Five things you didn't know about me.

Gosh it's catching! Thanks Adrian for tagging me. This meme thing it's getting everywhere, in your hair, up your nose, filling up your pockets. I'll have to have a good shake down on a piece of newspaper after this.
So, five thing you didn't know about me, it's actually quite difficult since I am quite gobby and likely to tell everyone hundreds of things they really didn't need to know at any one time.
I am covered in tattoos and when I grew up I removed a LOT of piercings. But I hardly think that is interesting (or likely to have gone unnoticed).

How about:
1) I am scared of crossing the road. When I was 8 years old, my Mother worked full time and had to send me home from school alone on the bus (My Nan was at home when I got there but was too infirm to pick me up from school). My Mother worried that I wasn't good at crossing the road and I was really very young to be coming through Bristol city centre on my own. So she devised a route whereby I got on the bus outside the school gate and it went the long way around the city before dropping me only one road away from my house. (This took about 45 minutes- I could have got a bus that took me home in 15 minutes but would have had to cross a busy road outside my school to get on it. This, I was forbidden from doing).
This system was set up and she gave me 15p every morning for the busfare. Unfortunately I was a naughty child and the Beano, with which I was obsessed, also happened to cost 15p. So when I was feeling brave I sometimes used to walk home and spend my money on a Beano instead of the bus.

I got away with this until I got hit by a car on a zebra crossing, miles away from where I was meant to be. I was briefly unconscious and when I came round I was so terrified of the amount of trouble I would get into that I tried to run away. Obviously no-one was having any of it and I was delivered home to prove my Mother right. I wasn't very good at crossing roads.
Consequently Chris has had to change his entire behaviour as, although he is a perfectly safe adult on the road, he has got sick of me grabbing his arm and screaming "No!" when a car is within about ten miles of us. I really am quite pathetic.

2) I love rooftops. Mostly I have always lived in houses with flat roofs. I spent all of my teenage years smoking sneaky cigarettes on my parents' flat roof, then on the roof of the gym at school and finally on the roof of my first flat, overlooking Barker's arcade. I LOVE roof parties and always head upwards when I arrive in hotels. Roofs are brilliant- they're like easy mountains and you can take a glass of wine up. Here is one in Mexico. Fantastic. See?

3) I was in the army cadets at school (If only I had a scanner I could truly embarrass myself but thankfully this was pre-digital mwahaha).

My friend Emma and I were the first girls ever at my school to be corporals. I loved it all, I fired machine guns, crawled through rat infested tunnels, flew a helicopter, even went training with the Royal Irish regiment in their barracks in Cyprus.

We thought we were really tough and shaved each others hair into undercuts, we won all the shooting and trekking competitions and later went on to captain the first girls' team to win the Black Mountains competition and climb Tungarahoa in the Andes.

Emma is now a lesbian in the police force (I'm not sure that's her official police title. I don't think they have a Stoke Newington lesbian brigade) and I gave up all the military stuff as soon as I turned 18.

Still love trekking though(Mount Kinabalu and Everest base camp in the last 2 years). I'm well hard me.





4) I am virally indestructible. Over the course of my life I have managed to catch and survive so many viruses it's a miracle I am here at all. I have been building up a huge and varied armoury of antibodies.

As a child I was born in the middle of a tabloid scare about the MMR vaccine and was never immunised. I managed to get through mumps and whooping cough without dying, as well as the usual chicken pox and measles stuff. Then as I got older I had a whole series of gastro-intestinal things which no-one could diagnose. Followed by dengue fever, which was more impressive since I didn't know I had it, fainted at LA airport and spent four days in bed delirious while my Mother cancelled my flight back to Polynesia.

Then I had hepatitis C which was a pretty bad one and ended up with me on interferon and ribavirin for a year before clearing the virus and being allowed to drink again! (Hallelujah!)

when die I hope scientists are able to use my blood for vaccine research.


5) I got new shoes today. All the gay men at work have been doing "queer eye for a straight girl" on me and decided I wasn't ladylike enough. They have been calling me "manly" and telling me off when I burp or sit with my legs apart. I am no longer allowed to wear my trainers to work and have to get a handbag. (They are going shopping for me in China next week).

I love my new shoes so much. Now I get to clip clop around the house like a grown up. Who would have thought it!

Right I tag Chris and Solveig