20 February, 2009

This post is in: Ramblings

Eighteen more things you didn’t know about me

Right, this is the very last time I respond to a meme – chain letter, whatever you call it – on this. I wrote Seven things you may not know about me, and thought that was it. Now Ellie Lovell has gone and tagged me with one that requires twenty five items.

So here, sort of in response to Ellie’s list, are 18 to add to my previous seven. I am not doing any more though, so if someone comes along with an even higher number they can bog off.

  1. Unlike Ellie, I’ve never cracked my head open; but when I was very young I had a number of operations to try and correct a club foot. They worked pretty well, but I have very little movement in my left ankle and I can’t balance on my left leg. Apparently surgery has moved on a lot since the early ’70s.
  2. I’m 36. (People keep asking, so it clearly has a place in this list.)
  3. I’m a Virgo and I think it says a lot about me. Except it can’t because I don’t believe in horoscopes. Or rather, not the generic nonsense you get in newspapers. I did once reluctantly let someone do my horoscope properly, looking up birth times in a book and everything. It was frighteningly, uncannily accurate: she told me things about my personality that I’d been trying desperately to keep hidden. I refuse to believe in them though, because it would mean accepting that we have no control over our destiny and that our creativity is merely illusion.
  4. I’m a perfectionist but not a completer-finisher. In other words I will leave things half-started because I’m terrified of them not being perfect. So I end up creating half-baked rubbish. Oh the irony.
  5. I had a pet rabbit when I was a child. It was vicious: we had to wear gloves to feed it. I don’t think it was happy. When we got him he had to travel a few miles to our house, so I named him Gulliver.
  6. I’m always falling in love (whatever that means). I never let on though, and seem to have a built-in panic mechanism that means I run away if anyone shows interest. Maybe because friendship is very important and I worry about ruining that.
  7. I learned to type at school, on a big, commercial, manual typewriter. Tipp-ex paper was the cool product, and much easier to use than an eraser. But if I was carbon-copying I would usually forget to erase mistakes from the copies, and end up making a bigger mess – by typing over the mistake – than I had to start with. Now I have a ‘delete’ key and seemingly unlimited ‘undo’ and ‘redo’. Magic.
  8. I played percussion badly in a South London concert band a few years ago. For two London Marathons I crashed my cymbal through countless Souza numbers, at the side of the road.
  9. I, too, like buying books but rarely read them. I’m good at starting them but bad at finishing them. I read Crime and Punishment until a few pages before the end, then never picked it up again. I’ve since seen it on telly so I know the ending now.
  10. I too was a member of the Young Ornithologists’ Club: yay! I still don’t know anything about birds though. But I do remember a trip to Regents Park and seeing Canada Geese for the first time. Now they’re bloody everywhere.
  11. I’m very indecisive. But I suspect you know that already.
  12. I love people but I’m terrified of them. My default presumption is that they think I’m an idiot, and it takes an awfully long time to persuade me otherwise. Which is possibly partly why I sometimes come across as arrogant (I don’t mean to), because I presume people have already decided they don’t like me and so I have nothing to lose. I’m going to regret writing this I think.
  13. I was brought up as a Quaker. I’m lapsed now (if it’s even possible for a Quaker to lapse).
  14. I’m married, technically. We’ve been separated for over three years and just haven’t got round to ending it officially. It took a surprisingly long time to come to terms with.
  15. Social media terrifies me. Yet I evangelise it, and here I am telling personal things to anyone who’ll listen. I really am an idiot.
  16. I’ve worked for my current employer for 13 years.
  17. I love rice cakes. I’ll eat them dry if I have to.
  18. I didn’t go to university. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life (I still have no idea, and it keeps me awake at night). Going to university for the sake of it (which is what a lot of people appeared to do) seemed pointless and a waste of time and money, and I knew full well that I wouldn’t do any work even if I did go. A couple of years ago I came very close to applying for an MA course in graphic communication, but I chickened out.

End of meme. Don’t even think of asking me to write more. ;-)

Ramblings

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