Good Omens

I was wondering what to wear on the TV if they didn't specify anything, and I decided to go for something a bit different - black trousers, black shirt and my playing-cards tie. Stylish. And then the TV woman emailed me and asked me to bring some black clothes so they could present me as a kind of man of mystery. Anyway, I'm going down to London tomorrow because the flight's from Gatwick in the early hours of Sunday, so this might be the last bloggery from me for a few days, depending on whether I can get my hands on the internet and whether I can be bothered to use it if I do.

That being the case, you'd think I'd be able to think of something relevant and funny and interesting to talk about, but I really can't. I'm going to go and practice cards a bit more - I'm almost getting to the point where I think I can do it on TV and recite them in Portuguese without it all going wrong. Almost.

"Do you remember that time when Daz..."

I must have heard my dad start a conversation like that dozens of times over the years, but for the life of me I couldn't remember any continuations before the funeral today. Still, it was a good day. "Daz", it seems, was short for Terence Andrew Sadler, and his funeral was suitably eccentric. The hearse especially - it was a motorbike with sidecar big enough to hold a coffin, driven by a man in black leathers and helmet, and with the funeral director (in top hat and suit) riding on the back.

The minister (and this one was a proper minister of some kind, although he was doing the "humanist style" service) delivered his eulogy in a strangely conversational style ("and he was also a fan of that fellow Cat Stevens, the one who became a Muslim, came to Spondon once but I didn't see him...") but he read the poem How Do You Live Your Dash? ("by Linda Ellis, I heard her one time on Radio 3, she's got a nice voice") wonderfully well. The music was "Bridge Over Troubled Water" again - all my dad's gang loved that song.

It absolutely chucked it down during the interment and then cleared up again as soon as we'd moved on to the pub for lunch. Had a good time reminiscing and generally chatting with Daz's daughter Vicky (who I'm told I met several times when we were little, but neither of us remember it) and her friends, plus his Uncle Byron and Aunt Peggy, not to mention it being a good excuse for Grandma (who was essentially a mother to Daz when he was a young man - she's spent her life taking in waifs and strays of one kind or another) to tell parts of her life story, something she can do endlessly and fascinatingly. I seem to come from a family of great storytellers - my brother's the same, and my dad was too, but that gene seems to have skipped my branch of the family tree.

Oh, by the way, if you couldn't see yesterday's entry until a few minutes ago, I do apologise. I did try to upload it last night, but I don't think it worked. And if it did work, sorry to confuse you. I couldn't see it on my computer until I re-uploaded it.

Hooray, hooray, it's a holi-holiday

I was meaning to wish all my American readers a happy July 4th yesterday, and remind them it's too late now to come running back and say they want to be a colony again. Hope you all had a good time, anyway, even though I saw fit to devote last night's entry to more whining about my free holiday next week.

Although it would be cool to be American in order to have fireworks in the summer, what wouldn't be cool is the amount of time off work you get over there, from what I've heard. This trip to Brazil next week, New York earlier this year, Germany the other week, then the WMC, MSO and BOC to come have almost completely eaten up the 25 days' annual leave I get. I don't know how I'd cope if I only got a couple of weeks off a year.

One dream of mine is to acquire a biggish chunk of money, £20,000 or so, and take a year off work to do all these things I never get round to doing. I'd join a gym, go to college or university or both and do as many weird courses as I could find (this is what the bulk of the twenty grand would go on), do all the usual memory and other mind-sporty things only with more time to practice, fit in a couple of trips to Las Vegas and general globetrotting, just generally have a good time. Write a book or two, set up websites about weird things. Maybe learn to play snooker well.

I'd also need some kind of brain surgery to stop me feeling guilty about spending all that money on myself rather than giving it to the people who need it, of course.

Oh, and by the way, I'm flattered and fascinated by all the comments I got on that post about my credit cards and things. I thought at the time I wrote it that it was the most boring blog entry I'd ever done, but it seems to have been one of the all-time most popular. I mean, I take the contents of my pocket and write about them in graphic detail, and people read the whole thing? Am I out of touch with what's cool and interesting nowadays? Or am I just such a great writer that I could transcribe the phone book here and everyone would love it?

