Just starting to panic a little bit now

The World Memory Championship is a month away, and I'm nowhere NEAR match-fitness. It's infuriating - on one level I can't stand the idea of losing the world championship yet again, but on another I can't really summon the enthusiasm to go all-out for the win. And circumstances have kept me from getting into any kind of training schedule lately, so I think I've already left it too late to get back into top form before the competition, even with some excessively draining training over the next few weeks. We'll just have to see what happens.

A healthy memory

Well, the not-blogging-about-work-in-case-I-get-in-trouble rule lasted for two months, more or less, which is pretty good going. But I can't resist this one tonight. The worlds of work and memory are sort of merging, you see, and the people who read this blog for the memory technique insights might be interested in this.

As I might have mentioned before, it's the Boots Healthcare Conference in Birmingham next week, woo, and I've been asked to go along to our department's stand (it's all about store-controllable wastage) and persuade attendees to come and look at this not terribly compelling-sounding display by performing a memory stunt. I'm not 100% comfortable with being an Official Boots Memory Man as opposed to a Boots Profit Protection Analyst, but as long as it's only once in a while, I don't really mind.

So what I've done is taken a list of all the stores which will be represented at the convention, which each have a number from 5 (Beeston) to 6526 (Glasgow Fort) and the value of their healthcare-department credit claim values for this year to date and last year in three different categories (out of date, damaged and theft), all of which are a one-to-five-digit number, and when somebody tells me their store number, I'll be able to reel off the six figures for their store, and amaze and astound them. Then I suppose I'll order them to make an effort to reduce their wastage if they want to see more memory feats, or something like that.

Having played around with techniques for memorising these slightly tricky numbers (when you have a 3-digit-image system like me, memorising a 4-digit number is inconvenient), I decided to memorise them as eight three-digit numbers, by taking off the first digits of each and combining them into one number. So for example, if store 27's [there is no store 27 in the Boots world at the moment, and the following numbers are entirely fictional] six numbers are 1425, 684, 9723, 226, 8821 and 23, I remember it as 027-109-425-684-723-080-226-821-023. See what I'm doing there? The 027 is the store [I forget where store 27 used to be, but it closed down last year. I reiterate, I'm not quoting real figures here], the 109 is the thousands figure from the first three numbers and the 080 is the thousands figure from the last three.

I tried memorising a scene of these nine images in isolation for each of the 192 stores that'll have representatives at the conference, but they just wouldn't stay in my memory. So I used journeys instead, and placed nine images in each location, and somehow that works a great deal better. Now when someone says 'store 27' to me, I have to run through my journeys and work out where it is, but when I find it, I can remember the images perfectly.

I don't know why that's so much better than doing it without a journey. Maybe my mind is just used to journeys and now I can't survive without them. Anyway, it's been fun to be working from home this afternoon, memorising numbers and getting paid for it, although I still feel guilty because I can't quite mentally accept that memorising is part of my job at the moment.

Speaking of memory, you can check out Gaby's pictures of Maisons-Laffitte here!

And the BBC were speaking of memory today to me, too, asking questions like "when you talk about memorising a pack of cards, do you mean a 52-card pack or a 36-card pack?" I suppose you have to check everything, but that's one I've never been asked before. They want to film me on October 7th.

Wait, I forgot to mention the interesting technical bits of the healthcare memory thing. Some stores have a four-digit store number - ones that start with 1 I remember which journeys they were on and just memorise them as a 3-digit number without the 1, and the handful that start with 20 or 50 or 64 or 65 I use others of my images that I don't usually use with numbers, so store 2053 becomes store h-5-3, a hummingbird, in my head.

And for the stores whose credit claims in a category are over 9999, I use another consonant or vowel for the 10, 11, 15 or whatever thousands figure - no number is over 16000, luckily. Creating systems is about 75% of the fun of doing something like this.

Old fellow

It's othello in my dad's ancestral home of Sheffield this weekend. I've played a couple of games on playok in some kind of preparation, conscious that I haven't looked at an othello board for months now (except in the course of moving mine to the new flat and dumping them in the corner of my living room - they're among the things I haven't found a place for yet). I also haven't done my treasurer's report for the AGM... come to think of it, where did I put my box of othello paperwork? I'm pretty certain I brought it with me, but I don't think I've seen it since. Ah well, there's days before I need it.

With this kind of advance preparation, I think I'm a dead cert to win the nationals this year!

Hooray, I'm home!

Despite a slightly awkward moment going through security at Charles de Gaulle airport when the machine picked up an undeclared bottle of liquid, an unidentifiable big heavy object and lots of sophisticated-looking timing devices in my rucksack. But I managed to explain without too much difficulty that the timers are used for timing memorisation of cards in memory competitions, that the big thing was the trophy I won at the UK Memory Championship and that despite the above I had put a half-drunk bottle of coke in my bag and completely forgotten it was there. I drank the coke without exploding and the security people seemed satisfied.

