Eight things

I have been tagged to do this twice: velocibadgergirl tagged me in May and panajane tagged me a couple of weeks ago. It is a long time from May to August, and I am very crap and slow to get round to things. Sorry.

Eight suddenly seems a large number.

1. I keep my possessions in alphabetised storage. Not all of them: just the odds and sods I can't seem to find homes for. In a drawer marked B are balloons and Blu-Tack: in W are six watches, a 1g weight and a whistle. It works splendidly for when I reach the end of a tidy-up and am left with an assortment of crap that doesn't belong anywhere.

When one particular thing begins to take over the drawer, it gets its own drawer, as in the Great Bulldog Clip Influx of 2003. I nicked a lot of bulldog clips from work because they have more uses around the house than you might give them credit for, and they have their own drawer on the tool shelves now.

I know! Fascinating. And to think, there are still seven things to go. I'll make the next one short.

2. I woke up one morning to realise I was in a field in Kent, dressed as a Playboy bunny, with big comedy polystyrene boobs down the front. Except for the presence of a strange woman and her German shepherd who were both staring at me from twenty yards away, I was very alone.

3. I am descended from Anglo-Saxon kings of Northumbria. If history had played out differently, our lot would still be living in Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland.

In the old days, living in a castle meant smacking people with swords, and other fun. Now it means appearing in Hello! with orange makeup on, so I don't feel like I'm missing out.

4. I no longer read badly written porn for a living. I am going to change the bit in my profile where it says that. Hang on. There. I had an interesting job, then I had a baby, and no longer had a job.

I get asked now and then how I got into doing that for a living: the answer is that I learned to be a proofreader with the Publishing Training Centre, spent about a decade proofreading for legal firms and publishing houses, and would read publishers' websites now and then to see who was hiring. If I saw something interesting, I would send a CV and harangue them continually until they finally caved in and gave me a job.

5. I was a thumbsucker as a child, and a teenager, and an adult. My mother nagged and shamed and shouted at me to stop, photographed me doing it in my sleep and told people I did it, which funnily enough only fuelled my insecurity. I'm not going to admit how old I was when I finally managed to give up, but it was long after I moved 250 miles away from home, graduated from university and passed my driving test. I took a hard-line, tough-shit stance with myself: I spent a few weeks with my thumb bound to my fingers with electricians' tape at night, and wore a big clunky thumb ring by day. The first week was one of the most emotionally testing of my life.

6. I used to be a good musician, and got to grade 8 in four instruments before I left school. I had to do solo concerts in posh frocks when I would rather be experimenting with drugs at parties (but I made time for that later). Then I did a BA in music at university, perhaps the most miserable experience of my life, and was put off music and musicians to the extent that I hardly play at all these days. I'd like to be good at the piano again. I'd like to be able to play Chopin, Rachmaninov and proper boogie-woogie. That'd be wonderful.

7. I was arrested in 1994 for possession of cannabis, and am still more proud of my bail certificate than my degree certificate. I had to collect my certificate from the police station three weeks after my arrest, where the constable told me "What I am giving you now is your certificate of bail. This is yours to do with whatever you see fit. You may throw it away, you may stick it on your wall, or you may roll it up, stick some funny stuff in the end and smoke it. Good day."

8. I am impatient. I can entertain myself in my head for long-haul flights or long train journeys, but if I'm in a queue that's only going to take a few minutes, I practically implode. Ian once lost me in a crowd at Victoria Station on our way home: he knew it didn't matter, because we only live a few tube stops away, so he went to the escalator without me to realise I'd already gone to the escalator without him. He said as he looked down the long, long line of hands on the handrail, he saw one tapping up and down impatiently and he thought "There she is!" And yes, it was me.

Now I have to tag eight people. I am going to tag everyone on Shengsters, which is more than eight people, but I'm sure not all of them will do this anyway. And I'm going to tag Gid, because the lazy bugger started a blog in April and hasn't done anything with it.