What I wouldn't give for an intergalactic omniglot

Sorry I've talked about nothing else for the past week, but the show I'm going to be on is called Caldeirão do Huck. It's got a website, and it doesn't look like the kind of thing that they'd invite foreigners on in order to play cruel jokes on them, but I'm still not sure what it's all about. Or for that matter what a caldeirão do huck. A cauldron of something, possibly. I'll have to ask Alberto for a crash course in what the show's all about - I have a feeling it's a kind of Noel's House Party.

Anyway, I'm still not practicing memorising cards, I notice. I think I have some kind of subconscious desire to fail spectacularly in front of the watching Brazilian millions. How many people watch this programme, anyway? And once again, what happened to my policy of not doing things like this? Sorry, I just get nervous before scary new experiences. Ignore me.

Things I should be doing tonight

1) Learning Portuguese.
2) Working out how I'm going to memorise a pack of cards in a TV-friendly way.

Things I'm actually doing tonight:

Sitting around in my pants watching Popeye cartoons and reading the entire run of Exiles comics.

I don't know. It's disgraceful, really. But it's been so hot today!

In other news, I'm going to a funeral on Thursday. You go your whole life without going to a funeral, and then two come, both at once. Not anyone I knew, an old friend of my parents who used to hang out with them and my uncle Stewart in days of yore. But my mum's swanning about in the south of France and Uncle Stew is a jetsetter who's practically never in the country and Grandma wanted someone to go to the funeral with her, so I volunteered. Although taking the day off work is going to cause me a lot of hassle for the rest of this week, because we're busy at the moment, especially with me flitting off to Brazil next week and everything. Still, RIP Daz, I've heard plenty of anecdotes about your antics over the years and I'm sure you'll be missed.

Dragon's pocket adventures

I haven't got a wallet, but I have got a big stack of credit cards and things that I carry around in my pocket at all times. Today, for the first time in ages, I had a look at the 'and things' and realised how long it's been since I threw the useless things away. It's mostly business cards that people keep giving me at memory championships (half the people there have some kind of memory-related business and use the competition as a good excuse to hand out business cards). So just in case anyone's interested, here's the inventory of what's in my pocket:

Maestro card

Train season ticket

Bank of Scotland preference account debit card (I haven't used the account in years)

Monument Visa card (occasionally use it online when a site won't take Maestro)

National Insurance Numbercard (I've been carrying this around in my pocket since I turned 16. Perhaps I should take it out and put it in a drawer somewhere - I know the number off by heart)

Business card for Samantha Birkinshaw of Michael Page Recruitment (She was the one who got me the job at Parkhouse, I think. I'm pretty sure she stopped working there a couple of years ago).
HSBC Savings Card (cashpoint-only card for an account I don't use any more)

AT&T phone card (only works in the USA, and in fact doesn't even work there any more. I bought it the first time I went there in 2000.)

Ulrich Voigt's business card for Likanas Verlag GmbH (he's a 'mnemonist' from Germany, and a very nice guy in fact despite being so intellectual and disapproving of 'memory sports' as pointless wastes of time. That IS the point! I don't know what his company does, if anything.)

Fiona Samouelle's business card from Michael Page (I think she's left too.)

Lincolnshire County Council library card (surely must have expired by now, I haven't used it in a good ten years or more)

One of my own business cards (I don't know how that got into the pile. I had them printed earlier this year to give to people who give me one. They just say "Ben Pridmore, idiot" and my email address)

Nick Rosen the TV director guy's business card, with an American phone number scribbled on it that might be his or someone else's, I don't remember.

Barclaycard (which I only use when I'm abroad and need to stick something in a machine. Usually for train tickets in Germany.)

A book of first class stamps, seven left.

Business card for someone called Branislav Maricic in some language that I'm guessing is Czech. I think it comes from last year's world memory championships, and he's some kind of journalist, but I might be wrong. On the back are some cryptic notes I've written - "Pack o' cards" "Andy" "375001" "David - person" and "8.30" I have no idea what any of them meant, but I hope I found them useful at some time.

