I make it seventeen days come Friday since anybody spoke to me

I get the feeling that my blog hasn't been all that interesting just lately. It's working nine to five that does it - when I'm doing the same thing every day, it doesn't inspire me to write about interesting stuff. And I blame this for why I haven't had much in the way of comments on my blog just lately. Even so, I would like to know somebody's still out there. Say something!

Possibly on the subject of whether I should get some new "business cards" for the UK Championship. I was thinking of retiring the "Ben Pridmore, idiot" ones and going with "Wile E Coyote, genius (have brain, will travel)"

Superhuman Genius (later than advertised)

Seems that it's been put back to Monday August 18th, rather than the 11th. But while this means it probably won't persuade new competitors to come to the UK Championship (on the 16th and 17th), it does mean that anyone who's travelled to Britain to compete might be able to stay until Monday night and see me on TV!

Although I'm only on for ten minutes at most, in a documentary about lots of superhuman geniuses, and these people will have seen me for rather more than ten minutes over the past three days, so I won't be offended if visiting memorisers don't want to watch it. Really.

I haven't done enough training!

Cripes, it's the UK Memory Championship in two-and-a-bit weeks! I need to seriously practice this weekend and next! I've got a title to defend! Actually, I don't know who's coming (early estimates suggested that every memory person I know was planning to turn up, but I haven't spoken to anyone for a while), whether there are prizes (I'd be happy with a cool trophy like last year's, but I wouldn't turn my nose up at another free trip to Bahrain if there's one going), where I'm going to stay (nasty hotel down the road from the venue, or nice but stupidly expensive one across the road? Probably neither and a bed-and-breakfast in Crawley because it's the nearest place with a room free when I finally get round to booking) or whether I'll be able to go to the Monday-morning prizegiving ceremony (might have to work that day) and whether the WMSC will officially strip me of my title if I'm not (probably not - I think I'm in their good books at the moment, or at least their indifferent books. I haven't accidentally offended anyone for weeks. As far as I know.)

This is what I get for missing the German championship. Everybody else probably had a whale of a time there, talking about all these things, and talking about me behind my back. Although they could have talked about me even while I was there, if they did it in German, and I still would have been none the wiser. I don't think I've spoken a word of German for more than a year now. I'm probably even worse at it now than I was before.

Right! Practice! And if you're reading this and you're going to the UK championship, post a comment and let me know! Keep me informed!

Ooooh, shiny!

I got one of the new-design 2p coins in my change yesterday, for the first time. I have to say, although I don't think there was any reason to change the classic designs on the back of coins, the new ones are actually rather groovy. They're stylish and modern, in a good way. It makes a pleasant change from the kind of awful design that the powers that be often end up commissioning for vast sums of money from popular but talentless designers. The 2012 Olympics logo, for instance. But I like the new coins. I think I'm going to start a collection.

I'm doing surprisingly well

I haven't yet slipped into my usual working routine of quickly ironing a shirt each morning before I go to work. I've got everything washed and ironed, plus the shopping done, at the weekend with plenty of time to spare. This kind of efficiency and advance preparation is alien to me, and I'm sure it won't last. Possibly tomorrow morning I'll oversleep, just to make up for it, and arrive at work an hour late.

Avast, ye scurvy lubbers

When it's really hot and sunny like this, my hat is uncomfortably sweaty. But since I need to wear something on my head to protect my bald shiny skull, and since I found an old bandana in one of my boxes of junk recently, I've taken to wearing a bandana when I go out. I think it looks seriously groovy. Especially when I'm also wearing my shades. However, I wasn't entirely convinced that I look good until today, when I was walking through town dressed like that (and a T-shirt saying "Aesculap Memo Masters 2007", in honour of the German championship happening in Tuttlingen today) and a small girl in a pushchair pointed to me and said (conversationally, as if it wasn't anything unusual or unexpected) "He's a pirate."

This is absolutely fantastic, and a huge improvement on "He's that one off the telly who lost to a monkey." Which, incidentally, is likely to happen if I go to Chicago any time soon - Jemfy saw me on telly there last night, being beaten by good old Ayumu. But now, everyone who sees me is clearly going to think "Hey, a pirate. Cool." I'm sure it's not just two-year-old girls who think that way.

I think I would still rather have been in Tuttlingen, but congratulations to Hannes for winning the German Memory Championship! I'm sure that more than makes up for him not being mistaken for a pirate today (as far as I know).

Spiders!

I don't get addicted to things very often. I even stopped drinking coke a couple of weeks ago to see if it would help me lose weight (the jury's still out on that one) without so much as a withdrawal symptom. But I do have a real weakness for spider solitaire. I actually deleted it from my laptop a year or so ago, because I was spending all my time playing it, but recently it occurred to me that I couldn't remember how to play, so I looked for it on the internet, downloaded it, and now I'm all addicted again. It's annoyingly compulsive. Are there rehab centres for this kind of thing?