As for the competition itself, I won't say much except that I was rubbish. I still won, so obviously I wasn't all that rubbish, but it definitely showed that I hadn't done any training. Got to get on with it now for the next month.

Good food, though - at lunch, we had a waiter who bravely attempted to talk with us in French, English and German, as necessary, which led to a fun multilingual bacon/Schinken/chicken confusion. And in the evening we had crepes, in the proper French style. And I got to see lots of sights in Paris!

Well, I did it.

I bought a new rucksack. I hated to do it, but I had to face facts - my beloved old rucksack is now essentially just a scrap of cloth that, at best, can be wrapped around things and carried in my arms without dropping too much stuff from it. It's not actually going to be possible to take my clothes, cards, toothbrush and other memorisation accessories on the plane to Paris in my old rucksack.

This is terribly sad, but I suppose I have had fourteen years of loyal service from my rucksack, and before that it put in a good three or four years carrying my brother's PE kit to school. Maybe I'll give it back to him now, seeing as I borrowed it temporarily from him in autumn 1994, or maybe just keep it in my box of treasured memories.

Apart from buying a rucksack, incidentally, I am completely and totally unprepared for the French Memory Open, or whatever it's called. I've done no training, I haven't planned out what journeys I'm going to use or how much I'm going to attempt in each discipline, I haven't even printed out my e-ticket details, map to the hotel in Maisons-Laffitte and useful stuff like that. I don't really feel like I'm going to be getting up early tomorrow to get the train down to Birmingham airport, then spending a day in Paris. I'm sure I will, but I'm surprisingly underprepared. We'll just have to see what happens.

And you, blog readers, will just have to see me on Sunday, because I won't be blogging till then. Au revoir!

Get off your back, go into town, don't let them down

One thing they do at Boots is encourage head office staff to go out into real live stores and help out on occasion. So that's what I've been doing today, back in Derby. It's really groovy - in all my varied jobs over the years, I've never actually worked in a shop before, so this is all new and exciting.

Nobody in the store recognised me (my fame might just possibly be fading here) but when I went for lunch someone did ask me "Excuse me, are you off the telly?" I like that phrasing better than the more common "Did I see you on the telly?". Being 'off the telly' suggests that I'm a regular TV star, rather than a subject of a one-off documentary. It's a subtle point of linguistics, but very flattering.

(It occurs to me that any foreigners reading this could use it as a local-dialect lesson, if they ever come to this part of the world.)

I have this conversation a lot these days

"Ben!"

"Hello."

"Remember me?"

"Um... no."

"Steve Barker [or possibly Chris Barton, or something along those lines]. I was in your brother's year at school. How can you not remember me? You're a famous memory man, I've seen you on TV!"

See, the non-famous-memory-men-and-women of the world have me at a real disadvantage now. They know all about me from my many TV appearances, whereas I, with my famous inability to remember names and faces, know nothing about them. And yet it's me who ends up looking stupid! I tells ya, it's tough being a celebrity.

Anyway, I don't remember any Chris/Steve/something-similar Barker/Barton/something-like-that being friends with my brother. I didn't pay much attention to those little urchins in his year, but I knew all his closest friends, I thought. I should be at least vaguely aware of the existence of someone who, when told that our grandma lives in Chilwell like he does now, observes 'oh, is she still around? I remember Joe used to go to Chilwell to see her on his holidays...'

Perhaps he's some kind of conman. Or perhaps I'm just really, really bad at remembering names and faces.

We are the world

Following on from last night's entry, I also have the same kind of feelings about the world championship as I do about the French. Apart from the bit about how it hinders my training for the world championship, of course, because that would just be silly. But I'm not really all fired up about the WMC at the moment, and I haven't done anywhere near the amount of training that I should, with one thing and another. Turnout is going to be pretty low this year, with plenty of people who could just about afford one trip to Bahrain not being able to make it an annual holiday, and a probable lack of Gunther and all the other previous world champions. I'm told that there might be even more Chinese competitors this time round, but I haven't seen a list of names yet, and the one of them who I'm friends with isn't going to be there. I just worry that the whole thing's going to be a bit of a flop.

Still, this shouldn't stop me getting into some serious training. I need to knuckle down and get my brain in gear, quick. Shame I've got Paris this weekend, Sheffield next weekend for the othello, a brotherly visit the weekend after, and then we're practically in Bahrain already, even without the inevitable BBC-pestering that's also going to happen. I have a feeling I'm not going to win again this year.

So this is gay Paree, come on along with me!

