I once had a whim and I had to obey it

Just every once in a while, if I've got money in my bank account and the whim takes me, I get into a mood where I buy things on impulse. I did that today, out in Nottingham - I was passing HMV and thought to myself 'I like browsing through the DVDs in HMV, but I never buy anything there. If I really want a particular DVD/video/whatever, I buy it on the internet or tape it off the telly, whichever is more convenient. And yet, if everybody did this, HMV would close down and I wouldn't be able to browse their DVDs any more. I'd better buy something. It'll be good for the economy.'

So I bought some of their cut-price DVDs - The Mitchell and Webb Look series one, Catterick, The Day Today, The Inbetweeners and the Doctor Who Lost In Time collection. The last of these wasn't reduced price, it was £15, but I've been meaning to get it for ages. And then in the Works bookshop I saw a book on playing the ukulele for absolute beginners. And then shortly afterwards I was passing the music shop and noticed that they had a cheap ukulele for sale. A little red one. So basically, I now own a ukulele. And I've spent the afternoon playing it. It's great - I can now play the ukulele part of 'Five Years Time' by Noah And The Whale (which is really, really, really easy to play, and I suspect their ukulele player also only had an afternoon of practice before they recorded it) and I'm starting to work on fingerpicking.

It's murder on the fingers, though - alternative titles I considered for this blog entry included "Played it till my fingers bled", "I've got blisters on my fingers!" and "Maybe get a blister on your thumb". The thumb-blister is the only one of those that has actually happened so far, but the fingers on my left hand are also rather sore.

The important question, though, is 'will calluses on my fingers impede my card-memorising technique?' Andi Bell learnt to play the guitar a few years ago and he's never won the world championship since. Perhaps it really isn't possible to be a Rock n Roll World Memory Champion!

Correspondence

I think I might have to spend the whole weekend writing to people. I've got to reply to a list of questions from the fact-checker who's proof-reading Josh's book (asking me about some things I've completely forgotten, naturally), reply to a few more interview questions from the BBC website guy who was here the other day (need to expound my 'filing cabinets' theory of memory in full detail), and reply to lots of emails from friends, fans and enemies (well, I haven't had any emails from enemies lately - perhaps they're not talking to me because they don't like me. Also, all my fans are my friends too, although possibly not all my friends are fans...)

Also, if anyone sees any business cards, bits of paper and such like fluttering around Beeston, could you give them back to me, please? They all fell out of my back pocket while I was cycling home from the supermarket tonight. I did manage to find all the credit/debit cards, luckily enough, but there's still some miscellaneous junk that's missing.

And also furthermore, I'm making a concerted effort to get every episode of Pocket Dragon Adventures on video, before Tiny Pop stops showing them and they disappear into obscurity again (actually, I think they're maybe going to release them all on DVD, but just in case they don't...) I've taken stock of all my old tapes and now I've got 70 of the 104 episodes. Maybe when I've got them all I'll somehow convert them to computerish files and 'torrent' them like some kind of genius hacker for the world to see. Long like Pocket Dragon Adventures!

The black sheep of the family

I made an alarming discovery today - it seems that Michael Heseltine's mother's maiden name was Eileen Pridmore! This could have all kinds of alarming consequences. What if he decides he's a long-lost cousin and invites himself round for tea? I have no idea what the likes of Michael Heseltine like to eat, and anyway my kettle's broken. And what if some journalist uses an unusual filing system in which he organises minor celebrities by their mothers' names, and then confuses the names Aileen and Eileen (which happens a lot), and asks Michael Heseltine for advice on how to remember where you put your car keys? My reputation would be ruined! Or what if the same journalist asks me for my comments on whatever Michael Heseltine achieved during his years in the halls of power (if anything)? I'd probably say something wrong and the government would collapse!

It's not like he's even got a hereditary peerage and thus gives me the fun of calculating how many people I'd have to assassinate to get myself a seat in the Lords.

It's hard work being memorable

High up on my to-do list is organising the Cambridge Memory Championship. It gets harder every year to come up with 'historical events', especially since we need 120 of them now. It's just typical of those memory competitors, insisting on raising the standards without a thought for us poor slobs who have to create the memorisation papers. It's very difficult to think of a whole lot of vague event descriptions, ideally two to five words, along the lines of 'peace treaty signed'. There are only so many things that can possibly happen, and I'd hate to repeat myself and use a description that I've used in previous years.