Alina Lord's business card from Nord Anglia PLC. She was one of the former employees at Cheadle who taught me most of what I know about my current job. She was (and presumably still is) Transylvanian and a lot of fun. This card has lots of phone numbers and things scribbled on it - I was using it to record everything important when I first started there.

Lim Teck Hoe's business card from Maximum Recall. He's the Malaysian guy who organised the 2003 WMC and was going to be organising this year's until it all fell through. I've scribbled "445900" on it at some point, for some reason.

Ottakar's book shop Reward Card - get it stamped ten times when you spend £10 or more (before November 2005) and get £15 off future purchases. Woo! It's got one stamp on it.

Mensa membership card. I think this is still valid, I've got a direct debit comes out of my bank account every year, but I didn't tell them my new address when I moved to Derby so I don't get any correspondence.

James Jorasch's business card from Walker Digital Management. The most recent memory guy to give me his card!

Mhairi Fitzpatrick's business card from Michael Page. A hat-trick of Michael Page cards! I think I only spoke to Mhairi once, and she gave me her card anyway.

Midland Bank (yes, Midland, not HSBC, that's how old it is) Pay-In Card. (Came with the British Othello Federation bank stuff when I took over as treasurer. You can only use it to stick in the paying-in machines.)

Burton card, which they gave me the one and only time I've bought anything at Burton's in the last ten years or so (the suit for my dad's funeral. If I ever have occasion to shop there again, I'm sure it'll come in handy.)

I don't think I'll throw anything out, it's kind of fun looking through this stuff and remembering where it came from. I'll keep adding cards to the heap until I can't fit them in a pocket any more.

Oi

So immediately after Portugal knocked us out of the world cup, I start trying to learn Portuguese. Makes me seem like some kind of traitor. It does remind me, though, of a fundamental fact about myself - I hate learning languages. I just find the things so darn difficult to do. Makes me wonder why I devoted a big chunk of my teenage years to languages, but hey, I was weird when I was younger.

Still, did you know they don't use the letters K, W or Y? That means I'm already three twenty-sixths of the way to mastering Brazilian Portuguese! Which is my aim over the next eight days, before I fly out there on the 10th. If there's one thing I hate more than learning languages, it's going to a foreign country and making people talk to me in English.

Remind me again why I agreed to do this TV thing?

Senile dementia

I left the house without my briefcase today, and didn't realise I'd forgotten it until I got to the train station, too late to go back and get it. And then at work while going out to buy a sandwich (the most important function of my briefcase is carrying my packed lunch), I quipped to a colleague "I seem to be getting very short-sighted in my old age. No, not short-sighted. What's the phrase I'm looking for? Means forgetful?" It took me five minutes to remember 'absent-minded'. This isn't a very impressive display of memory from someone who's hoping to win the World Memory Championship in a month and a half.

In my defence, I think forgetting my briefcase in the first place came about because I wasn't wearing my usual office clothes. I decided to go casual on casual day for a change, so that I could wear my Germany shirt. Because having spent quite a lot of money on it, I thought I should try to get as many jokes out of it as possible. It'll be outdated after the World Cup, after all.

In other news, my washing machine just behind me here is making some very loud banging noises. I hope it doesn't blow up or anything. It's a good seven and a half years old by now and it's never completely broken down yet, so I shouldn't complain. Generally speaking, my posessions all stop working much earlier in their lives than that, I seem to have the touch of death with technology.

P-p-p-pick up

Sainsbury's have a half price offer on 18-packs of penguin biscuits. 89p, which is a pretty good deal really. Interestingly, they haven't got a similar offer on the packs of 9 on the shelves next to them, which are still 98p a pack. I felt like buying a 9-pack just to make some kind of ironic point, but then I realised that that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense, so I didn't.

I'm watching Andy Murray playing tennis at the moment, and his horrible mother's in the crowd. I saw her being interviewed last year when Murray had just won a very impressive game, and rather than saying anything nice about her son, she immediately launched into a list of his deficiencies as a tennis player and observed that they'd have to work on them before he'd be any real good. Although on the other hand, maybe if I'd had a mother like that I'd be practising speed numbers like I said I would right now, instead of wasting my life watching Wimbledon.