Movie night!

I must find the time to go to the cinema. I really want to see Wall-E, and Batman looks like it's worth watching too. I wanted to look up when they're on at the big new cinema in the Westfield centre, but I can't remember what it's called, and internet searches haven't been much use. I could, of course, get on my bike and cycle down there in roughly sixty seconds, but I've got the internet, I disapprove of leaving the house to find information that I should be able to find by just sitting here and letting my legs fall off from lack of use.

I suppose I could just download the films instead of going out, come to think of it. Those TV adverts make it look like such a cool thing to do, with people coming and serenading you...

Doomed to stay in Derby

There's a real shortage of decent, affordable flats in Beeston. Maybe I'll just live on the street and carry all my posessions around with me in my trusty rucksack. It'll save me a lot of money in the long run. I'm surprised more people don't do that, instead of moaning about the difficulty of getting on the property ladder.

Hey, it's my blog, I can write what I want

Although the only thing that comes to mind to write tonight is an extensive list of observations about the Thundercats episode "Mandora - The Evil Chaser", by William Overgard. A really great episode, but watching it (as I did tonight) inspires a huge amount of criticism of plot flaws, voice acting problems and artistic issues (although actually, this was one of the better-drawn stories). And as far as I know, there's only one of my readers who'd know what I'm talking about, and he already knows everything I'm going to say.

But maybe I'm wrong. Would you, my readers, like to read a big long blog full of comments like "Why doesn't the Sword of Omens react when Quickpick steals it? When we see it later on, the Eye is wrapped up in rope (the normal way of deactivating it), but even if it was Quickpick who did that, and not the Mudhogs, how does he know to do that before touching it?"

Or "At the end of the episode, when the Thundercats 'all' chorus the final line, everybody's lips move, but only Tygra and Wilykit are audible. Were they just too lazy to overdub the other characters (who are voiced by the same actors)? And why can't we hear Panthro? He didn't share an actor with either of the characters we can hear."

And why does Mandora bellow "They're tying us to the ladders!" when the Mudhogs do so to her and Quickpick? Quickpick, presumably, has noticed this himself without being told, and there's nobody else around.

I've got about a million more of these, from this episode alone. It's a good job I'm going to refrain from posting them tonight.

Attention, viewers!

If you happened to be watching Granada Reports at 6:15 today, you would have seen my friend Gilly and her shop. Sorry I didn't get the message in time to advertise it in the blog, but if you saw it but don't know Gilly, well, now you can appreciate it all the more!

Here's an advance thing to set your video for (assuming you're still using an analogue TV/video setup) - "Superhuman: Genius", a documentary about various clever people and also me, will be on ITV1 at 9:00pm on Monday 11th August. Watch it and be in awe of my superhuman genius!

Mutter, moan, complain

Dagnabbit, I really, really wish I was going to the German championship next weekend. If nothing else, it's always such good preparation for the world championship, but also I want to catch up with all the latest memory gossip, see what everybody's up to, talk about the rest of the competitions to come this year, and so on. There are some things you don't find out just by emailing and posting on internet forums. Besides, I'd rather be just hanging out with fun memory people than working. But hey, it's my own fault for spending so long jobless. And I always under-perform at the German championship and feel annoyed with myself anyway (except last year, when I was brilliant).

Potatoes

Potatoes, which also have a Latin name, are made in factories in the West Country, by a secret recipe which involves beetles. They have been a popular accompaniment to many meals since being reclassified as a vegetable (as opposed to a vehicle) in 1932. Unsubstantiated rumours have it that many celebrities eat potatoes, among them Dennis Waterman, John Travolta and Dutch international hockey player Wouter Jolie.

There are three different ways to cook potatoes - baked, grilled or eaten raw. True connoisseurs of potato-eating believe that washing them beforehand spoils the taste, and indeed often pour handfuls of dirt, mud and worms over the vegetables before cooking and eating them. Baked beans can be eaten with potatoes, but broad beans can not, due to a law passed by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1987 aimed at preventing "unwholesome eating practices".

When not being eaten, potatoes can be used as paperweights, doorstops, tennis balls, DVDs (when sliced to the correct width) and antelopes. Some cheeky bus drivers have been known to take a crafty day off work by dressing a large potato in hat and tie and having it drive their buses for them. A poll of Austrian socialist early-20th-century aeroplane enthusiasts in 2003 listed potatoes as their third favourite thing, after vacuum cleaners and Pakistan. Early-20th-century aeroplanes were ranked a disappointing 27th.

