Party time

It's Crispy's 21st birthday party tomorrow. This is both a good and bad thing, I think. Good not only because she's my best friend and we always have fun when we get together, but also because it's got to be a good thing to be invited to 21st birthday parties of trendy young women when you get to my advanced age - this is the second one in less than a year, after Shahin's last May or whenever it was.

The bad bit is the mental arithmetic the existence of this 21st birthday makes me do. When I first met Crisp, she was 14 and I'd just turned 23. So any reminiscences along the lines of "wow, how many years have we known each other now?" lead inexorably to the horrific milestone that's lying in wait for me in October.

But enough of that kind of thinking. An impending party leads to more mundane thought processes, like should I have a haircut tomorrow morning? It's been two or three months since the last one, and it's getting a bit on the long side, even with my famously non-growing, sparse hair. But on the other side, it's not really as long and ugly-looking as I usually let it grow before getting it cut. Maybe I'll leave it. I definitely need to trim my beard, though - it doesn't look nearly as good when I grow it long as it used to, because the white hairs seem to grow much longer than the others. Sigh, I'm definitely too old.

Not in a blogging mood tonight

I'm sitting here thinking "Oh, I haven't put anything in my blog yet today, I'd better do that," and feeling completely devoid of inspiration. That hasn't happened to me very much over the nearly six months I've been doing this (must have a half-anniversary party!), which surprises me a bit. I've tried keeping a diary several times in the past, but it's never lasted this long. I think there's something about putting it online where anyone can read it (even if nobody does actually read this because I don't tell anyone it exists).

I considered posting a bit of nonsense that I wrote years ago and have on this computer, but that seems like cheating to me. I think there's an unwritten rule that everything I put on here has to be fresh and new and original - not that anyone would notice the difference if I put some old stuff on, but it's the principle of the thing.

So anyway, as you can see, I've devoted three paragraphs to saying that I don't feel like saying anything - that's concise by my standards. Now I'm off to memorise some binary digits before bed. Thanks for reading!

Wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully pretty artwork

I have a real mental block when it comes to drawing. It's a deep-seated childhood trauma caused by the fact that my brother was always so much better at it than me. I wish there was something I could do about this, because I think I've got the soul of an artist trapped inside the body of this accountant somewhere. Every now and then, I think of something that I would really like to draw a picture of. Occasionally I even manage to put pen to paper and actually try to draw it, but the results aren't generally very encouraging.

Anyway, around Christmas time I found myself thinking "What I should do, is draw a picture of Nigel and Alistair from Newshounds kissing under the mistletoe, with Nigel standing on a box or something so he can reach." It didn't get any further than that, but then another Nigel-fan on the Newshounds forum the other day observed that we've never seen the lovecats kissing before, so I took that as a good excuse to draw this:



Now, I'm not claiming it's a work of art comparable to Van Gogh's best, or for that matter that it meets even the most basic standards of acceptability for a quick pencil sketch, but I like it. It looks more or less like I thought it would look before I started, it's kind of cute, and it's not even a complete swipe. And it's about three or four years since I tried drawing anything but stick-figures, so I was already feeling quite happy with my artistic outpourings even before Thomas K Dye, the writer/artist of Newshounds, said it was 'adorable'. That just made my day completely. It's so cool when someone you admire pays you a compliment.

Weirdly enough, a day or so after the Newshounds forum inspired me to draw something I'd been thinking about drawing, today someone posted a link to something he'd written, and it's something that I've been meaning to write for a couple of months now - An interview with Daffy Duck by Rory O'Bannion. The general tone of the thing is freakily similar to the thing that's been bouncing around my head, although the Daffy in my interview would have been as youthful as ever and full of enthusiasm about his latest Duck Dodgers series. And I can't believe Daffy wouldn't have got on with Chuck Jones, considering he directed The Scarlet Pumpernickel, the cartoon in which Daffy gets to expand his acting range and cast all his friends in an epic dramatic production. Still, I love this interview.

Time off for good behaviour

Left work two hours early today, not because of any special occasion, strike or communist revolution, but because the flipping accountancy software package has blown a fuse and we weren't able to use it all day. It's one thing after another there - ever since I started working there two months ago there's been an endless series of computer problems getting in the way of work. And going home early isn't much of a treat, because I know I'll have to make up the time and more over the next few days to get everything done.

