Hair piece

I need a haircut. My remaining hairs don't grow all that fast, but they've already got to the length where it's starting to look silly, and this weekend's the last chance to get it done for weeks - Cambridge othelloing next weekend and New Yorking the week after. However, I was thinking of going to London tomorrow, and I distrust southern hairdressers. I'm almost certain that they all charge you a hundred pounds and give you a perm whether you want one or not.

I'll just have to find a barber around here that opens reasonably early in the morning, get my hair cut and then get the train down south. I could always not go to London, since my only reason for going is that I quite feel like it and I haven't been there for ages, but I believe in doing what your heart tells you to do, and then rambling on about some insignificant technicality on your blog the night before.

I suppose I could cut my own hair. I did that once, years ago, and nobody noticed. Or shave it all off like a cool person.

Fingerbobs

I've trimmed the fingernails on my left hand and not the right, out of an understanding that that's what ukulele players do. Well, 'trimmed' makes it sound like I've given myself a caring manicure. I bite my nails off, rather than using nail-clippers or scissors or suchlike. Anyway, I'm still having fun with the ukulele, and I wanted appropriate fingernails.

However, it's got me thinking about whether it will get in the way of the other things I do with my fingers. What's the optimum length for othello-disc-flipping fingernails, for example? I flip with my right hand and I think that you need medium-length nails for perfect flippery - no nails at all and it's hard to pick up the disc, big long nails and it's hard to hold on to it. This is probably why very few othello players have long fingernails. That or the fact that 99% of othello players are men.

As for memorising, I think, although I haven't really tested out the theory, that long or short fingernails shouldn't make a difference with the way I look through packs of cards now. Very long nails might get in the way, but I'm not planning to grow them to excessive lengths.

And what if I learn to make Fingermouse-style finger-puppets? That's on my list of things to do, and I think long nails would definitely get in the way there. It's a complicated business, being a polymath. The kind of polymath who's not particularly good at anything, of course.

In other, less finger-related news, Prince Charles is coming to my workplace tomorrow. Just a flying visit - according to his website he's also got other appointments in Nottingham and Mansfield in the course of the day, and I doubt he'll have the time in his schedule to find my desk and tell me he's a big fan of my TV appearances. In fact, he's scheduled to be in my building for ten minutes, according to the announcement on the company intranet, in which time he'll come in the main reception, be shown the 'heritage area' and leave by the exit on the far end of the big head office. He'll have to run. And the tour of the company heritage will have to be limited to one of the less overweight directors gasping "That's a bust of Jesse Boot! Right, come on, let's go!" as they run along after him.

Call me a socialist radical if you like, but I don't really see the point of Royal Visits.

Sluggish brain

I have to confess, it's a very, very long time since I did any serious memory-training. Tonight I did something that is part of my regular practice routine when I'm practicing regularly, but which I don't think I've done at all since the WMC last October - memorised 1500 binary digits in as quick a time as possible. When my brain's up to speed, I can do it in a bit under 8 minutes with a passable level of accuracy in the recall (four or five lines out of the fifty with mistakes, that kind of area). Tonight it took me 10:42.88.

This is horrible, but it's not unexpected. I know I'll snap back into my usual form when I've done it a couple more times, but when I haven't practiced for a while, my thought processes just slow down - it's not that I find it more difficult to remember what the image for 1110010111 is or that I struggle to make a mental picture out of it, it's just that my mind wanders and starts going off on tangents, and I have to drag myself back down to the mental story I'm supposed to be telling. It's nice to be confident that my times are going to increase by leaps and bounds the next few times I try this exercise, but it's frustrating that I'll have to work hard to get back to the level I was at last year before I can keep going and improve my personal best.

But it's nearly the start of the memory season! New York and Cardiff will put me back in the mood, I'm sure, and then I'll be back into training nearly nightly, exchanging memory-technique ideas with other memorisers with much more enthusiasm than I am at the moment, catching up on the latest buzz from the world of competitions, finding out what rule-changes Gunther has been lobbying for all winter and objecting to them, all the joys of memory!