Bom-dia, meu nome é Zoomy.

I'm almost certainly going to Brazil in two weeks, touch wood. Which is extremely scary and I don't think I want to do it any more. But I'll get over it.

This is of course another distraction from training for the world championships, and I've had a lot of those lately, what with the football. And general laziness, to be honest. I had a real buzz of motivation earlier in the year, but for the last few months I've been steadily declining back to 2005 levels of don't-feel-like-it-ness. Well, not quite that bad (seeing as for most of 2005 I didn't look at a pack of cards or sheet of numbers that weren't pi at all), but getting there. I did have a go at speed numbers tonight, but considering there wasn't even any football today I should have done a lot more, really.

Never mind, this weekend I've got no plans (although come to think of it I haven't been to see my grandma for aaaaages, so maybe I should do that too), so if I can drum up the willpower to do it, I can do an hour numbers and cards and maybe come up with a definite plan for how much of each to attempt at the worlds.

More pretty pictures!

What you can't see here is that the lights on the face really flash and everything. 


Just for the purposes of comparison, for the benefit of those poor people who didn't watch Battle of the Planets. 

And a picture too...

 

An epic travelogue

So, if memory serves (and remembering something that happened more than five minutes ago isn't my forte, as I think I've demonstrated this weekend), I set off on Thursday night for the first stage of my journey, and the great challenge of finding my hotel. A cursory search of the internet hadn't revealed any of the various hotels actually at Birmingham airport, so I'd booked a room at the Holiday Inn a couple of miles down the road. I decided to walk it, seeing as it was nice weather and I don't like getting taxis. And it was a very pleasant walk - the area around the airport is for some reason absolutely crawling with rabbits, it's like walking on some kind of bunny carpet (I didn't actually tread on any, don't worry). But the number of rabbits I saw on the walk was inversely proportional to the number of Holiday Inns, since it turned out not to be where I thought it was, and after a couple of hours of walking around I found my way back to the airport train station and got a taxi like a normal person would have done in the first place.

After that, I got the plane in the morning without any difficulty. The usual funny look at the passport control because my picture looks like a completely different person, but no trouble. The departure lounge seems to have got more interesting since I was last there, and I had two good books to pass the time with anyway, The Marlows and the Traitor, and Kavalier and Clay. Then I had a day of looking around Düsseldorf (which I didn't think much of) and Essen (really nice!). I bought a Germany football shirt to wear for a laugh at the competition. I know I don't normally buy clothes, generally wearing the same old falling-to-bits ones I've had since I was a teenager, but I'm not above spending huge amounts of money on a single garment every now and then if I think it'll be funny. And I like to think I've got a reputation for wearing interesting T-shirts at memory competitions, so I need to keep that going even now that everyone's seen my entire wardrobe.

I also bought a teddy bear in a Germany football shirt, just on a whim. He's called Ballack, and he seems to be getting along well with Hi-Fi, Tom Jones, Treelo, Iago, Dragon and Shelley, the rest of my stuffed toys who I really should blog about some time soon. I thought about taking him to the competition as a mascot, but decided that two Germany shirts would be overkill, and anyway he wanted to stay at the hotel and watch TV. I found the Essen Holiday Inn without much trouble at all, although negotiating the constantly-shifting roadworks and diversions and working out which direction cars were likely to be coming at you from while crossing the road was a bit of a challenge.

The weather all weekend was absolutely baking hot and sunny, the kind of temperature where it's seriously uncomfortable to be in the direct sunshine. My hat comes in handy for stopping my bald shiny skull getting sunburnt in this kind of situation, but it's horribly hot and sweaty wearing it. Still, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, and I'm too superstitious to stop wearing it to memory competitions now. Somehow I don't think I could memorise anything without it sitting on the desk (or, if there isn't room, on the floor) in front of me.

