And a happy new year

I feel a bit embarrassed about staying at home tonight and not celebrating the new year in some kind of alcoholic way, with people around. Not that I normally go to a wild party on December 31st, but now that I'm writing about my everyday life on a daily basis, I feel like I'm under some kind of obligation to do interesting things every now and then, and I've probably not lived up to that standard just lately.

Also, because I spent the day before my birthday two and a half months ago looking back on the past year and wondering what the future will hold, I can't really do what everyone else is doing right now in their blogs. I'm just going to go and memorise some packs of cards and then watch the football. And I wonder why nobody reads this thing! Ah well, I hope anybody who does end up reading this has an absolutely wonderful 2006. Peace on earth and goodwill to all!

Goody Goody Yum Yum

I know I normally try to avoid writing about whatever's on telly at any given moment (otherwise it's too easy to use it as an excuse to run out of imagination and not think about what to put in this thing), but I'm watching something at the moment that makes me think "My god, this is awful!"

It should be good, too - it's a 90-minute special about the Goodies, the long-running, popular and very funny TV show from the seventies. They produced somewhere in the region of 40 hours of material over the course of the series, so there should be just about enough reasonably entertaining stuff to fill this special by itself. What they've done instead, though, is show a barrage of two-second clips that would have been funny if they were shown in the context of the 30 seconds either side of them, mingled with new footage of the Goodies themselves reminiscing in painfully unfunny style (worse even than the Two Ronnies in their recent series) and the usual list of celebrities all saying in identical words that they liked watching the Goodies when they were younger.

There isn't even enough of THAT to fill an hour and a half, so they've resorted to showing everything twice, padding out the show with "Later on, Rolf Harris will be saying this about the time the Goodies mentioned him on their show..."

Just repeat the flaming episodes, for crying out loud! It wasn't the highlight of British comedy history that everyone seems to be saying it was, but it was still usually funny enough to be worth watching, and every now and then it was hilarious. This, on the other hand, is rotten. I wonder if they're doing it on purpose, in line with the usual BBC policy of not repeating Goodies episodes? They're trying to convince people it wasn't worth watching in the first place.

Honestly, I'd stop watching it if only I could be bothered to get up and change the channel. I need to get over this laziness thing. I'm not planning anything for the new year, I'll do a whole load of memory training over the long weekend. Then, I suppose, I've got to go back to work. Ah well, could be worse.

As Time Goes By

It really bugs me how quickly this year seems to have gone. I'm going to have to go to great lengths to make 2006 really drag. I should make the year as boring and uninspiring as possible, to make sure it feels like it goes on forever. I feel inspired to make resolutions, but I've already done that a couple of months ago on my birthday, so I won't. If I achieve too much next year, it won't leave anything for the rest of the world to accomplish.

I've just come 6th out of 23 in an othello tournament on Kurnik, mainly because of two walkovers against absent opponents, but it's still good. It drags my tournament rating up above 1200, which is cool, but not quite cool enough to get into the 1250+ tournaments they have from time to time. More hard work or sabotaging people's internet connections at crucial moments, whichever is most convenient, I think.

Meanwhile, I need to arrange a holiday - the US Memory Championship is on Saturday March 11th, and I've just about definitely decided to go there, just for a bit of competition practice. It's only a little competition, just five short disciplines, and I wouldn't be allowed to win it, because it's meant to be for US citizens only, they just let foreigners take part occasionally without their scores being counted. But it'd be nice to see New York properly. I've only ever had one flying visit, on my way by train from Boston to Washington back in 2000, and I don't think an hour and a half is enough time to do the city full justice.

Oh, and as a footnote to last night's entry, Everton lost 3-1, and West Brom beat Spurs. Hooray!

Schadenfreude

The midweek football matches that haven't been called off because of the weather are kicking off round about now. I hope Boston's match was postponed in good time before the poor Carlisle players had to trek all the way down there - we've had a history of waiting till the last minute to call a game off in the past.