The legends associating Sir Walter Ralegh with potatoes are entirely false - he in fact invented the tomato and the geranium, and sometimes wore a hat that looked somewhat potato-like, but the potato was in fact invented by Rotisserie Vasquez, by accident, in 1657 while he was preparing for the World Memory Championship. Vasquez remained unaware all his life that he had invented the potato, noting in his diary that "my basement is full of strange brown things these days" shortly before his death in 1660.

A new kind of "space potato", launched in 1983, is expected to land on Jupiter in August 2010.

Luxury apartment or stonking great house?

Luckily, all the people who failed to advertise Beeston flats in the paper a couple of days ago have all decided to start putting properties up for rent now. There's a staggeringly expensive "luxury apartment", a slightly cheaper three-bedroomed terraced house, and a reasonably-priced nice-sounding one-bedroom flat in a very handy location. I'm going to see the latter tomorrow, although I'm a little tempted by the luxury apartment. I mean, I quite like the idea of living a life of luxury, and hey, I've got a new job and haven't been fired after my first week, I can pay more than twice my current rent for a really nice place, right?

Nah, I'd become fat and decadent. I'll just go for the non-expensive and doubtless very pleasant one. I hope it's not secretly luxurious too.

Ah, the fun of talking memory with people who are more or less interested in the subject

Today was quite fun. I forgot to ask whether the gathering at the Tamworth Travelodge was officially called a seminar or a convention or a get-together or what, but whatever it was that I was speaking at, it seemed to go down well. People were left with the impression that I know something about memory [or, if you want to look at it a less self-centred way, people were given some useful tips for how to teach schoolchildren to use their brains] and I had the fun of making up a way to remember the workings of the body's circulatory system, which included a digression about how Fat Andy went to the school where Philip Pullman was a teacher.

I had also prepared a snazzy way of remembering that speed equals distance divided by time, which involved Speedy Gonzales and Daffy Duck, but didn't have the time to show it off. Which is a shame, really, because it was cool. Ah well, I'll save it for the next time I'm talking to teachers. I'm sure it'll happen again.

Subtle advertising

In your latest British Othello Newsletter, when you're reading my article on how to win tournaments, cross out the words "during lunch" in the London section and add "before each round", please. That was what I'd intended to write, but I seem to have forgotten it when I sat down to type it up, ending up with outlining a strategy that works perfectly well at every tournament rather than a Bath House-specific one. This occurred to me late one night in bed, a couple of days after I'd sent the article to Adelaide, but I decided it probably wasn't worth emailing her and asking her to stop the presses and change it, especially considering I missed the deadline for submitting it in the first place.

What, you're not a member of the BOF? Well, go and join, right now! £6 a year and you get to read the entertaining newsletter articles of me and others, you get to come to tournaments on a regular basis and hang out with a lot of very nice and entertaining weirdos, and an ability to play othello isn't essential. It's easy to learn, and I'm sure you'll like it. Go on, join the club, even if you're reading this blog in the hope that I'll talk about memory stuff for a change.

Anyway, I've got the day off work tomorrow. Kind of bad form to take a holiday on your fourth day in a new job, but I'd arranged long ago, while I was unemployed and thought I'd probably need the money, to be a guest speaker at the annual convention (or something along those lines) of Maximize Your Potential, up in Tamworth. Not the kind of thing I normally agree to do, I know, but it might turn out to be fun.

The commuter's lament

I'm working in Beeston now, I don't think I mentioned that, which means travelling there by train. Which isn't so bad, but tonight the train was cancelled for no adequately explained reason, so I got the bus instead, which takes longer, and the whole thing cut into my sitting-around-at-home-doing-nothing-of-importance time. I bought a local paper while I was in town to see if there are any nice flats to rent in the town, but it seems there aren't any, nice or otherwise, within a ten-mile radius. I did walk past a four-bedroomed house for rent, but I thought that would probably be a bit excessive.

Hello, I'm the new Jeremy

It's fun being the new bug in an office. You know you've settled in when people stop introducing you as the replacement for your predecessor, but until then you remain a semi-anonymous New Jeremy. In my time I've been a new Kevin, a new Phil, a new Dave and a new Natasha - jokes about that one lasted the longest; it varies proportionately to the physical differences between you and the person who did your job before. One of these days, maybe I'll be the new Ben. That'll keep an office full of people rolling in the aisles for weeks!

Office workers are easily amused, as a rule.

In which I postulate a mediaeval memoriser

You know what there isn't enough of in blogs these days? Poorly-researched theories about 14th-century poetry, that's what.

