I was tagged the other day by my
Good Friend,
Good Dog, requesting me to reveal six things of no real importance about myself; and, seeing as
GD is a
GF, I'll have to oblige but (since they are of no real importance) they shouldn't detain you long...
The only downside is that there's a rule that you then have to tag six other people. However, since these tags are of no real importance, they can probably be safely disregarded. I
suppose...
Anyway, first (well, first-to-sixth) things first: my sextet of Unimportant Things:
1)
I played Hitler in an end-of-term school revue. I got the part because (a) I was good at art and (b) I wrote and directed the revue.
2)
When I was eight I won a Windsor & Newton paint box as a runner up in a Kellogg's poster-painting competition. My design showed a packet of Corn Flakes balanced on the top of an Indian Rope Trick, levitated by fakir in a turban: politically incorrect, but a indication of an early interest in magic.
3)
My highest score at playing Bejeweled is 1, 256,100...
...but I've never even approached that score since let alone equalled it, so goodness knows how much coffee I'd had that day!
4)
In my first job, I spent six weeks locked in the basement of Bromley Town Hall (for security reasons) drawing up an inventory of the supplies then held by Civil Defence (since disbanded) against the eventuality of a nuclear disaster. It was scary partly because there were a lot of cockroaches in that basement and because there were 8000 knives but only 7,984 forks. However, they did have 351 soup tureens although at least two of the lids were badly cracked...
5)
During a visit to Disneyland, I was twice asked for my autograph under the misapprehension that I was Francis Ford Coppola. The second time I obliged...
6)
My first pet was a fly called Fred.
I wrote about Fred on this blog three years ago, so it could well be time for a reprint...
MY FIRST PET
by
B. Sibley (Form 3)
My first pet was Fred the fly. Later we had a hamster called Hamlet (because he was sort of blonde coloured) but Fred came first.
Fred moved in at the end of autumn and stayed more or less until the beginning of spring, although as my dad says, to be truthful we never actually saw the going of him.
Being a housefly, Fred was already completely house-trained and never did any of those rather disgusting things that The Children’s Encyclopedia said flies do - or, if he did, we didn’t ever see him doing them.
Fred was a very intelligent fly and always sat on one corner of the TV screen watching everything from nature programmes like Tales of the Riverbank to Dr Who (mainly when they were fighting insect-type aliens), though my mum always said he would damage his eyes by sitting that close.
He also showed good taste when it came to music and would sit very still on the arm of our gramophone player for the whole side of a long-playing record. Fred's favourites were ‘The 1812 Overture’ (with live canons) and the soundtrack from South Pacific and my dad said he was probably the reincarnation of Beethoven, but we couldn’t test this out, as we didn’t have any Beethoven records.
When I grow up and can afford to buy a few more records, I’d like to have another fly and carry out some experiments to see if all dead composers become flies in the end.
The End
Image: Harriet Macdonald, 2006
* General Mills in the USA marketed a Limited Edition Monopoly Cereal featuring, "crispy, sweetened whole wheat and rice cereal pieces imprinted with the Monopoly game's famed game pieces along with marshmallow bits resembling Monopoly property cards." Yuck!
* The top-hatted gent on the Monopoly logo is known as Mr Monopoly but this is a name he only acquired in 1999 (apparently "in honour of the [upcoming] new millenium"); prior to that he was called Rich Uncle Pennybags, a name he went under on a companion game marketed in 1946.