It really is a LOT harder to motivate myself while I'm the world champion, but I'm pleased to report I'm much more in the zone right now, out of practice though I am, than I was back in 2005. Who knows, if I keep it up I might stand half a chance this year...

Correspondence course

I was going to write a blog tonight about feeling proud of myself for getting up-to-date with my emails, but then I remembered one from a few days ago that I hadn't replied to, went back to my inbox to respond to it and found a whole virtual pile of other messages that I need to get back to as well. It's not like I'm even a big email-exchanger, it's just that sometimes I seem to get swamped by the things! So if you're waiting for an email from me still, I assure you it's nothing personal.

New York!

I've got a really quite big apple in my fridge right now, which just serves to remind me how much I'm looking forward to my trip to New York in a couple of weeks. It's ages since I had some time off work - what with starting there in the middle of July I only had 17½ days' holiday, and I used up most of those with various memory championships (and a certain amount of staying at home rather than going to the Memoriad because I was too worn out by the WMC), so I've been working five days a week, every week, for much too long now.

Also, I like long plane journeys every now and then. There's usually cartoons, films and video games, and what more could anyone want? And then there's all the fun people I'm arranging to hang out with when I actually get to the city! Gee, it's gonna be swell!

One of those "sorry, it's late at night and I can't think of anything to blog about" posts

Sorry, it's late at night and I can't think of anything to blog about

This is where I get it from

Grandma, reminiscing about her days working in the payroll department of British Jeffrey Diamond 65 years ago: "Old Sammy Wainwright, 7505 his number was..." Seriously, her recall of every detail of her life is uncanny, and the way she tells it is captivating. I'm going to have to get myself a video camera and capture some of her stories on film.

The occasion for the four-hour non-stop recounting of Grandma's life story I enjoyed today was of course those 1911 census returns featuring her parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. It's great to hear the stories of the people behind that snapshot of households on April 2nd 1911 - how Grandma's Uncle Ronald did well for himself (or at any rate had a good job and bought his own house, which was good work in the Depression), while Uncle Colin spent some time in the nick (but we don't talk about that). Uncle Jack, four years old in 1911, grew up to be quaite refained and wore a bowler hat, but the best part was that mystery 'boarder' I mentioned in my post here.

It turns out that nine-month-old Ethel Gough, living in my great-great-grandparents' household, was the result of an indiscretion between my great-great-granddad and another woman, and ended up coming to live with him rather than her unmarried mother, and having the subject of her parentage resolutely ignored by the family from that moment on. Not that Grandma found out about this until long after the fact, of course - she recalled "I came home one day and told my mam 'Auntie Ethel looks just like me!'... And she hit me."

I can just imagine the difficult decision process of how to record little Ethel's "relationship to head of family" on the census form. The instructions say to 'State whether "Head," or "Wife," "Son," "Daughter," or other Relative, "Visitor," "Boarder," or "Servant."' and they went for "Boarder" in the end.

All shame and scandal in the family is long gone and forgotten now, of course. It's the kind of thing that makes you think - all these names on the census were real people at one point, before they became names on a page and half-remembered stories. Poor great-great-granddad on the Batty branch of the family died in a coal-mine accident only a few years after filling in his census form. There need to be more books, documentaries, websites, whatevers about the ordinary people of history. I should make one...

Mensa - a table; Mensa - O table

The Mensa people want me to do my memory thing at their Annual Gathering in October, as a warmup act for the Brain of Mensa finals. I'm not sure whether or not to take them up on the offer - on the one hand, it's always great when people want me to perform in front of an audience (it still doesn't happen all that much), but on the other hand Mensa members are the worst possible audience for any kind of brain-related showing-off. They'll just respond with "Hmm, well, I could have done that just as well, of course" or "Hmm, well, it's an amusing trick, but it's not real intelligence, is it?"