Anyway, at the moment I'm not as enthralled by Boston's hypothetical chance of making the playoffs as I am by the significantly more possible chance of Everton getting relegated. I do feel a bit guilty about hoping a team will fail so spectacularly, though. Admittedly it's normal to hope that one particular team will win any given game (very few people go to a football game hoping for a draw), and this does naturally extend to hoping that the other team will lose, but there seems something rather more malicious about desiring Everton to lose a sufficient number of games that they end up somewhere in the bottom three places of the league table at the end of the season.

On the other hand, three teams do have to finish in those positions every year, and thus drop down to the level below for the next year, and I think it's very much in the spirit of cheering for the underdog if I hope that the lesser teams manage to avoid the drop at the expense of Everton, a normally very successful team currently in their 52nd consecutive year in the top flight. So it's entirely reasonable of me to be wishing for them to follow up their two consecutive 4-0 thrashings with another heavy loss to Liverpool tonight.

They're currently 16th out of 20, coming up to the half-way point of the season, and with Sunderland dead last by a mile and seeming to have no hope at all of survival, and Birmingham also struggling so much that you wouldn't want to bet against them being relegated, we need Portsmouth and West Brom to rally sufficiently to drop Everton down to 18th. It could happen tonight, if they both win (unlikely, since they've both got difficult games), and it would certainly cheer me up unreasonably if it did. Of course, Everton's game on Saturday is against Sunderland, who ANYONE can beat, so they'd have to be even more terrible than they currently are to stay in the bottom three into the new year. Fingers crossed, though.

I've had a very lazy day today. Did a very little bit of memory training this morning, but not the several hours I was planning to put in while I'm off work with nothing better to do. I keep finding good reasons not to - along the lines of "Hey, Virgin Radio are playing their top 500 songs all this week, I'll have to listen to that..."

I think part of it is dietary. I'm no expert on what you should and shouldn't eat, but I'm pretty sure that stuffing yourself all day with leftover Christmas chocolate, biscuits and cake (home made cake, and delicious it is too) isn't good for you. Likewise, having no exercise whatsoever for the last week or so possibly contributes to my general lethargy. Never mind, I'll snap out of it tomorrow, do lots of healthy things, eat vegetables, run a marathon or two, that kind of thing. Or I might do the same again and sit around all day reading and listening to the radio. It's the holidays!

It's the longest possible time till more Christmas

But apart from that, everything is good in the world of Zoomy. I hope all my loyal readers had a great festive season too! Apologies for not posting here over the last few days, but as I mentioned, my brother was round, and although I've officially told him I've got a blog now, I think there's a fundamental difference between writing an online diary in the full knowledge that someone will read it, and writing an online diary while there's someone in the room with you who could look over your shoulder. But maybe I'm just weird.

Lots of snow today, on and off. There's quite a carpet of it out there now. Hopefully it'll carry on for the next week, making everything look shiny and pretty, and then go away before I have to go back to work next Tuesday. Hearing a lot of birds chirping outside this morning, I decided to put some food out for them, but after the Christmas gorging of the last few days, didn't have anything left in my food cupboard except some boil-in-the-bag rice. So I put an uncooked bagful out on the windowsill, then an hour or so later started worrying that if birds ate it, it would expand in their stomachs and kill them. Thinking that it was probably better to kill birds by neglect than by actively giving them lethal food, I took the rice back in and resolved to give them some bread when I get round to buying some tomorrow.

I have no idea whether these concerns of mine have any kind of medical validity. I'd look it up somewhere, but I can't be bothered. This also makes me feel guilty, but I suppose that's what the Christmas season is all about.

Target: 2006

I can't believe it's 2006 in a week and a bit. This year is to a lot of British people more or less my age even more significant than when 2000 came along with its unprecedented amount of noughts. Because next year will be the year that a whole generation look at the calendar and think "it surely can't really be 2006? That's the future! The distant future, with Galvatron and Unicron and Death's Head and all those lads!"

For the benefit of those readers who are too young or too foreign or had too deprived childhoods to know what I'm talking about, I should point you in the direction of Transformers: The Movie. The normal Transformers cartoon was set in the present day, you see, but for the big feature-length special cinema version, they did a story set twenty years in the future, with lots of new giant transforming robots, lots of the ones we knew and loved being killed (and only partly in order to force children to buy the new toys - there was genuine drama there too) and a really great soundtrack. Americans will tell you that the movie was set in 2005, so I should have been saying all this last year, but in the eighties there was a real time-lag for things like that to cross the Atlantic, and by the time we got the movie over here, it was 1986.

