable for the next few years until he moved away too - and even then we wrote to each other for a while and a few years ago got in touch through Friends Reunited.

Robert Hodgson, meanwhile, I met again when we both went to the grammar school and found that we didn't have anything in common any more, so we didn't hang out together. But I haven't the faintest idea what became of Robert Brown, or whether we'd find something to talk about if we met up again today. He's unsurprisingly not on Friends Reunited for Clinton Park, and you can't really Google someone with such a boring name unless you want to read a million articles in the hope that they'll mention where the subject went to primary school for a few months in 1982. It'll just have to remain one of those mysteries.

Memory loss

While I was memorising thousands of binary digits this morning, part of my brain was adding up how much money I've got and working out what to do with it. I remembered that I'd spent a fairly significant amount of money some time in the last couple of weeks, put it on the Barclaycard and thought it was a good thing I was getting this extra money at the end of the month, because otherwise it would have stretched my monthly pay a bit. But I couldn't remember for the life of me what this expenditure was for.

I spent absolutely ages racking my brains, trying to work it out. I knew it was something unavoidable, not a regular monthly payment but something that I had to pay every now and then, and for about a hundred pounds, but what could it be? Okay, I'm pretty relaxed about my money, but could I really have spent such a lot of it and forgotten? After running through every kind of household expenditure and tax I could think of, I'd just about come to the conclusion that I must have either dreamt the whole thing or been hypnotised into handing over my hard-earned cash to Paul McKenna. I gave up and decided to wait for the Barclaycard statement to see if that would remind me, then took my glasses off to clean them and remembered - "Oh yes, the new glasses!"

I'm not sure what the moral to this story is. You can still become world memory champion even if you've got a memory like a sieve? I really am so relaxed about my money that I can spend it and not consciously register it? My memory is going as I spiral helplessly towards thirty years of age? I really was hypnotised, possibly by an evil optician like in 'The Miserable Mill' by Lemony Snicket? Or perhaps I'm just plain mad.

In other news, I've been spending quite a lot of time lately playing othello/reversi at Kurnik, a Polish games website where you can play just about any weird game you like, without downloading things or signing your life away. It's where all the cool othello players hang out nowadays, and I've been sort of meaning to start playing there for ages now, but only just got round to it (and then only because I was bored stiff at work). But the whole site really does deserve a plug - not many people go out of their way to provide a place where you can play connect 4 with people from all over the world.

Also, Kurnik is Polish for henhouse. I think that's an excellent name for a website.

Anthology of Interest

Okay, it seems everyone wants me to do this documentary. Fine. If he does turn out to be evil, it'll be your fault. So, having decided that, I'd better get on with writing my books, so they can be launched to tie in with the theatrical release of this oscar-winning masterpiece.

I haven't really talked about my literary aspirations here before except very vaguely, so for want of anything better to write about, I'll describe 'How To Be Clever', so that anyone reading this can steal the idea and write it first before I get round to it.

The basic idea of the book is that, unlike some others that promise to increase your intelligence, aptitude, intrinsic moral worth, all that kind of thing, HTBC shows you how to make other people think you're clever, while actually remaining just as thick as you naturally are. This is an art that I've cultivated over the years.

It will include lessons in things like how to memorise a pack of cards (actually quite easy, with just a little bit of practice and the right technique), how to get into Mensa (there are actually very few different kinds of puzzles in IQ tests, so if you know what to look out for, and practice them a bit, you can increase your "IQ" a few notches), how to work out square roots without a calculator (they don't teach that in schools any more, so anyone who knows how to do it must be a real genius, right?), how not to play chess (trust me, once people think you're clever, they'll automatically assume you're a great chess player. The trick is to avoid actually playing a game, at any cost) and much more.

There'll also be lots and lots of useful random facts that you can slip into conversations, encouragement to be more creative and spontaneous (if you're going to be a genius, you have to be eccentric) and probably pictures too, just in case the book gets bought by the kind of person who doesn't like reading.

I've been writing little bits of it every six months or so for the last couple of years, and one of these days soon I'm really going to sit down and put metaphorical pen to paper, then try to get the thing in print. I don't want to approach publishers until I've actually written the whole thing, in draft form at least, because I'd hate to have to meet a deadline. I'm very bad with those.

Of course, I also resolved recently to write another book, didn't I? I've got ideas, but I think in the end I'll just sit down and write the first thing that comes into my head, and see what happens. It might be a masterpiece. It might be the complete works of Shakespeare. It might be about a terrapin called Dean. We'll just have to see.

Baby You're A Rich Fag Jew

I've got money! Lots and lots and lots of it! Ooh, and so many things shouting out at me to buy them. We finished work at lunchtime today (the Select people came and kicked us all out of the office, so they obviously couldn't wait to get rid of us), so we did the farewell drinking session this afternoon and early evening. So I can still get up earlyish tomorrow morning and go to see Grandma without feeling terrible - see, I'm just fine when I stop drinking Stellas after three pints and move on to something else.