Anyway, I found the competition venue without any trouble at all, considering I got off at the wrong one of Hattingen's S-Bahn stations and so the map I'd carefully printed out beforehand was of limited use. As well as the Speed Cards Challenge, the Schulzentrum Hochhausen was host to a speed-stacking competition and other sideshows. This is something that the German competitions do very well, and the British ones do terribly. The WMC is always accompanied by Tony Buzan and his friends and relatives giving lectures on self-optimisation and things to gullible businessmen and charging the kind of prices that make your mind boggle. German competitions are accompanied by the kind of shows and contests that people actually want to come to, and this is probably why lots of people there like 'memory sports' and nobody over here does.

Boris did a fantastic job organising everything, by the way - very much putting my shambolic Cambridge effort to shame! There were only ten competitors in the SCC at the end, which was a bit disappointing. Possibly the clash with Germany's football game in the afternoon had something to do with it. Clemens wasn't there, but there was me, Gunther, Steffen Bütow and Alisa Kellner among the participants. For the first round, I was up against Florian Dellé, and stuck with the strategy I'd come up with in advance - just go for a fast time and then if it goes wrong, go a bit slower in the next two heats (it was best of three, head-to-head, if you remember). Actually, I needn't have worried - as usual in these things, when I'm actually in competition, my recall is much more accurate than when I'm at home. I did 32.03 seconds (a bit better than my existing world record) in the first heat, and something like 34 seconds in the next. So I'd won pretty comfortably, and got to sit out the third heat. Watching Steffen against Alisa was entertaining - there really could be something in this as a spectator sport, you know!

For the second round against Franz-Josef Schumeckers it was the same kind of thing, I had another couple of times in the low 30s, including a 31.03, and won it without any difficulty. Nobody else was doing much under a minute. I was up against Steffen in the third round, and he decided to forfeit it and save his mental energy for the final round after lunch. That annoyed me a bit, to be honest. But I decided to go for a super-fast time rather than doing nothing, and made a complete mess of it twice in a row.

After lunch (which was pizza, and free of charge for competitors, another coolness. I live on pizza and McDonald's when I'm in Germany - there are always people selling cheap slices of pizza in train stations and elsewhere, generally reheated several times, often burnt and always delicious. Haute cuisine!) it was time for the grand final, which was me against Gunther. After those failed attempts at breaking the record, I was concerned that I might make a mess of things, so decided I needed a new strategy. Gunther, I reasoned, would assume I was going for a 30-ish-second kind of time, know he couldn't beat that, so would hope that I made a mistake and take it slowly, and make sure of getting his own recall correct. That would give me leeway to go more slowly, say 1 minute, and be certain of winning. So I did, and I have no idea why - I know from experience that going through the pack twice makes me no more likely to recall it correctly than only going through once. Strange but true. My time was about 1:00.91, I think. To my alarm, it turned out that Gunther had done about 51 seconds. He'd expected me to do the sensible thing! I'm deeply offended. Haven't I spent my whole life not doing the sensible thing? And now that for once I have, it was anticipated by my opponent? Luckily, though, he got the third card in the pack wrong, so it didn't matter. I went back to doing the silly thing for the second heat and got it perfectly right in about 36 seconds, without any trouble.

So I won, and to be perfectly honest, I won without breaking a sweat. It sounds disrespectful to the other competitors, I know, and I really should be keeping my big mouth shut here, but I would have liked to be challenged a lot more than I was.

Anyway, the final ceremony included the finals of the speedstacking - very exciting and one of those things I've been meaning to get into since learning of the sport's existence last August, although I imagine it would be hugely frustrating to keep making mistakes at crucial moments; a blindfold Rubik's cube solver (extremely cool); an attempt by Boris at the two-packs-of-cards memorisation record (much better than my own disastrous attempt in 2004, but still unsuccessful, unfortunately); a magician, and a whole lot of trophies. This, again, is normal for a German memory competition. In Britain we get a speech from Tony Buzan, maybe about how great he or one of his friends is, and a quick presentation of medals.