And then there's names and faces. It's a real chore finding pictures of people and then putting names to them. If anything, that's even more difficult than remembering their names in a competition (which, as everyone knows, I'm rubbish at).

And I've got to email people and pester them to come along and compete. Because all this work of creating things for people to memorise is much less worthwhile if nobody turns up to the competition. I'm way behind on keeping in touch with competitors, and it really is easy to forget about a memory competition if you don't get reminded...

It'll be memorable

Well, three hours of filming for the BBC News website, and hopefully it'll come out as something fun to watch. I'll let you know when it's online!

I should probably confess...

... that despite having bought a new hoover on Saturday, I haven't actually technically taken it out of the box yet, let alone used it to suck up some of the filth around this place. And the BBC are coming tomorrow. I might just leave the place dirty, so as to give the little snippet of BBC-News-website-magazine-feature a gritty edge.

In other news, those Natural Confectionery Company sweets you see advertised on telly? They're not very nice. Stick to unnatural confectionery if you want good sweeties.

It's the works Burns supper and I've tae address the haggis!

Hey, all you people out there in the blog-reading world, would you do me a favour? If I die (I'm not planning to die, but they tell me there's a chance of it happening at some point over the next hundred years), start having annual suppers on the anniversary of my birth, death, first World Boku Championship, whatever's most convenient. And turn it into some kind of national event somehow (create a wikipedia page that says Pridmore Night is the most important festival in Britain, that should do the trick). I think I'd make a good national icon.

Why does everything I own inevitably explode?

Had to buy a new vacuum cleaner today in order to keep my clean-this-pigsty-up-a-bit resolution. The old one started pouring smoke out of itself when I turned it on, and although I'm not one of those technological whizzes, I'm pretty sure that's a bad sign. I considered leaving it on to see whether it would either stop or go bang and destroy half the street, but decided to just go and splash out on a new one from Argos. It's good for the economy to buy new vacuum cleaners, I understand.

Real plans this time!

I was out of bed this morning in time for a few speed cards before going to work (it's official, my brain is four seconds slower in the early morning than in the afternoons) and now I'm all fired up to actually do some memory training this weekend. And also some house-cleaning, because the BBC News website are coming to film me on Tuesday. And I've also had an email today from Korean TV wanting to film me for a memory documentary. The whole fame and fortune bandwagon keeps on rolling! (On a very obscure kind of back road that few people are watching...)

Have you ever noticed?

That if you're typing an email to somebody called Jim, and your right hand accidentally slips one key to the left, you end up writing a sentence like "Hun, if I send you an amended file, can you include it in a new report?" Which completely changes the tone of the whole email.

Yes, I'm still superhuman

I'm actually getting tired of seeing "Superhuman: Genius" in the TV listings. It seems to have been playing constantly on ITV4 for the last few months, and now tonight it's on ITV1 again. I mean, it's nice, but can't ITV make some new documentaries? And couldn't they buy "The Mentalists" and subject that to the same round-the-clock showing? "The Mentalists" is all about the world of memory competitions, and it's the kind of thing that motivates people to take part themselves. "Superhuman: Genius" just motivates people to tell me I'm extremely clever if they see me in the street.

Ah well, at least it clashes with Celebrity Big Brother Eviction, so nobody's going to watch it...

Meerkat market

Since I've posted more than one blog entry criticising TV adverts that have no idea how to sell their product, I thought I really should praise comparethemarket.com, for their brilliant 'comparethemeerkat.com' ads. Now THAT's how to present a concept in a memorable way!

For the benefit of foreigners or non-TV-watchers, comparethemarket.com is a car insurance website, and their adverts consist of a meerkat explaining that his website, comparethemeerkat.com, has been getting a lot of hits by mistake. If you want to compare meerkats (size, hobbies and so on) go to his website, if you're looking to compare the market for car insurance quotes, check out theirs.

The best part of it is that they've really created a http://www.comparethemeerkat.com/ site! Someone's had a lot of fun making it, I can tell. If I wanted car insurance, I'd almost be tempted to use the comparethemarket.com website. Almost. I'd probably still just call Direct Line, to be honest. Their adverts are more convincing.

Suspicious

Yesterday I bought "The Suspicions of Mr Whicher", largely because I'd seen someone at work reading it, liked the title and then noticed it in the bookshop and decided to flick through it, rather than because I had any idea what it was about. Who needs fancy advertising techniques, anyway?