It's the first ever French memory championship next weekend, in Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris. I'm going along, although to be perfectly honest I think I might prefer not to be - it's a very small competition that few people will be coming to, and it's actually more of a hindrance than a help to my preparations for the WMC next month, because I need to be practicing the long disciplines now, not the quick ones we'll be doing in this championship. But still, I said I'd go along, and it'll hopefully spread the word in a country that's remained bafflingly untouched by the spread of competitive memory in Britain, Germany and Austria. With the greatest of respect to Pierre, it would be nice if more than one French person had ever competed in a memory championship, and from the sound of it we might just double that figure next Saturday.

Still, Gaby and Idriz will be there, which will be fun, and I'm going to spend Friday seeing the sights in Paris, which I've never really done before (I've made two flying visits in the past, but never even been to the Eiffel Tower. I mean, I already know what it looks like, but it seems silly to have never been there in person.)

Sleep!

Right, I'm worn out after another Saturday of moving heavy objects from one place to another. I need a real weekend, the kind where you sit in front of the telly and do nothing, or maybe do some memory training if you're feeling conscientious. I'm going to bed. I'll make up for this skimpy blogging tomorrow.

Moving house again

Well, I know I've spent the last week talking about my new flat, and I'll stop now, but I really do like the place. I've very nearly got everything unpacked and put away, and I could maybe get back to some memory training if not for the fact that Grandma, that big copycat, is moving tomorrow, from an upstairs flat to a downstairs one in the same building, and I'm helping her out. I might become a removal man full-time, it might give me more free time to do other things.

Although writing this just reminds me that I need to email lots and lots of people about memory-related subjects. I'll have to spend the rest of tomorrow doing that, and then, maybe, spend Sunday actually memorising things.

Plant life

Another thing about this new flat is that it came with a couple of plants. There's a plastic flower thing, and a sort of big tall thing with leaves. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm pretty sure it's not plastic and so probably needs some kind of looking after if I don't want it to die. I'm not what you'd call an expert gardener, as you might have guessed from those first few sentences, and watering plants sounds so easy in principle, but gives rise to all sorts of complexities when you come to think about it. Is that too much water? Not enough? Is this one of those plants that dies if you put water on it? Is it likely to bite me if I get too close? Does it need sunlight? Fresh air? Music? Should I just get rid of the thing before I inevitably knock it over and get mud all over the nice new carpet?

Room to spare

There's a room in this flat that is either the guest bedroom or my study - it's got a bed, but now it's also got my desk and all my memorising paraphernalia too. I'll memorise in it when I haven't got someone staying here, and use it to accommodate guests if anyone ever wants to come and visit me. It's also got a little shelf, on which I've dumped a random selection of my books, for the education and enlightenment of my guests - I'll list them some time when I'm less lazy and see what that says about me - and also, serving as bookends, two of my memory trophies, so guests can recoil in amazement at the sight of the ugly great Memory World Cup 2004 (which used to be a silvery colour but has gone a fascinating array of tarnished shades, I can only guess at what the thing is made of), and the 3rd-place-in-the-world-championship trophy 2003, made of good Malaysian pewter and still the same colour it's always been. Although the little bit on top is about to break off if anyone touches it ever again.

This is a great flat, it really is.

Oh this rain it will continue...

Wow, serious downpour outside as I sit down to type this (laptop perched on a box full of comics I haven't put away yet). I'm trying to stretch my inadequate memory and recall whether this summer has been more or less rainy than last summer, but I can't be sure. And since I don't trust weather statistics quoted by any other source, I suppose I'll just have to never know.

Anyway, before it started raining, I was going to observe how cool it is that they're turning on this Large Hadron Collider thing in Geneva tomorrow. I really like the idea of a device costing billions of pounds that smashes things together harder than anything's ever been smashed together before. I especially like the name - I'm a big fan of the recent trend in science to give things simple names like the Very Large Telescope, and I hope to see a lot more similarly-named, vastly expensive and completely unnecessary devices being built in the future. After all, the money would only have gone to waste if they hadn't built these things, and it probably wouldn't have ended up going to the impoverished and needy anyway...

I'm back on the grid!

Woo! Yay! New swanky two-bedroomed, just-down-the-road-from-work, cable-phone-and-broadband-connected flat! If you're ever moving house, I recommend... well, I can't remember what they're called, but they're the first removals firm in the Derby Yellow Pages. And they're cheap, efficient, friendly and didn't lose, destroy or eat any of my posessions. And they were impressed by my trophies, even though the nice-looking ones were packed away in boxes and the only ones they saw were the big ugly metal ones that are awkwardly-shaped and wouldn't fit in anything.