I'd like to rectify that with a summary of my opinions about the two different prologues of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women". The Legend is a collection of lengthy accounts of the lives of great women of ancient times, in rhyming couplets, and it's not Chaucer's greatest work. It probably went down better among his circle of poetic friends in the 1390s who wanted to see a new English-language summary of the story of Hypsipyle or Ariadne or Hypermnestra than it does with the casual reader today. The problem with the exercise is that all the great women of ancient legend did nothing of interest - they either nobly refrained from having it off with other men while their husband went out and had adventures, or killed themself because their lover cheated on them. It gets a bit repetitive when you put them all together.

The only bit really worth reading is the Prologue, in which the God of Love takes Chaucer to task for his past translations of antifeminist writings and orders him to make amends by writing about all these Good Women. It's got some funny bits, some beautiful poetry of the kind that only Chaucer could do with an ugly language like Middle English and, to the puzzlement of literary critics of the past six hundred years, it comes in two distinct versions.

The two versions of the Prologue are known as the F version and the G version - the F appears in all but one of the surviving manuscripts (Chaucer lived before the invention of the printing press, when books were all hand-written and thus a lot more scarce. All the surviving manuscripts of the Legend are clearly copies of copies, dating from the 15th century, and none of them is exactly the same), and the G version exists in only one manuscript, MS Gg 4.27.

As an aside, I really feel sorry for old Gg 4.27 (Gg to its friends). It's a really important manuscript - dating from no more than twenty years after Chaucer's death, it was the first known attempt to combine all his works into one volume. It's hugely significant to Chaucerian students, and yet unlike the Fairfax manuscript (after which the F prologue is named), or the Ellesmere, the Hengwrt or dozens of other snappily-named documents, Gg hasn't got a real name, and we just have to know it by the code it was given by the Cambridge University Library.

Anyway, the G prologue is found only in Gg, which is the earliest of the eight manuscripts that contain the prologue, and critical opinion until the 20th century held that G was the original draft, and F was Chaucer's revised version. Victorian editor the Rev Walter Skeat said in his edition that he wasn't aware that anyone had ever suggested otherwise (which probably means that someone had and Skeat wanted to deride their theory in a public forum - Skeat was a very cool guy who thought nothing of describing other editors' editions as "worthless" and much of the subsequent work on Chaucer seems to have mainly been aimed at getting back at Skeat for his opinions). But since then, there has been a lot of writing on the subject arguing that G was the revision, done some years later. A hundred years of heated debate of the kind only academics are capable of and the question is still up in the air.

It's a tricky question, and my theory on the subject is that everybody's wrong. I reckon that the G prologue is nothing to do with Chaucer at all - he wrote the F version, and G came about by virtue of a manuscript being produced by memorial transmission. It looks to me like the scribe of an ancestor of the Gg manuscript had access to the text of the legends, but his exemplar for the Prologue had been reconstructed from memory. I've been known to memorise poetry myself - not many people do this in these modern times when you can record a poem in millions of different technological ways, and modern editors tend not to believe that such a thing was ever possible - and I can see the signs of a not-quite-perfect recall.

The main differences between F and G are rearrangement of various passages, changes to a word here and there, and some pieces omitted in one or the other - most of these appear in F but not in G.

The rearrangements are an easy mistake to make when you're trying to memorise a long text. You remember individual sections, but forget exactly what order they came in. The story does seem to flow better with the sections in the F order - at least one of G's rearrangements seems to break a sentence in half and continue it a couple of dozen lines later.

Where words are changed, the F version is normally more poetic-sounding (lines 12-15 in F go "...Men shall not ween every thing a lie/ But if himself it seeth or else dooth;/ For, God woot, thing is never the less sooth/ Though every wight may it not see..."; in G, lines 13-14 become "For that he say it not of yore ago/ God woot a thing is never the less so..." . I suspect the G-memoriser was no poet himself, and just came up with something that fitted the meaning without thought for how it sounds when you read it out loud. Of course, a lot of differences in the G prologue are probably the fault of the Gg scribe, who was pretty rubbish, so it's hard to say.

The bits that G has and F doesn't are mainly an extra couplet here and there which doesn't add anything to the meaning, except for one lengthy digression on the subject of books. This is entirely Chaucerish in tone and relevant to the discussion at hand (although it slows down the action more than it needs to) - maybe it's from another, lost, poem of his and the memoriser mentally joined them together because they were about the same thing?

Anyway, I could go on at length about this poorly-thought-out theory, which I'm quite fond of, but I probably shouldn't stay up all night writing about it. I should probably go to sleep and wake up refreshed early tomorrow morning for my new job...

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It occurred to me that, even though I'm being coy about the details of who my new employers are (regular readers may remember that time, now purged from my blog, when I blogged about a choice between two jobs, listing the pros and cons of each, only for one of the employers to read it, take exception to the cons I mentioned and decide they didn't want to employ me after all), it would be entirely acceptable for me to give a plug to the employment agency that found me the job in the first place.

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