Luckily, it turned out to be brilliant - it's a detailed true account of an 1860 murder investigation, and what's best about it is the picture it gives of the very earliest days of police detectives. The developing vocabulary of detective fact and fiction is really fascinating, and the writer (Kate Summerscale) has a real knack for picking up on the little nuances of meaning in 150-year-old language. I'd recommend the book to anyone!

More family history

In the spirit of the genealogical research of last Tuesday, it seems only fair to write something on the subject of my grandmother too. My other grandmother, that is - not the one who starred in The Mentalists, wasn't born until 1920 and is still alive and well today, but the one who died when my dad was young and consequently doesn't get mentioned very much when I talk about my family. Her only fifteen minutes of fame, to the best of my knowledge, come in this 1948 article from a Sheffield newspaper:

"The parents were delighted, and none more than Mrs. S. Pridmore, of 72, Robey Street. She has ten children, nine boys and a girl. They are all members of St. Thomas's, and two of them are in the choir, but it was left to 17-month-old Georgie to represent them and give the daffodils to their mother."

And here's little Georgie himself, proving that aside from the moustache, my dad really did look exactly the same for his entire life!



And finally, here's Mrs. S. Pridmore on the 1911 census, back when she was still Katherine Millership and a middle child of one of those wonderful enormous Sheffield familes, rather than spending her entire life from the age of 19 to 45 churning out offspring of her own:



Let's preserve the memory of my long-dead Other Grandma! I'm sure she'd be just as big a hit with documentary-watchers if she was alive today!

Just maybe...

... I might be getting back into the memory mood. Really feeling like getting in some hard-core training in preparation for the Welsh Championship at the end of March. I might just spend tomorrow memorising a whole lot of numbers, cards and anything else that comes to hand!

Stupid Expedia

Not stupid working when I'm trying to book a stupid trip to stupid New York. Stupid letting me pick out all the stupid flight/hotel/other options and then not stupid letting me stupid book them.

Still, assuming it becomes possible to buy flights and things at some point before March 5th or thereabouts, I've decided I'm definitely going to non-stupid New York for the US Championship. Woohoo! It'll be fun to see the sights and the people and the giant monsters! Who wants to hang out with me while I'm there?

Ties

There are many aspects of this world that history books of the future will poke fun at and which make me deeply ashamed to be living in this time period. One of the more trivial but nonetheless annoying is the fact that I wear a tie to work. And an ironed shirt. I mean, really, it's the 21st century. Why is it still necessary to knot a decorative strip of cloth around your neck in order to look smart? Perhaps I should make a stand and go to work in my pyjamas. Or naked. I'm extremely cool and popular, after all - maybe it would start a new trend and I'd appear in those history books as an inspiration for change?

The illustrations would be hand-drawn and would make me look a lot better in the nude than I do in real life. History is written by the cool people.

Time flies when you're... working

I just realised today that I've now been working for Boots for six months! It really doesn't feel like it - sad to say, I really am having fun. This thought disturbs me so much that I can't think of anything appropriate to write about the semi-anniversary.

The good old days

I heard today that the 1911 census is available on the internet, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act and some bright spark noticing that it didn't become technically a law that you have to wait 100 years before releasing a census until 1920. And so, even though they make you pay money to look at it, I couldn't resist. Here's my granddad:

That's him at the bottom, Sidney Pridmore, age 10. Yes, my great-grandfather was born in the 1850s - we believe in big, big generation gaps in our family. Sid-Prid is rather an ugly rhyme, but then his parents had had twelve previous children (almost certainly most of them boys - females in our family tree are few and far between), so they were probably running short of names by then.

Funnily enough, if I'm remembering my family history properly, Granddad went on to have 13 children himself, three of whom died in infancy. I had no idea he was taking after his father. That's a weird family trend. And also, if Sid was the youngest of his Pridmore brood, does that make my dad the thirteenth child of a thirteenth child? And just how many magic powers does that grant me?

I really need to find out more about my family. Must get in touch with my cousin Sue, who actually knows about these things...

Office rituals

I'm vaguely irritated by the tradition of getting a 'secret' card for anyone in the office who has a birthday, gets married, has a baby, leaves the company, things like that. And particularly by the tradition of furtively passing the card around the office disguised by an old brown envelope and pretending it's some kind of tedious bureaucratic business. Every place I've ever worked does this, and I think it's just silly. It's not like the card-recipient ever doesn't know that a card is coming to them. Bah humbug, I say.

This doesn't mean I don't want a card next time I have a birthday, get married, have a baby or whatever. That'd be terrible! I hope nobody from work reads this...