So, unemployment until Tuesday, and then I'll be a normal wage-slave again. I'll have to stop talking here about the delights of not working and find something else (the life of an accountant probably doesn't qualify as interesting enough).

I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but I taped 'The 5000 Fingers Of Dr T' this morning. An absolutely wonderful film, that surprisingly few people have heard of, it's a live-action version of a Dr Seuss book - a concept which should be completely impossible, but somehow works in this case. It captures the Dr Seuss look perfectly, and that's an amazingly difficult thing to do. Dr Seuss himself isn't as appreciated in some quarters as he should be, but the fantastic imagination that goes into his drawings is something that's unmatched in all of history. He's one of my all-time heroes.

Hmm

Is it too late to call off this whole documentary thing? Today's filming session had more telling me what to do than I like to have in my average day. Which makes me wonder again why I'm doing this if it's only going to get on my wick, when the end result is going to be people sitting and watching me going about my everyday life and talking about memory stuff. None of which is something I really like. So should I call Nick and tell him I don't want to do it, or just put up with it so as not to hurt his feelings?

Also, I've got a sort of reputation in memory circles as the kind of person who's down-to-earth, and doesn't go in for self-promotion. If there's an award-winning documentary about how great I am, it might damage that reputation.

I think I'll just do nothing and hope he realises what a dull documentary this would be. Anyway, officially the last day of work tomorrow! Got my P45 and final payslip today, the money's in the bank tomorrow, I would imagine there's going to be a fair amount of drinking too. Which might be a problem seeing as I'm taking my grandma out to lunch on Saturday. Ah well, I'm sure I'll be fine as long as I keep off the Stella.

Ross and Joey are drinking midori on Friends at the moment. Or several years ago when they filmed the episode, anyway. And it's probably coloured water, to be fair. Still, it's good to see.

I will not celebrate meaningless milestones

I don't want to leave my job and start a scary new one! Someone arrange things so I don't have to, please. Tomorrow is sort of my last proper day of work - not only do I have something to do (showing Kim from Luton the wonders of the bank reconciliations) but I'll be filmed either working or pretending to work. I'll wear my Parkhouse t-shirt as a sort of private joke. After that I doubt we'll be doing anything on Friday, and we certainly won't on Monday (officially our last day) because I don't think anyone's going to come in. We get paid on Friday, you see.

And then on Tuesday I start at the new place. This brings with it all kinds of anxieties. Can I still remember how to do management accounts after all this time doing financial analysis? Will the people there like me? Will I like the people there? Will I get lost on the way there on my first morning? I tend to do things like that when I'm nervous.

I got my new glasses at lunchtime. I was sceptical about their claims that they wouldn't be in before Thursday, so I went and checked on my lunch break, and they were there. Both pairs - the ones with normal lenses and the ones with the extra-thin ones which the people there assured me would take a couple of weeks. I don't know why I asked for the extra-thin lenses anyway - I didn't particularly want them, but I can never resist a sales pitch. I'm wearing the normal-lens ones at the moment, because I think they look better.

The new glasses are a lot less obvious than my old ones, if you see what I mean. A particularly short-sighted or unobservant person might not notice that I'm wearing specs at all, because they're quite small and less ostentatious. I think it's as close as you can get to contacts without the ickiness of sticking things in your eyes. I'd still rather not have glasses that look like everyone else's, though. Maybe when I've got a bit of money to spare I'll splash out on some Timmy Mallett ones. Or Jan Formann's ones, with an L on one side and a K on the other so he's got 'LOOK' written across his face. Then again, two of us wearing those at memory competitions would just look strange...

Zoom - it's part of my name

On the way back from Luton today, I saw the strangest company slogan I've ever seen, written on the side of a van. The company in question are called Huntleigh Healthcare, or something along those lines, and the slogan was "Healthcare - it's part of our name."

They either deserve applause for coming up with a brilliantly ironic swipe at senseless advertising, or else public derision for putting something so mindlessly stupid on their vans. Either way, this blog is dedicated to Huntleigh Healthcare, or Something-beginning-with-H-and-ending-with-something-like-leigh Healthcare, anyway.

In other news, if I'm going to get back into the habit of watching EastEnders, I'm going to need reminders. Addiction has always been something I've needed to work at. But I'd resolved to watch it this week just because I've always loved the Mitchells. Don't ask me why. I might catch the repeat on BBC3 tonight, if I can be bothered.

Also, I've been practicing speed cards for the last couple of nights, three packs a night, and I've made mistakes in all six packs. And they were all over 35 seconds, too. I really need to get back in training on a regular basis.

Okay, I've got one now!

My mistake, obviously, was to decide to do my blog before taking my washing out of the machine. Which is still working more or less fine, incidentally. Positive reinforcement always does the trick.