Having been a member myself for many years, I know what a bunch of snobs Mensans can be. If I really want to stroke my ego, I should go to a stupid-people convention. They'll genuinely believe that I'm really, really clever and not suggest that I might be an entirely average person who can do a party trick with cards. On the other hand, I'll get a free meal out of Mensa and maybe even some intelligent conversation. So I'll probably do it. I'm bad at saying no to people, after all.

Incidentally, I'm seeing a lot of people writing it as "MENSA" just lately. It's not an acronym, people. It's the Latin word for "table", indicating a round-table kind of society, and a play on words with "mens", meaning "mind".

Happy Charles Darwin/Abraham Lincoln day!

It's their joint 200th birthday today, you know. And while some might say Darwin is better than Lincoln because he appears on the £10 note, worth roughly three times as much as Lincoln's puny $5 bill, others might argue that Lincoln is better because he's probably going to be on those unimaginative Americans' money forever, while Darwin's about due to be replaced by some other notable dead person.

Anyway, this gives me an idea. I could secure my legacy as a famous person forever by simply sharing my birthdate with someone more famous! That way, whenever his birthday is celebrated with a BBC2 evening of programmes, there'll always be a passing mention of "funnily enough, world memory champion Ben Pridmore was born on the very same day!" That's the only reason anyone's ever heard of John Major, you know - Eric Idle tribute programmes.

Trouble is, nobody who shares my birthday has yet achieved any real degree of fame. The best that 14/10/76 currently has to offer is Henry Mateo, Dominican minor-league baseball player whose wikipedia article is even more skimpy than mine and can't even decide whether he's a shortstop or a second-baseman. I suppose it's still possible he could become the next Joe DiMaggio, but I think we should pin our hopes on some currently obscure 32-year-old suddenly achieving superstardom. Come on, all you Zoomy-birthday people out there, get famous! And quick!

You might not think of me as a shining example of male health...

... But nonetheless, I've just been interviewed for Men's Health magazine. It'll be on the shelves in April or May if you want to check it out - part of an article about "superhumans". I wish people would stop calling me that. Or, even better, I wish people would find some way to give me superhuman powers (faster than a speeding bullet, that kind of thing) so as to justify the title.

I don't make people smart

I did wonder how they'd adapt my repeated assertions that IQ tests are basically all entirely worthless, that no sensible person cares about them in the slightest, that the only, and very easy, way to improve your score is to practice the handful of very specific kinds of questions they ask, and that memorising cards isn't going to do anything for your intelligence, but it seems they decided to chop it all out. Likewise, my scoffing at the twaddle that Michael's other interviewees came out with. Still, I came across quite well, I thought. Except that people are going to get the impression that I'm one of those people who believe it's important to improve your IQ, which I'd like to take this opportunity to deny absolutely.

Shame they didn't include the moment when I was taken by surprise by Michael's belief that he himself isn't a nerd, because it was very funny, and he does come across in his narration as if he still thinks of himself as a 'normal' person compared to the 'brainy' types he was trying to emulate.

It's another one to add to the list of TV appearances, I suppose, and it's always nice to get a bit of coverage of the world championships, but I'm hoping this one doesn't get repeated as incessantly as Superhuman Genius...

Next week, "Make Me Live Longer"? And judging by the previews on the internet, no Aubrey? What kind of life-extension documentary doesn't feature Aubrey?

I owe you nothing

Ooh-woh, nothing at all. Let me explain. Back in, ooh, June 1996 it must have been, I took out a loan of a few hundred pounds, I forget exactly how much, in order to buy a little motorbike. Impressed by how easy it is to have people give you money in return for a promise to pay it back eventually, I subsequently ended up borrowing more money in order to move into a rented room of my own even though I wasn't earning nearly enough money on my trainee-accountant pittance to afford it. After all, the only other alternative was to keep living with my dad, who also couldn't afford it, and I thought it'd be preferable to bankrupt myself rather than him. And besides, he always refused to put the heating on.

Anyway, I went on living beyond my means for a fair few years, running up further little debts here and there (a succession of little motorbikes that I kept crashing into cars or having stolen, among other things), confident that I'd eventually be rich and successful and anyway it's not real money if it's a loan, even to the extent of giving up my job in November 2002 and deciding to spend some time doing my own thing and seeing just how far my credit cards could take me before I had to go back to the working world again. Surprisingly far, considering by this time I was adding regular memory-competition trips to places like Germany and Malaysia to my expenditure.