So, thanks to the generosity of the sponsors (Volksbank Sprockhövel - if you want a bank in Sprockhövel, check them out! Assuming they are a bank, I'm not entirely certain about that) I went away with two trophies (for winning and for the best time), and a solid gold pack of cards (seriously cool!). Of course, once again I hadn't brought a bag big enough to take them home with me as well as Ballack and my clothes and things, but I managed to cram them all into my rucksack without leaving too much behind in the hotel room (my notepad, since there wasn't anything written in it and I can easily buy another one, and my jumper, since I've got about half a dozen more at home and I only wear one at a time).

I skipped the get-together at Boris's house for the football game. Rude of me, I know, but these competitions tire me out tremendously and I just didn't feel up to it. I went back to the hotel and was fast asleep by eight, not even disturbed by the sound of Germans celebrating their victory. Which reminds me, a German interviewer at the competition asked me what I thought the result would be, and I said 2-0 to Germany. Should have put some money on it, really.

Coming home yesterday was fun - the boiling hot weather lasted right until the split second I got on the plane, when it turned into the most amazing thunderstorm, with torrential rain (the plane was sitting in the middle of like a square mile of concrete and it was all under an inch of water by the time the rain stopped), vicious wind and some really great lightning. The pilot assured us that if the plane was struck by lightning it probably wouldn't kill us, but we weren't able to take off for an hour and a half until there was a break in the weather. Luckily, I was still immersed in Kavalier and Clay. It's one of those books that can still utterly absorb you even on re-reading it. And then when we finally did fly back to Birmingham, there weren't any trains from the station because of engineering works. In fact, there are practically never trains from Birmingham International station, and I'm not sure why they still call it a railway station except out of some sense of tradition. But the replacement bus service wasn't as slow or late as they usually are, so I shouldn't complain. Incidentally, in Germany the trains really do all run on time. I was hugely impressed!

Did I remember to set the video for Doctor Who?

Did I heckers. Now I'll have to wait till they show the whole series again on BBC3 to tape the rest of them. Anyway, lots to write about the weekend, but I'll save it for tomorrow because I've only just got back, later than planned, and I'm going straight to bed. I've got the day off tomorrow, so assuming I wake up at some point (I'm completely exhausted for some reason) I'll be able to blog at length then.

I don't get it

And by 'it', I mean ticket inspectors on trains. Not as a person, they're all very nice people, but I don't get why they don't conduct on the same trains every day. I take the same train every morning and evening, and it's always someone different inspecting my ticket. It was the same when I was commuting from Boston to Skegness - never the same guy twice. Well, sometimes they're guyesses, but mostly they're guys.

Anyway, I'm off to Hattingen. Gradually. My plane leaves too early in the morning to get a train down there without panicking about missing it, so I'm spending the night in a hotel in Birmingham. Then I'm going to spend tomorrow sight-seeing in Dusseldorf and Essen before finally making my way to Hattingen on Saturday morning. Unless I get lost.

Doctor in the house

If you've got fancy cable TV like what I have, you can see each new episode of Doctor Who three times in a week. Which should be plenty for the guy who's taping every episode for future viewing marathons, right? I missed last Saturday's because of the party, and then on Sunday I forgot to turn over to BBC3 until about 30 seconds after the episode started. So I watched it, but decided to tape it on Friday so as not to have the first couple of words missing. It occurred to me yesterday that I'll be in Essen by the time it comes on on Friday, so I'll have to set the video and remember to leave the set top box tuned to the right channel and everything, and I'm pretty hopeless at that. So if you happen to see me over the next day or so, remind me about it, okay? Thanks.

Ewww.

Shudder. I'm trying not to look at the TV too much in case they show another replay of Michael Owen hurting himself. I'm horribly squeamish about knee injuries, having had some very nasty ones myself in the past, and that looked sickeningly familiar. Poor guy.

On the other hand, we might get to see Theo Walcott playing now. I'm full of hopes that he can be England's surprise hero and win the cup for us.

Although on the other hand...

After saying yesterday that it would probably be a good thing to do a lot of practice for the speed cards challenge, I went and did three packs of cards (for the first time in a few days) and had times of 31.01, 29.51 and 27.34, a new personal best. So I think I might actually leave off training at that point. But then I did have a mistake in recall on the second pack, which is annoying. The SCC is going to be a really different kind of challenge - it's not about getting the best overall score, it's about beating your opponent each time in a knockout kind of competition (Swiss system so everyone's taking part all day, but with four rounds and sixteen competitors you can't win if you lose one heat). So I'm looking forward to the new experience. I'll play it by ear as to whether to go for a fast time or to be certain of remembering it all correctly.