Also, Americans wouldn't understand about the British Transformers comic. In the USA, the cartoon series was super-cool, and the comic book was okay. Over here, the cartoon suffered from being chopped into five-minute instalments and shown on the otherwise unexciting Wide-Awake Club show on Saturday mornings. But the comic was something else.

Transformers were really, really, REALLY, popular, you see. People tend to forget that now, but EVERY child loved Transformers. So naturally, everyone wanted to read a Transformers comic. This left the publishers, Marvel UK, with a problem. They normally just reprinted American Marvel comics, and while there was an American Transformers comic, it was monthly, like comics all are over there. British kids couldn't be kept waiting a month for each issue, we were used to weekly comics. At first, Marvel UK compromised, and produced a fortnightly British comic, each issue containing half an American issue with some of the usual British filler (letters pages, reprints of three or four other American comics with vaguely robot themes, dull text pages about robots in the real world, one-page or half-page comic strips in the more traditional British style, competitions, fact files, readers' drawings, all that crap). That way as few as six pages of Transformers could still fill a whole comic. And kids would have bought (and indeed did buy) any old rubbish with that shiny logo on it.

But then the American comic stopped publishing for a couple of months after the first four issues. In desperation, Marvel UK decided to create their own Transformers material - it was that or put out a Transformers comic with no actual Transformers comic strip. And one of the writers they called on was a guy called Simon Furman. Furman's stuff was GOOD. Much better, in fact, than the 'real' American comic ever was. Rather than losing interest, the British comic-buying hordes got more into Transformers than ever. The British comic went weekly, dropped most of the backup strips and alternated between American issues chopped in half to spread over two weeks, and Simon Furman originals brilliantly fitting in between American stories so well that you couldn't see the join.

Which brings us to 1986. The American comic, for some mad reason, hadn't done anything to cash in on the movie's success, so Furman was told to come up with something. He came up with an epic called Target:2006, in which the characters from the movie travelled back in time and messed with the present-day characters. It was a masterpiece, and the talk of the playground every week (I was nine years old at the time). It led to a lot more stories set twenty years in the future (a lot easier than slotting them in between the American issues, which continued to drag down the quality of the UK comic every now and then), and fixed the year 2006 in the minds of British youngsters as 'the future'.

I just never thought it would actually happen. I could just about see the year 2000 coming to pass, I'd worked out how old I would be with an amazing BBC computer program that only took two or three days to type in out of a book, but I never considered that one day it would actually be 2006. I'm going to have to get hold of a time machine next year and go back to 1986 (for some reason you could only ever travel back in time exactly twenty years - apart from that time something went wrong with Unicron's time portal, but that's another story). I still just can't believe that it's going to be the future next year. My mind can't get to grips with the idea.

No more teachers' dirty looks

Hooray for the holidays! Now all I have to do is buy cards and presents for everyone...

But enough about Christmas. On the yahoo memory group, there's some discussion about 'the Ben system', that technique for memorising numbers and playing cards that I dreamed up a couple of years ago. You might have noticed the name attached to it - it's a little-known fact that I was the one who thought it up, and played a large part in popularising it, because I did it in a very subtle kind of way. I've spent a lot of time in the past explaining at length that it's only a modification of the Major system, rather than a real system in its own right, and that in any case 'the Ben system' is a silly name and I wish people wouldn't use it. I tend to emphasise this so loudly and frequently that nobody could be left in any doubt that 'the Ben system' is the accepted name for it, even if they didn't know that beforehand.

I've got a bit of a reputation in memory circles for modesty, which I've acquired essentially by going around saying "I'm modest! Look at how modest I am!" Frankly, it's kind of surprising that it's worked as well as it has. There are very few things in the world I like more than having someone say I'm great, and any time I say otherwise it's only because I know it will prompt even more adulation and praise. Does this make me a terrible person? And should I care if it does?