And so it came about that in November 2003, having left my six-month temporary accounting job in Skegness, and returned from Kuala Lumpur with a third-place World Memory Championship trophy (rather stylish, made of pewter) and an alarmingly empty bank account, I found a job in Derby and took out one big loan to consolidate all those other debts, finance the relocation and give me a bit of extra spending money to have fun with. £16,000, it came to, which surprised me a little. But hey, over five years it didn't amount to all that much, and I was earning semi-decent money by this point, after all. And at some point in the distant future, it would all be paid off and I'd feel comparatively rich!

And now, woohoo, that day is finally here, and I've just made my 60th monthly payment. I am now, for the first time in living memory, entirely free of debt! No loan, no credit card balances, no nothing! Now I can be scornful of the indebted masses and tell them if they can't handle their finances properly it's their own stupid faults and they shouldn't expect the government to bail them out with us hard-working taxpayers' cash, by cracky. I'll write a letter to the Daily Mail!

No, actually, I'll tell you what'll be even more fun than that - I'll work out what I'm going to do with my extra £350 a month that I'm not giving back to the Royal Bank of Scotland. It's like getting a credit-crunch-busting pay rise!

Sorry, haven't had the time or the non-laziness to sort out pictures of Ham and Ex to illustrate my planned ramblings about them, so they'll have to wait till Wednesday (tomorrow and Tuesday I already know what I'm going to blog about - I sometimes worry that my life is getting planned out too far in advance).

Instead, let's talk about fizzy drinks. I went through quite a long period of drinking water at home, but lately I've got back into the habit of coke as my regular liquid intake. I'm thinking I should probably stop, but on the other hand I don't want to. Could someone please fabricate some scientific research to prove that the stuff is actually good for you?

And no, I'm not going to switch to diet coke. It tastes like wee.

More family ties

A sequel to this post and this one. I realise that census records of my ancestors aren't terribly interesting to anybody outside my immediate family, but as I keep saying, it's my blog, not yours, and I can write about whatever I want. So nyah. And maybe somebody else out there will think it's cool too, who knows? Besides, tonight's subject matter was either this or Ham and Ex, the loveable cartoon puppies from mid-1930s Looney Tunes, so I'm not going for mass appeal here either way.

So, fans of Grandma's star turn on "The Mentalists" can now see the 1911 census returns featuring her parents! My family tree is very lopsided - thanks to the huge generation gaps in the Pridmore family, my great-grandparents on that side were actually a fair few years older than my great-great-grandparents on the Bancroft branch. Here's great-grandma:

Ada Eliza Batty, a 17-year-old worsted spinner from Wakefield. It is cool to see all these distant relatives - if only I had more time on my hands, I'd try to track down the descendants of all those great-great-uncles-and-aunts in my extensive family tree. Of course, this research would be a bit more exciting if there was a single person anywhere in my family history who wasn't from a working-class Yorkshire family, but at least I make everybody else's ancestors look fascinating by comparison...

Anyway, here's great-granddad:



Herbert William Bancroft, 14-year-old apprentice bricklayer. Lots of bricklayers in my family. And hey, check it out, no infant mortality among the Bancrofts! Five children and they're all still alive in 1911! And they've even apparently got a 9-month-old 'boarder', Ethel Gough. I have no idea what that was about - I'll ask Grandma when I go to see her next weekend.

As a footnote, having had a telling-off when I phoned her today, here's a public apology for not calling or visiting Grandma nearly enough, considering I only live just down the road and all. I really am terribly sorry.

Tomorrow, Ham and Ex, the loveable puppies from mid-1930s Looney Tunes.

Weekend!

Snow! Possibly. Maybe I'll make a snowman out front and then throw snowballs at it. Or maybe I'll stay indoors where it's warm and watch the telly. Or play the ukulele. We'll see how the mood takes me.

