Tagged. Like a criminal...

Damn. Tagged again. I must learn either to hang around the teachers at break time or to run faster the next time they are coming. Inflation appears to taking effect, no longer are bloggy friends satisfied with three things or five things…

Following being tagged by my KindaBlue friend, I present:

Eight things you never wanted to know about me

1. When I was nineteen, I had a bite on my forehead which got infected. My head was so full of pus that I couldn’t open my eyes. The pressure caused by the buildup of pus was such that my head would spontaneously degunk in projectile fashion. Yuk.


2. As a very small child, I got rather confused between the Green Giant (the jolly fellow who sells tinned peas and sweetcorn) and God. They started with the same letter, they were both sort of big, and they both lived in a land I couldn’t see. Isn’t it obvious that I thought they were one and the same?


3. I have a grand total of zero qualifications relevant to my occupation. I have also received a vastly expensive education at the expense of the taxpayer, with a PhD collecting dust in the further reaches of my mind. One day, I intend to use some of that knowledge I have carefully stored.


4. Cycling back home the morning after a university ball, wearing a rather elegant dress with a somewhat risqué slit up the thigh, I was accosted by some dirty old men who slurred at me words to the effect of “I can see your knickers.” I was pleased to be able to respond to them that I very much doubted that they could, as I wasn’t wearing any. Ah, to be young…


5. I really do not like frogs (the amphibians, not the cheese and onion flavoured nation). My dislike stems from treading in my bare feet on an unidentified and squelchy amphibian which had until that point been contentedly camouflaged on an extremely tasteful brown carpet in the family home. I was two years old. I can still vividly remember the sensation. As a direct consequence of that experience, I wholeheartedly encourage people to have frogs’ legs whenever they get the opportunity.


6. My travel companion and I stripped off in a Peruvian desert to enjoy the fresh air and sunshine, having seen not a soul apart from each other all day. We had just put out clothes back on when a taxi load of Americans (all of whom were fully clothed) appeared from behind a rock.


7. As a young chemist, I had to memorise the periodic table, as my university did not provide them in exams. I used to revise mine forwards, backwards and up and down groups, one element to every stroke on the ergo (rowing machine). If I missed an element, I started again at the beginning. I got extremely fit. I also eventually learned the damned thing. I can still scribble it out today, six years on from my exams.


8. Little me had once declared that “Brothers are a waste of a good pregnancy.” In fact, little me had pretty much decided that males were a bit redundant, and I was well into my teens before I learned that women did not in fact control the universe. The evidence in favour of my hypothesis was:
• The Queen (who was on telly a lot) was a woman, and she was in charge of doing all the fun bits of running the country like opening new sports facilities;
• The Prime Minister was a woman, and she had to do all the boring bits of running the country, like sorting out new wars for us to fight and dealing with her minions of men. When she stood down, they were going to let a man be the Prime Minister. I wondered if the country would survive…;
• The teachers at school were all women;
• My mother was in charge at home. My father was and still is around, but for many years, he seemed a bit like a luxury item and I wasn’t quite sure what the point of him was.

There. Does this damned thing get mutated as it gets passed around from blogger to blogger? Well, I tag the Badger to reveal the eight things she'd explain about herself to an alien who she was meeting for the first time.