When I won the WMC back in August 2004, the local news came round to film me at work. Marketing director David, never one to miss a chance to promote the company, strategically placed Parkhouse Recruitment logos around the office (including an enormous triangular toblerone-shaped thing intended to be displayed at rugby matches that happened to be in head office at the time because nobody had remembered to send it wherever it was meant to be), and produced from somewhere a T-shirt with the Parkhouse logo for me to wear on the interview.

I kept the shirt around in my desk for a couple of other photo shoots that week, and then basically left it there and forgot about it, until I was clearing out my desk last week and finally took the shirt home with me. Now, this shirt is either black or very dark blue, I'm not quite sure. Sort of navy blue, if the navy had been taken over by goths or vampires. I put it in the wash without considering the consequences, and now I find that all my white things that were in there tonight are now a sort of greyish-blue colour. Or maybe bluish-grey, I'm not quite sure.

If you were wondering, I don't do that separating-whites-and-colours thing when I do my washing. That's always struck me as the kind of thing that you'd only do if you deeply care about your clothing being whiter than white, and spend hours agonising about the different brands of washing powder, or nasty liquid-filled plastic bubbles, and fabric conditioners, and little bags that you put little cubes of washing stuff in the machine with, because using washing machines the way they were designed to be used and putting the stuff in the drawer just isn't good enough. No, I refuse to conform to what these profiteering companies want me to do, and just buy the first box that comes to hand from the supermarket, and bung everything in together. This doesn't lead to nearly as many disasters as you would think.

It has tonight, though. Although it's a very mild kind of disaster. My white jeans are now greyish-blue, which is a shame, and a towel, a couple of hankies, and some pants and socks, but the only work shirt in there was the one that was grey already, and the work trousers seem to be exactly the same shade of brown that they were when they went in, so obviously they're immune to dyeing somehow. I remember the last time this happened, years and years ago and involving socks, all my work shirts went a uniform shade of dull grey, so I've been quite lucky here. And the jeans look quite cool, really. It would have been nicer if they'd had a sort of tie-dyed look, but it's all one smooth shade. Maybe it'll wash out. Or half-wash out. Or maybe I'll try washing everything with something bright red and see what that does.

Zoom's 97 varieties

Getting close to my hundredth blog entry. Who would have thought I'd still be finding things to talk about after all this time? You'd think I'd be reduced by now to counting the number of entries I've made and trying to get away with filling a whole page with talking about it, but no, I manage to come up with ways to keep this thing so fresh and interesting, you'd swear I was just starting out on this thrilling adventure that is bloggery!

Sigh. I hate running out of ideas.

I need a holiday

Which is a strange thing to say, really, since I haven't been doing proper work for months. But I just feel like I need a break from the sort-of-but-not-quite work routine I'm in at the moment. Maybe starting my new job next week will feel like a refreshing change.

Actually, what I need is an adventure, preferably involving magic, dragons and an assorted cast of friends and enemies with unusual and charming personality quirks. I must sit down and write it some time. I've just got back from seeing Howl's Moving Castle, and while I maybe wouldn't recommend it to anyone who likes their plots to make sense, it's very atmospheric, and I left the cinema feeling all magical, which is always a good thing. It also sort of inspired me to sort of combine two of the unwritten stories that have been circling in my imagination for absolutely ages now, with added bits and pieces arising from that idea. Trouble is, I have a feeling it needs to be a graphic novel, or at least profusely illustrated with the pictures interacting with the words at important points. If only I could draw, this kind of thing would be so much easier.

Back to work tomorrow. On Tuesday I've got to go down to Luton to show the assorted eejits there how to do the handful of things I do that they've decided are worth doing in future. They've left it much too late to take over these things, so I'm quite certain they're going to just drop it - it's not vitally important information, it's just presenting a few figures they already have, but in ways that make sense, which comes in handy if you want to plan for the future. I'm sure people will miss them once I've stopped doing them, but I've never felt that they were essential to the smooth running of a company.

I'm thinking of bowing to the inevitable and getting a DVD player. I've always tried to resist it, because I know what I'd do is get lots of cartoon DVDs that you can't get on video and spend all my time watching them. But while wandering through the auctions on eBay today, I found a complete collection of Bosko cartoons that I'd really quite like to have. And if I'm going to achieve that back-burner ambition of mine to watch every WB cartoon ever made, it's going to be a lot easier to collect them on DVD rather than VHS. And yes, lots of them, Bosko included, are public domain and I could get them from various other sources, but I much prefer to track down obscure ancient video releases. Finding them is half the fun. More than half if they're not very good cartoons.

Ooh, less than a week and I get all that money! Which reminds me, I had a call from my dad this morning about getting together with grandma and my brother on Saturday - he's going to bring my Christmas presents along with him. He probably bought them last year some time. I sometimes wonder if his internal clock is just wound up too fast. At least he's meeting me at Attenborough on Saturday, not coming round to pick me up here, so for once I don't have to get woken up by him knocking on my door three hours before the time we agreed...