During the excitement of moving, another man on the street recognised me from the telly and said hello. He then turned to his girlfriend and said "He can memorise a whole pack of cards." The girlfriend replied "Yeah, right," in a tone that made it clear she believed he was lying. I'm surprised by this. Is it so completely unbelievable that someone can memorise a pack of cards? Actually, there are quite a lot of people who can do that, you know.

Another suitcase in another hall...

Moving tomorrow, won't be back in internet land until Monday, still got to pack things, can't talk now, see you later, bye.

Gah!

Stupid cheap shoelaces! Bought them last weekend, one's broken already! I'd take them back to the shop if I could remember where I bought them and if they'd cost more than a pound. That does it, I'm going back to my bad habit of not untying my laces, ever, and just treating my shoes like slippers.

Also, I'm sorry if this blog has been unspeakably trivial just lately, but all I've been doing is working and packing. Not that that hasn't been fun - work is still going really well, and I've even been persuaded to use my memory skills for good rather than evil and perform memory tricks to attract people to our department's stand at the Boots Healthcare Conference at the end of the month. So make sure to book your tickets (if you're a Boots healthcare manager and have access to a time machine, since the registration deadline was three days ago). Funnily enough, shortly after agreeing to this, I had an email from a non-work person who wants me to perform memory tricks to attract people to his stand at some kind of computer retail exhibition, a week after the Boots thing. Something about me must just suggest 'corporate memory man'. There might be a career in this, if not for the minor stumbling block that I don't want one.

Boxes upon boxes

In early 1998, I moved from a rented attic room into a tiny little room in a shared house, and my friend Karen helped me move my stuff. She observed "Ben, for someone who's had a short little life like yours, you haven't half accumulated a lot of shit." I miss Karen and her colourful expressions, actually. I must look her up some time.

Anyway, it's ten years later, and I would estimate that I've got about ten times as much junk piled up in cardboard boxes now. Moving house is a terrible inconvenience, especially if you find it impossible to throw anything away, ever. Half the stuff in these boxes is probably just going to be unpacked, put somewhere and never touched again until the next time I move. Maybe I should just dump it all outside the Oxfam shop and make a fresh start? But then what would happen if I find that I really need that half of an issue of Autosport magazine from 1997?

Warning!

I've got a new bike, did I mention that? Yes, I know it's no more than a couple of years since I last got a new bike, but it was falling to bits through lack of care and maintenance, and I felt like splashing out rather than keep fixing the thing. Anyway, it came with a little sticker on it that says "Warning: For safety reason. All bolts must be checked for tightness before every ride. Failure to do so could result in serious and/or/fatal injuries."

I ask you. I could nitpick the unusual punctuation and grammar, or wonder whether it really means to imply that you can have injuries that are fatal but not serious, but I'm more interested in the instruction that I have to test every bolt on the bike, every time I want to ride it anywhere. I mean, I'm all in favour of safety (except for wearing a silly-looking helmet, I'm still not going to do that), but that seems a little excessive. And does this mean that if the bike spontaneously falls apart, I can't sue whoever made it, because I didn't check all the bolts?

I suppose I could lie in court and claim that I had, but they're probably monitoring me with CCTV cameras, just in case. Or I could be honest and say that the sticker fell off, which it quite genuinely did on the way home tonight. I hadn't noticed it until then. I'll keep it and stick it onto something else, just to confuse everyone.

But wait, if I leave Derby...

I won't walk past that chip shop on my way home, the one with a sign saying "You are welcome to breastfeed here" on the door! I won't be able to quip "Well, thanks, but I think I'll stick with the haddock and chips..." and entertain whoever happens to be with me at the time!

And next door to it, I won't be able to giggle at the sandwich board outside the Discount Furniture Warehouse that says "BED'S FROM £79" on one side and "SOFA'S FROM £49" on the other. Some punctuation-conscious employee of the DFW sellotapes little bits of white paper over the unwanted apostrophes, but they keep blowing off or getting rained off and rendering the sign all ungrammatical again. Perhaps I'll buy them a bottle of tippex as a going-away present.

And a bit further down the road, in the somewhat more shabby furniture-and-miscellaneous-junk shop, I won't be able to admire the stuffed fox-with-rabbit-in-mouth tableau and wonder whether I admire the taxidermy skill and want it to decorate my living room or feel repulsed by the whole thing.

Nor will I walk past the most badly-planned traffic lights in the country, with a pedestrian crossing not synchronised with the traffic lights at the roundabout fifty yards away, so if someone presses the crossing button at the wrong time, no cars can get on to the roundabout ever, and the queue stretches back for miles.

Nor the corner of Hartington Street, next to where the Discount Furniture Warehouse people live and park their vans in an impossibly tight space, that serves as one of my memory locations and for some reason has a tree in my mental journey that isn't there in real life.

It's the little things I'll miss.