Nailbiter

This week I opened a can of butterbeans with my bare hands.

That is, without using a knife to flip the ring pull up for me.

This may seem like an everyday occurrence for most of you, but it is something I have never been able to do in living memory. Nor is it likely that I was doing this before living memory, given that I would have been under four years old, give or take. What four-year-old is opening cans of butterbeans?

So it would be more accurate to say that I have never been able to do it.

Let's take a trip into the land of living memory...

You are eleven years old, painting my nails with a foul-tasting substance to try and stop me from biting them. It tastes horrible, to be sure, but you can get around this by picking at your nails with your other hand. That way you can still ensure, for whatever reason, that you can beat them back to the nail bed. You don't know why you are biting your nails, but you always have done.

You try covering all of your nails with plasters, physically removing the ability to get at them, but when the plasters fall off there is nothing forcing you to put another one on, so you leap at the opportunity which has presented itself and gnaw them right back off.

A decade later you paint your nails black, and this works for a while, but when you get a job at a pub you have to remove the nail polish and you're back to square one. A few years after that you paint them green, yellow, orange, and there is no one at a pub telling you to remove it, but after a few weeks it flakes off, and again, there is nothing which forces you to put another layer on.

Sometimes you go a few weeks without biting them and marvel at the tiny flashes of growth. But then you'll get a bit drunk, or have a stressful day at work and all of the hard work will be gone. Because once the floodgates have opened there is no stopping it.

At this point you think that you will be biting your nails for the rest of your life. You've tried to stop so many times that you may as well have tattooed the New Year's resolution onto your fingers.

Then you listen to a podcast about mindfulness, about noticing the things you are doing and choosing how you react to them rather than reacting without choosing. The podcast host is talking about not letting anger take hold and acting out of a sense of rage, but you think that maybe you could apply this to nailbiting.

Miraculously, it works.

And it works fast.

For probably less than a week, you focus intensely and notice every time you raise your fingers to your mouth, asking yourself whether you actually want to start biting. The answer is always no. You've never wanted to, but you've always done it anyway.

The habit of a lifetime is broken in seven days.

It happened so quickly that you can't even fully remember how you did it. Can it really have been as simple as thinking about it? Why did you never do this before? It doesn't matter, because now you can open a can of beans like every other person in the world.

Mindfulness is a hell of a drug.

Watching University Challenge tonight, I think about how the buzzer would feel different on my fingers now that there are these strange, keratinous claws on the end of them. An odd thought, one I could never have conceived of having before this year.

The episode was between Queen's, Belfast and Cardiff.

Here's your first starter for ten.

Queen's beat Liverpool in the first round, which means that if they beat Cardiff they will have defeated both of the finalists from the 2012 League Cup, a rare distinction in University Challenge.

That match went to penalties, which I listened to on the radio in the car after swimming training. If I had less football knowledge on tap like this I might be better at questions on a wider variety of subjects, but I don't know how to get rid of it. Maybe I can use my newfound control over my mind, somehow?

Rankin takes the opening points for Queen's with Pascal, and they grab two bonuses on flags. Carlisle takes the second starter and Queen's race through a hat-trick on films scored by Ennio Morricone. One of these is Days of Heaven, which I saw in the cinema last year, and which had some of the most gorgeous cinematography I've ever seen.

Rankin takes another starter, on David Lynch. An appropriate question, given his passing last week.

The picture starter is on the inverse square law, but no one gets it so Rankin wins the bonuses with Rimbaud on the replacement. They guess Hooke on one of these, but the answer is Boyle. When Cardiff finally get a starter right they also start guessing Hooke, but they are never right either.

McKillen remembers forget-me-not on the next starter, which wins them a bonus set on Dickens. I just finished reading Great Expectations, so was delighted at the question on the Finches of the Grove, one of Dickens' many comedic flourishes.

It is 90-0 to Queen's, and Rankin makes this 100 with another ten-pointer.

Cardiff's Gilbert hears 'Edinburgh of the Seven Seas', and buzzes in immediately with St Helena, but he is wrong. This is unfortunate because the question later mentions St Helena, and the correct answer, Tristan de Cunha, was formerly one-third of a territory called 'St Helena and Dependencies' before the three thirds were split in 2009.

Rankin recognises Puccini very quickly on the music starter, and the gap is now 145 points.

It looks like we might be on for another historic battering, but a slip-up by Thompson allows Boyling in to take Cardiff back above zero, and they spend the rest of the match muddling their way up to a respectable score, despite several incorrect guesses of Hooke.

McKillen is harshly punished for a very late interruption, but it doesn't matter, and he makes up for it on the very next question.

At this point Queen's know they have won, and cruise to the finish line.

Queen's 180 - 70 Cardiff

Well done to Cardiff for not giving up and working their way to a respectable score. Not well done for repeatedly guessing Hooke, even on starter questions.

Queen's will need to stay focused for the entire match if they are to progress beyond the quarters but look like a very solid team.

Next week sees Warwick take on Oriel for the last place in the quarter-finals. See you then.