Also, should I make a Christmas cake? I've got half the ingredients sitting aroundthe place. Or I could try my hand at a home-made Christmas pudding, so that I could get one without nuts in for a change. Nasty things. Or on the other hand, I could just do that extensive Christmas shopping like I really need to, and stop coming up with more exciting things to do. Why is it so difficult to find appropriate presents for relatives? Even cards are difficult - I have to find one that matches the person it's being sent to, because there's nothing worse than getting a generic Christmas card with a robin on it.

I had to check the cards I've received so far then, just to make sure there aren't any robins. I'd hate to seem ungrateful to the people who went out of their way to buy me a card. But it's okay, they're all good ones. Ah, the joy of receiving.

Ooh, I could crush a grape!

Aargh! I just typed a long blog entry on my shiny new laptop and accidentally deleted it! Well, I'm not typing it again, I was already getting fed up with this keyboard. In fact, the last line was a decision to stick with the old computer for everyday computering, and just use this thing for CDs, DVDs (when I get round to buying some) and when I'm on the move, like the young go-getter I am.

The rest of the post revolved around saying that while I'm starting to like the new job, and could quite happily stay working there, I don't want to either commute or move to Burton, which seems like an insurmountable problem. None of the solutions I came up with are very practical, although becoming rich and famous and never having to leave this comfortable little rut of mine is always an option. Anyway, I'll go into more detail another time, I'm annoyed with this machine now.

All work and no play

...is not good for zoomies. But that's the last late night I'll have to work for a while, and it's nearly Christmas, and the weather's quite nice at the moment. Possibly I'll have something to talk about tomorrow, who knows?

What a way to make a living

Working nine to eight is no fun at all, even if it is in return for getting the day off on Friday. Which I'm sure a lot of companies would give you anyway, what with it being the 23rd. Still, everything has its good side, and in this case it's that coming home late tonight, I saw a fox crossing the road and skulking into the yard two doors down. This is very cool, because I've never seen a fox around these parts before. I'll have to keep an eye out for him in future.

Still, all this work gets in the way of the other stuff I like to do of an evening. Christmas really gets in the way of memory training, and I was on such a roll with that too. Bah humbug.

Santa came a week early

I've got a new toy! A shiny new laptop, and it's great! I even treated myself to a new scanner/printer/copier thing, seeing as I haven't had a working scanner since I trod on my old one about six months ago. Spending money on myself is fun. I don't seem to have done it for ages. The new laptop is so cool, in fact, that I'm almost considering getting rid of my trusty desktop (which I'm typing this on right now), the only computer I've ever owned. I've had it since June 1999, which makes it really quite elderly by computer standards, and it's fair to say it's not as quick or properly-working as it was. But apart from the sentimental attachment, I'd have to work out how to transfer all the junk on it over to the laptop, which sounds like more work than I'm normally prepared to put into anything.

I still haven't actually bought presents for anyone who isn't me, but never mind. It's late-night shopping all this week, so although I've got to work late tomorrow and Tuesday, I'll still have plenty of time to buy cards and get them in the post at the last minute, maybe buy a few presents on Amazon, seeing as they emailed me to say the 20th is the last day to order things for Christmas delivery, buy a turkey and whatever else people are supposed to eat at Christmas, get some decorations, a tree or two and some kind of dancing reindeer or the like, clean my flat up a bit and get ready to celebrate the birth of our saviour in the appropriate style.

I need fairy lights. I've never had fairy lights before.

Bright Light City

I went to London today to do a bit of Christmas shopping. As it turned out, I didn't do any at all, and just bought things for myself, but that's what I always do on the first shopping trip I make. I never seem to see anything that looks like a suitable gift until the very last minute. I've left it too late to post presents to people now, anyway, because I've got to be in the office Monday to Thursday next week and I won't get a chance to go to the post office.

I nearly spent £120 on a present for my brother - a Japanese boxed set of Predacons from that cool little comic shop on Tottenham Court Road - but decided against it in the end. We don't generally go above a fiver on our presents to each other, the rule is quality and entertainment value rather than material worth, and while that doesn't necessarily preclude buying something that's both cool and expensive, I don't really like to. It might look like I'm saying "Ha ha, I've got more money than you!"