Wiki wiki woo

I disapprove of Wikipedia. It's almost certainly a bad thing that a website so full of wild inaccuracies and outright lies should be the first port of call for anybody conducting research into anything. On a related note, I believe that editing one's own Wikipedia page is just about the worst thing anybody can do, ethically speaking. You have to be a terrible swollen-headed oaf to care what is written about you on a website like that.

Which brings me to the point of this blog. See, if somebody doesn't edit my Wikipedia page very soon indeed, I'm going to have to do it myself, and then I'll be consumed with shame and self-loathing. I also disapprove of asking people to edit my page, of course, so I'm not doing that tonight. I just want to say that it would be cool if someone made sure the world records list was up to date, complete and didn't include things that aren't world records held by me. It'd be great if somebody wrote a bit more in the body of the article about the TV shows I've been on, like the time I made a complete fool of myself on Blue Peter or the thing with the chimp. It would be extremely groovy if somebody realised that I didn't 'recently' quit my job (two and a half years out of date with that bit now), and that I was never working on a novel unless you count the NaNoWriMo. Similarly, if only somebody would remove the description of me as 'a writer' unless and until I actually write something, ever.

And wouldn't it be fantastic if somebody slipped in a 'fact' that's completely untrue, like for example that I won the hammer throw at the North Berwick Highland Games in 2003, and threw in a link to a website that looks at first glance that it might be corroborating evidence for that claim, just to see if it slips past the Wiki editors? I tell you, I'm just itching to do that myself, but I worry about the morality of the whole thing...

One point twenty-one gigawatts!

Well, you can't see that Back To The Future is on Sky and not watch it, can you? Even though it's getting alarmingly close to the point where I could travel thirty years back in time and hang out with my teenage self, which makes me worry that I'm never going to be the star of a teen movie. Heck, I'm even older than Michael J Fox was when he last played 17-year-old Marty!

Also, I really suck at doing things, just lately. Will someone please come round here and bully me into organising all the various events/get-togethers I'm supposed to be organising?

Another one to set the video for

Tuesday, 10th February, 10:35pm, BBC1 - "Make Me... Smart". Featuring that loveable World Memory Champion, whatsisname.

I can't promise it's any good, I haven't seen it yet, but hey, it's got me in it.

Also, apparently, this is the UK version, trimmed down to fit BBC1's timeslot (not a great timeslot, incidentally - don't they know I'm a major superstar who should be broadcast in primetime? Between EastEnders and Holby City, say?). There's also a longer, 'international' version that will be making its way around the world via BBC Worldwide, so truly devoted Pridmore-philes will have to track down both of them to add to the constantly-looped video playing on all four wall-sized screens in their Ben-Shrine.

Cycling in a winter wonderland

It's really great when it snows all day long like this! Even though this part of the country always gets much less snow than all the rest, it works out quite well today, because we got a reasonable amount, whereas the rest got too much. Even cycling to work through a snowstorm is quite fun, every once in a while. It's invigorating!

How do you do, do you do, the thing that you do?

Ace wondered, via a blog-comment, what exactly an accountant does. I must say, I'm a bit in the dark too. Of course, I do have that self-imposed ban on talking about my work on this blog (and I only violate it once a week or so at the most), but I'm not actually working as an accountant right now, I'm an analyst, which is an entirely different kettle of fish, so I'm quite at liberty to talk about it.

I do, however, firmly believe that accountants are unnecessary in this world. Their very existence rather clashes with my socialist principles. You might wonder why I choose to do it for a living, but basically, it's because I'm good at it and people give me money to do it, and my socialist principles aren't really what you'd call a deeply held belief system. I'm still a working class hero, though - look, I've got a blister on my thumb and everything.

I would like to come up with a snappy definition of accountants, such as Ambrose Bierce or Samuel Johnson might have come up with, along the lines of 'someone who tells a company how much money they have and then takes every penny in fees', or 'one whose entire working life is devoted to bending the facts in order to justify his employment' but I can't think of a good one.