I will admit my decision to go easy on the training is influenced by the fact that there's an England game tonight and I've got a Looney Tunes Special Bumper Collection video to watch (three hours of cartoons, several of which I don't think I've ever seen before, even though they're all from the fifties and therefore the kind that are on TV constantly). I bought it on eBay, only the second thing I've ever bought off there, and since it arrived this morning just before I left for work I gave positive feedback to the seller without so much as checking that the right tapes were in the box. I worry about offending someone by not giving them prompt and glowing feedback. Although the warm fuzzy glow they get from it might be diminished if they knew I could never bring myself to say anything bad about an eBay seller, even if they hacked into my bank account and stole all my money, launched a low-yield nuclear missile at my house and sent me a video with a slight distortion on the soundtrack.

General chit-chat

I met a guy at the party on Saturday night who I got on extremely well with and spent a long time talking to about this and that, until my brother accused us of being 'like a pair of woodpeckers, only talking to each other'. This is either a common expression that's passed me by all these years, or one of those phrases that only he uses.

On Sunday, I bought a fantastic graphic novel - a collection of all Alan Moore's Future Shocks from old 2000ADs. I'd read most of them before, but it's brilliant to see them all at once. And here's another reason to shop at Page 45 in Nottingham rather than Forbidden Planet - the guy on the till asked me what else Alan Moore had written, because the name sounded kind of familiar. I thought he was joking, but it turns out he was entirely ignorant of Moore's work. Now, I suppose I shouldn't expect someone working in a comic shop to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of every comic ever written (although most of them do, because who else but a comic geek wants to work in a comic shop?), but not knowing Alan Moore? If there's a single most famous writer currently producing comics, it would have to be him. Everyone who works in Page 45 can chat with you about any comic you care to name, and recommend good ones. It's the personal touch I appreciate.

I'm undecided about how much to practice speed cards before Saturday. My natural inclination is to do quite a lot, although with most championships I normally leave off training for the week beforehand. With cards, though, you can lose a couple of seconds if you get out of practice for a day or two, and there isn't going to be a huge amount of memorising in Hattingen (12 packs at most, which is nothing, really) so I don't need to worry about not having a fresh journey to use.

One of the presents I got my brother was a Harmidge leathercraft set. Make your own real leather comb case and clothes brush holder! I found it in a charity shop where it had possibly been sitting for a good thirty years - the picture on the packet shows two children with late-sixties/early-seventies hairstyles and clothes looking with delight at the pack's contents - three little pieces of leather that you have to sew together to make the comb case. You also get a comb and clothes brush, needle and thread. Possibly the most exciting birthday present anyone could hope to get.

And a Jem video, which I'm inclined to write about at greater length another time, because I watched it and realised I'd forgotten just how darn good Jem was.

Beans, of the Boston Beans

The mistake was the two of us going to the Boston Bean Company Bar before the party and having four pints of lager each. Not that it stopped the party being great, it just had the effect of making me feel really, horribly unwell today. I actually lost count of how much I had to drink, which isn't like me (I don't have the problem of forgetting things I do when I'm drunk, I suppose it's part of the memory champion thing, but I do have the big problem of remembering what I've done when I'm drunk, which is worse). I was staying off the Stella, so it could have been worse, possibly.

Anyway, great party. My costume, as previously mentioned, was brilliant (photos to come when my brother gets them developed). His Zoltar outfit was really cool too, although I question the decision to base it around a skintight purple leotard that was more figure-hugging than is strictly necessary. We got a few unusual looks from people on the street outside the restaurant (did I mention this fancy dress party was in full view of the public?), which was fun. I'd write more about it, only as I mentioned I'm not well today.

Still, I've got the next five days to recover before Hattingen on Saturday - I've got Friday off work to travel there, and my boss is off for the next two weeks so hopefully work won't be too taxing.