So I need another shopping trip tomorrow to actually buy cards and presents, and maybe that laptop computer for myself that I've been meaning to buy for ages. I bought some CDs today, including a big Christmas compilation that my brother and I are going to spend the whole of Christmas listening to whether we like it or not (I insist, it's not Christmas without Christmas songs), and the CD player on my current computer is increasingly senile and non-working. I'll need a laptop for organising that memory competition anyway, so it's a worthwhile expenditure. I'll do something big and charitable to make up for it.

I need to buy decorations and food for the aforementioned festive fraternal visit - this'll be the first time I've entertained someone at Christmas time, and I'm determined to make a proper turkey dinner, and Christmas pudding and everything. I don't know how it's come round so quickly this year, it still feels like November to me.

But it makes me look like a geek!

I've got one of those luminous reflective jackets (with Parkhouse Recruitment written on it in big letters - I don't pay for my clothes, as a rule) that is very useful for stopping lorries from running me over when I'm cycling home from work in the dark. Or it would be, if I wore the thing. You see, that kind of thing is just so uncool. It screams 'trainspotter' to anyone who sees me wearing it. And because I'm so worried about total strangers' opinions of my sartorial elegance, I'm very reluctant to wear this potentially life-saving item.

"But Zoomy," I hear you say, "you look so cool that no amount of reflective safety gear could harm your image!"

Or, if you're more honest, "But Zoomy, nobody gives a monkeys what you wear anyway, least of all people who catch a fleeting glimpse of you from the pavement as you cycle past. And even if they did, they'd laugh at your normal clothes anyway, so you really don't need to worry."

So okay, I'll wear the nerdy thing. But I'm not wearing a helmet.

Perchance

I don't know why, but I've had really epic dreams for the last couple of nights. Or maybe it's just that I've remembered them better than I usually do, by virtue of waking up half an hour or so before I need to get out of bed and thus having ample time to analyse my subconscious meanderings. But each of them came in three distinct interlinked sections, with a whole host of characters, strange locations and goings-on. This morning I even woke up with a catchy original tune running around my head, but I've forgotten it now, annoyingly enough. I do have another dream-composition from a few months ago that's going to be a hit single some day, or at least a popular jingle for a bacon advert (the lyrics involve getting out of bed and having a bacon sandwich, which was obviously something on my mind at the time).

A guy on an internet message board for idiots who want people to think they're clever (one of my favourites, naturally, although I don't post there much any more) is fond of saying that you only dream if you have unresolved thoughts in your mind when you go to sleep. So, he says, a practicioner of yoga (or whatever he does) doesn't need to dream and is therefore an altogether better person. Being too polite to say so to his face, I'll say here behind his back that this is the most ridiculously, colossally STUPID thing I have ever heard. Why on earth would you want to not have dreams? Letting your subconscious play around and entertain you is something that you should try to do as much as possible! In fact, what the world needs is a way to make people dream much more than they do at the moment. That would make the world a better place.

Last night's dream actually posed me a moral dilemma that I was ruminating about at work today. Going into detail would be long, complicated and incomprehensible, but the basic idea in this dream was that a friend of mine was unhappy, and I came up with a solution that basically involved taking her mind off things for an evening, rather than doing anything about the long-term cause. Indeed, when presented with an opportunity to ask for help from someone who might have been able to do more (but might have made things worse), I deliberately didn't. This, it seems to me, is typical of the way I always go about things. I do go out of my way to make other people happy, but only in the immediate kind of way you can do with a hug or a kind gesture. I generally avoid doing anything to help people deal with serious problems of their own. If someone's upset, my usual solution is to do something silly and keep everyone entertained, leaving someone else to do the comforting. Perhaps I should make more of an effort to do some good in the world. Or possibly I should stop overthinking everything and just carry on the way I am.

See what I mean about Christmas time? I'm getting all introspective and serious. It won't last. Anyway, if anybody was wondering how the new job's coming along, it's not too bad. I don't entirely know what I'm doing, but everyone else there is to a greater or lesser degree in the same situation, so it could be a lot worse. Still don't know if I'll stay there in the long term, but I'll cross that bridge when I either get fired or find out that I've been there for forty years and I'm retiring next week.