In fact, I'm going to have to work quite excessively hard over the next couple of weeks, because having told my boss that her deadline to get the monthly accounts completed was too short and got an extra day to do it, I now feel obliged to get everything finished well before the original deadline, to confirm my reputation as a miracle worker. That's something I've missed at this new job - my strategy is normally to come into a new workplace and do the job much more quickly and accurately than whoever was doing it before, and have everyone think I'm great. But because everyone is new at Nord Anglia, they haven't got anything to compare me to, and so just assume that all the brilliant things I'm doing are normal. I tell you, it's tough being a genius. And having such an inflated opinion of my own abilities is a real handicap, too.

Still, it's not all bad. Getting home early gave me a chance to do something I was too lazy to do all this time I've been off work - practice hour numbers. It went really well, too, I got a score of 1940, a personal best and 9 digits short of Gunther's world record. I'm really feeling confident about the world championships at the moment, if I can keep up the training. It's a while since I've gone into a competition knowing that I've achieved really big scores in practice in lots of the disciplines.

It's funny really how I've snapped back into hard-working, dedicated, super-accountant, super-memory-guy mode after a week and a half of unmitigated accidie. All it took was being forced to get out of bed at half past seven after not nearly enough sleep, and now I'm all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (I'm a squirrel when I'm not a dragon, did you know?) and looking around for more useful, productive things to do with my time. It's great.

Writing books is hard

Or at least, sitting down to write them is difficult. I'm normally okay once I get started, but I keep finding better things to do with my time. I was only trying to write a synopsis to send to publishers, but I just can't be bothered. I think it's because I'm trying to persuade someone to give me money for writing this thing, and that turns it into work, and therefore not fun. I'm not sure how to circumvent this problem, really. I could get it published and give all the money to charity, but then that kind of defeats the object of writing the thing in the first place. Perhaps I could say I'm going to give the money to charity and then actually keep it? Conning my subconscious in that way would be pretty clever stuff, I'll give it a try.

Anyway, I've got to go back to real work tomorrow. What a drag. Never mind, at least it'll get me a bit of exercise, cycling there and back. I think I've put on about three stone over Christmas, what with all the sweets and cake lying around the place and no more physical movement than necessary to change the TV channel occasionally.

One person I sympathise with is Sharon off EastEnders. I've been trying to get hooked on it again lately, but I keep forgetting it's on. I've watched a couple of recent episodes, though, and she's gone and had another fiancé killed in shocking circumstances just when they thought they were going to be happy forever. It's only been a couple of years since the last one, poor thing, and she's also had her father return to life and be murdered in the meantime. If it was me, I'd want to move away from Albert Square and settle somewhere more peaceful, like Baghdad.

Synapsia

Rather than doing anything constructive today, I've been reading the collected editions of Synapsia magazine that all the competitors at the world memory championships this year were given free. It was the magazine of the Brain Club, which is Tony Buzan and his gang of mind-map enthusiasts, also discussing other brain-related things like chess and memory and the like. Like these things generally do, it started out with wild enthusiasm in 1988, was published regularly for a few years, then gradually dwindled away through lack of interest (whether from the writers or readers, I'm not sure) until it was coming out once a year before finally disappearing in 1997.

If I'd known about Synapsia back then, I would have been one of its biggest fans. I was a terribly nerdy teenager, and I can just see me and Noddy poring excitedly over every new issue. Who knows, maybe I would have got into the whole memory thing much earlier, and competed in the first world championships back in 1991? Probably not, though - it took actually talking to memory people at the MSO in 2000 before I believed the memory techniques described in Synapsia and such publications could really work.

The funniest bit is reading about the MSO in Synapsia. The first mention comes back in 1991, when Ray Keene confidently announces that not only will the first MSO happen in 1992, but that it's reasonable to expect at least five hundred competitors in each mind sport, that well over ten thousand people, plus their spouses and friends, will converge on the event from all over the world, and that TV and press coverage will be huge, turning mind sports into the most popular thing in the universe. And these estimates might have to be revised upwards closer to the time.

The MSO was quite big for the first few years (when it finally started up in 1997), but it never got more than 2000 or so competitors at its peak, and international participation was always pretty minimal. But it's not really nice to laugh at over-optimistic predictions, and I do like the MSO and Synapsia. Just not as much as I know I would have liked it when I was 14, that's all. I'm not sure whether that means I'm less nerdy now, or just nerdy in a different way.

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.