The fascinating Doctor Z tagged me (hi, Z!) so I am obediently presenting the disinterested masses with:
Eight Random Things About Me.
Now of course the only way to make this truly random would be to write every single fact I can think of about myself on tiny slips of paper, stuff the mass of them into a duvet-cover, and ferret eight out, thereby inevitably presenting the gentle reader with such gems as ‘I like marmalade’, ‘I have brown hair’ and any number of phrases beginning with ‘when I lived in Italy…’. Can I do this to you? Can I do this to myself? No I can’t. And of course, the fun is to think of eight things I haven’t really mentioned before, also, eight things that surprise people slightly (thereby keeping the reader intrigued, hah hah). I say fun – of course, I mean difficulty.
Tell you what, the Editor can edit them. That’s her job [Bah - Ed]. Thereby presenting you with:
Eight Things About Me – Editor’s Choice.
- Reed thinks cooked carrots are only marginally less disgusting than the pavement outside an all-night take-away. In fact, all orange vegetables are disgusting, swedes, sweet potatoes, squash, pumpkin. Why not invite her to dinner and upset the both of you thoroughly by having spent the entire day making carrot and coriander soup followed by butternut squash ravioli and then pumpkin pie with chantilly cream? (This really happened once. She ate most of it. She’s a good girl really). But she adores carrot cake. Because a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, apparantly.
- Reed can knit fine Shetland lace. She has been told that this is very hard. She finds it quite easy. Did I ever mention that I find her almost unendurably smug? Anyway, she used to be very shy about the fact she could knit, as peers between the ages of 12 and 26 would collapse with merriment at the very thought. Knitting is however officially ‘cool’ now, so she has Come Out. Never mind, it won’t be cool soon enough, and she can go back into her woolly little closet, which should help with the smugness problem.
- Reed bites her nails. This is infact an improvement on her childhood habit of chewing the cuffs of her shirts and jumpers, so we let her.
- She once played the Sheriff of Nottingham in a panto, complete with purple stockings, van Dyke beard and ‘tash. It was one of the more enjoyable experiences of her life. Alas, she can ham, but she can’t act, so that was that.
- Reed is obsessed with libraries. I have a strong feeling this only comes as a surprise to that uncle who is still inexplicably under the impression that Reed wanted to be a lawyer when she grew up (oops, that’s two things in one go. Oh well, they’re both quite boring, so we’ll let it pass). Her step-father even gave her a book of, basically, Library Porn for Christmas.
- She once sprained her ankle by getting tipsy, climbing onto a table to dance, and falling straight back off again. As this happened at boarding school, she ate a whole packet of anti-sherry-breath polos while waiting for the school nurse to come and have a look (yes, I know. Sherry. At seventeen. Lord have mercy). To this day, the taste of polos makes her ankle twinge. She has got over wincing at the sight of tables, thank God, because that would be silly.
- I strongly suspect that her fondness for PreRaphaelite art has a lot to do with the fact she has been complimented incessantly on her PreRaphaelite hair since she was seven.
- She can read over 1000 words a minute. And, importantly, recall what she’s just read. This makes quite a lot of people quite annoyed. It even makes me annoyed. We think it’s because she learnt to read when she was three, Scout of To Kill a Mockingbird style, and didn’t learn the actual alphabet until she was seven. She still has to stop and sing it to herself under her breath to check which comes first, I or H. I strongly suspect that f she had been left to the tender mercies of Primary School, she’d be dyslexic, just like her sisters and cousins.
I’m supposed to tag some more people to do this. I was going to tag Sol, Aphra, Teuchter, the Singing Librarian, Helen, and SG, but they’ve already been tagged, and I was going to tag Lilian, but she very cleverly tagged herself. So, I tag Archie (unless he’s done this and I completely missed it, in which case, oops), and Bloglily, if they like to be tagged for this kind of thing, and if not, please ignore, obviously. Charlotte has ducked out altogether by promising only to do esoteric or high art memes, so I won’t tag her out of respect [for 'respect', read 'fear of satirical eye']. Unless she can pickle a cow in aspic in the middle of it.