Fantastic and Terrific

By way of a belated birthday present, my brother found me a fantastic old comic, in more ways than one. It's issue 78 of Fantastic, the magazine of choice in the late sixties for British children who wanted to read American superhero comics but couldn't get hold of the originals. Or at least I assume it was - I've never heard of it before.

Actually, the title at this point in the comic's history was "Fantastic and Terrific", with the "and Terrific" in very small letters. This used to be a common sight on British comics - an unsuccessful one would be swallowed up by a more popular title, and the names would both be featured prominently on the covers for a while, so as to make sure not to lose the few readers who only liked the failing comic, before the second name, like Terrific, was quietly dropped. The cover also features the logo "A Power Comic", with a picture of a fist just to emphasise how powerful it is, the date (10 August 1968) and a little copyright notice for Odhams Press Ltd.

It was on sale every Monday for 9d - Australia 10c, South Africa 10c, East Africa 1.25, New Zealand 1/- (10c), Rhodesia 1/3, West Africa 1/-. So it's educational too - NZ was obviously in the process of decimalisation at the time, and a shilling went further in West Africa than it did in Rhodesia. The rather uninspired cover illustration is a close-up of the superhero Goliath's head, and a photo of the Fantastic Book of Soccer Stars that could be found inside.

The front and back covers are the only splash of colour in the comic - the British standard at the time was anthology magazines, in black and white, with five or six stories of five or six pages maximum each, with the obligatory crossword puzzles, letters pages, competitions and fun facts to pad out the stuff that people actually wanted to read. So ignoring the fact that the American material being repeated was designed to be read in full colour, in 20-page bursts every month, Fantastic strictly follows the British format. We get a luxurious nine pages of Avengers, Goliath and his friends battling the evil alien Ixar, five pages of Dr Strange in the middle of a longer magical fight scene with Yandroth, five pages of the X-Men thwarting the plans of the Mutant-Master and Factor Three, six pages of Thor exploring Ego the Living Planet, including a glorious double-page spread that must have looked so much better in colour, and eight pages of the Hulk fighting the Sub-Mariner. Plus a full-colour back-page pin-up of Unus the Untouchable, a crossword that you need to know the name of the Beast's girlfriend to solve, a "Spot the Boob" competition which isn't nearly as fun as it sounds (it's a spot-the-deliberate-mistake thing), letters and editorials. All for ninepence!

There's three-quarters of a page of adverts in the entire comic - two little ads for stamp collectors' outfits, and an encouragement to buy Tonibell Miniballs - the ball with the ice cream inside - in order to enter a competition and win £50 of vouchers to spend in London's biggest toy shop. Oh, and rather incongrously in amongst all the superheroes, there's the first of five pull-out profiles of famous footballers, that you can put together to make a little book, just in time for the 1968/69 season. This week it's Bobby Moore (who gets the front page, of course), Billy Bremner, Billy McNeill and Jeff Astle. Bremner's Leeds went on to win the league that year, if anyone's interested, so the Fantastic editors Bart and Alf (whose names replaced Stan Lee's in rewritten footnotes to the superhero comics) obviously knew how to pick the winners.

They really don't make them like that any more.

Seasons in the sun

It occurred to me today that the next few months are going to be comparatively dull reading if you're mainly interested in this blog for the memory or othello talk. Memory competitions are traditionally all crammed into July and August, although there'll be anything up to two of them in March next year, which would be good. And even othello has now stopped until the end of February.

I've sort-of volunteered to organise one of the regional othello tournaments here in Derby next year. I never wanted to do one in Boston, because the place is so impossible to get to by public transport that it would just be inconvenient for everyone, but I've got no such excuse in Derby, so it's about time I did. If I put the tournament on in April, it'll be good practice for the memory competition I'm planning to hold in May - another thing I've been promising to do for years but haven't got round to it.

The othello will be a lot easier than the memory - that'll involve lots of advance preparation and (unless it's unlike every other memory competition ever held) a lot of unexpected problems causing it to run wildly behind schedule until we get pestered by caretakers trying to throw us out of the building. Which comes in handy when you need extra arbiters for the speed cards.

How To Be Friendly

I was wondering today why I don't like a particular person more than I do, when we've got such a lot in common and like most of the same things, and that led me to speculate about what qualities my favourite people have that makes them my friends. I decided in the end that it's not shared interests, so much - most of my friends aren't particularly interested in memory, or cartoons, or board games, or things like that. Likewise, more often than not I don't share their own favourite things and activities either.

I think it's more a shared mindset, or similar sense of humour - the people I like the most are the ones who I can have a really strange conversation with, both of us reacting to and building on the other's comments until the whole discussion is a lot more fun than either of us could hope to produce with anyone else. I also concluded that a special friend needs to be the kind of person who doesn't run away screaming when I mention that I'm in love with Piper O'Possum from Nick Jr.

I seem to have been doing a lot of thinking today. I've also been considering this book I keep talking about writing, and whether I'm going about it the wrong way. What I should maybe have done is taken a month or two off work with my redundancy money and devoted myself to it with some kind of seriousness. What I should also maybe have done is gone about approaching publishers and people like that first, rather than waiting until I've written the thing.

I know I had perfectly good reasons for not doing that - I didn't want to agree to write the book before I'd done it, because that would turn it from a hobby into a job, and thus make it a lot less fun. Also, there was that time a couple of years ago when I was asked to write a book, agreed to do it and then changed my mind and had to tell the company in question that I had (which is the kind of thing I really don't like doing). But now I'm starting to think that exploring the possibility of getting the thing published might be fun in itself, and might also inspire me to get writing.

Incidentally, more than one person has told me exactly that in the past, and I've replied that no, my brain doesn't work that way, so it wouldn't work. So I'm not claiming any originality in this idea, and I give full credit to everyone who's given me such good advice. But that's my plan for the moment - as soon as I get round to it, I'll look into people who publish how-to-be-clever kind of books and see about sending them a synopsis and sample chapters.

log, on, secure, online, free

That's the title of the HSBC personal internet banking web page. Log, on, secure, online, free. It's said that for at least a couple of years, too. It's the kind of thing that makes you think you're logging on to an amateurish phishing attempt instead of an official website of a really big company.

I know that talking about other things I've seen on the internet is meant to be the kind of thing I don't do, but it was that or write a long essay about the things I've removed from and added to my Favourites list today, and I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be anything more boring than that. Except maybe the BBC Sports Review of the Year, which I've just turned off. I don't know why I always start to watch the thing every year, it's never remotely interesting. I might tune in again later to see who wins the award, but it's a foregone conclusion this time round anyway, so I might not.

So, fourteen more sleeps till Santa. Christmas seems to have come round unreasonably quickly this year. I still don't properly feel like the festive season has really started. Which is probably a good thing, because I usually get terminally depressed at this time of year, and I'm only just easing into that mental state now. Still, just two more weeks and it'll all be over, so if you see me in the meantime and I'm manically cheerful or sulky and uncommunicative, bear with me. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible after Boxing Day.

Freedom!

Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's how I feel. The office in Burton is finally more or less ready, so I don't have to work in Cheadle any more! Except on Monday when I have to have a final bit of training up there, but that's just a day trip. No more hotels! No more free swimming pool that I could never drag myself out of bed to use! No more meals cooked for me and paid for by my company every morning and evening! No more quality time away from cartoons and the internet to concentrate on winning the world memory championship!

Okay, it hasn't been all bad, but I'm still glad to be back home for good, hopefully. Of course, the others might still go into Burton on Monday and find that the building's completely unusable, but that's a little unlikely. I'll celebrate being able to post something on this blog every day by not posting anything tomorrow - my brother's coming round for the weekend, so I probably won't get a chance. But after that, I'll return to the daily dose of dementia, rather than doing anything productive.

Incidentally, I was a little disturbed to find out last night that the financial controller not only knows about my memory competitions, but knows enough about it to be aware that names and faces are my weakest event. If the boss is going to be checking up on me so thoroughly, he might find this blog, which presents a dilemma. Should I only say nice things about the job, just in case, or should I stick with the honest approach and say what I think? Not that I've got anything bad to say at the moment, but suppose I have in future? Censorship is bad, but then again as Thumper's mother's always telling me, if you can't say anything nice it's better not to say anything at all. Also last night, I sang 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love' at a karaoke place, to the admiration of my colleagues. Admiration is good, being filmed by mobile phones doing it isn't. Horrible inventions. And I was trying to get a good reputation at the new place too, as a hard-working, serious, kind of guy. Ah well.

On the subject of work, I have rather rashly promised to take my final CIMA exams in June, or May, or whenever it is. This will involve a heck of a lot of studying (I haven't taken an accountancy exam since 2002, so I've forgotten all the stupid technical stuff that nobody knows in real life but you have to memorise to pass exams). What bothers me the most is that this will really get in the way of my memory training - I didn't start serious training until early 2003, so I've never had to combine the two before. Of course, if I just wrote a best-selling book, or taught courses to stupid businessmen, I wouldn't have to have a day job at all, so I've only got myself to blame. I'm sure I'll manage to juggle the two somehow.

I need a trip to London some time soon. Christmas shopping needs doing and (more importantly) I need to buy a whole pile of comics, too, I've got out of touch with some of my favourites just lately with one thing and another. And I really do need some new work shoes. To be honest, I needed some six months ago, but it's now got to the point where the left one is actively disintegrating as I walk around. Another week or two and there won't be any sole left - which will be fine as long as I'm careful not to be seen walking around the office, and avoid puddles when I'm outside, but it's probably time I got a new pair.

Great Googly-Moogly

Of course, the problem with spending a weekend doing absolutely nothing is that you don't have much of interest to put in your blog on the Sunday night. So for want of anything better to do, I'll enthuse about one of my favourite cartoons. Ntl's revolving sample channels (a great idea for encouraging people to pay for more expensive packages) has brought me Nick Jr again this month, so I get to watch Maggie and the Ferocious Beast. Yay!

The show is about a girl called Maggie, who has created an imaginary world called Nowhere Land, populated by an assortment of toys, birds, monsters, jelly beans and the like, foremost among them being the Ferocious Beast (a big, friendly, slightly dimwitted orange thing with red polka-dots) and a slightly neurotic pig called Hamilton. Yes, there are three equally important central characters and only two of them get a name-check in the series title. Poor Hamilton. The fact that the setting and everyone in it are figments of Maggie's imagination doesn't generally come up in the stories at all - they're light, uncomplicated, surprisingly philosophical adventures, occasionally with a moral but more often completely pointless (in a good way). We never see the real world, although Maggie goes back there at the end of the day.

It's the kind of show in which the best episodes are the ones where nothing happens at all. There are some fantastically off-beat episodes - "Morning in Nowhere Land" has no dialogue at all, and just shows the Beast and Hamilton waking up and going through their morning routine to the accompaniment of orchestral music until Maggie shows up and they start the day's adventure. "Where's Maggie" features Hamilton and the Beast sitting on a hill wondering why Maggie's so late coming back from her holiday, and worrying that she might not come back at all.

There are some great supporting characters too - Rudy the mouse is notable for the fact that his hat and boots don't come off. Everybody treats this as a perfectly normal thing, except the Beast, who keeps bringing it up in conversation in the hope that someone will explain it to him. Nedley the rabbit is entirely amoral, and just unable to see the point of doing anything that doesn't benefit him directly. In one episode he borrows Hamilton's jumper and then just refuses to return it because he likes it so much. Rather than ordering him to give it back, because that kind of thing just isn't done in Nowhere Land, the plan Maggie comes up with is to go to the beach, where he'll get so hot that he'll have to take it off.

You have to watch it to appreciate it, plot summaries don't do the series justice. "The Push-Me Popper" (in which Hamilton gets a new toy and won't let the Beast play with it because he'll break it, so the Beast takes it anyway and does break it) doesn't sound at all different from a million other cartoons, but there's something about the characters and the writing that makes it hilarious. I was laughing out loud when I watched it for the first time.

Anyway, back to Cheadle tomorrow. Last week there, fingers crossed, touch wood. See you Friday.