The Going Gently 10 Things About Me Challenge...

I'm the scrawny one.

Well, Going Gently started it, my sister Pear Tree Log stepped up to the challenge and, this being the first day of 2012 in my neck of the woods, it's time I found ten things worth confessing to too. So, in the strict random order that my hind-brain faxed them to fore-brain and sent them to my fingers:

1. I lived in a zoo for the best part of a year (and skipped school for the year too, with parental consent and connivance) - Banham Zoo in  Norfolk. It was a little bit smaller in those days, started out as a private zoo to amuse the owner's business associates. We had temporary accommodation between the bear cages and the deer enclosure. Every night we went to sleep to a chorus of howler monkeys and gibbons. The village school was officially rated as "Useless" so my parents just let me play in the zoo all day every day - I loved it and learned far more than I might otherwise!

2. Once, while working for the computer firm EDS in the early nineteen-nineties I accidentally destroyed one of H.M. Government's accounting systems - and incurred fines of £2,000 a MINUTE, for three and a half days... That was how long it took me to fix what I had broken (and I got the biggest cash bonus I'd ever had for getting back the system I had broken in the first place - so unfair, but I took it!). The eventual penalty was negotiated down to half a million quid and a lot of "free" service from EDS. Lovely. I had two hours of sleep during those three days - and I woke up suddenly knowing how to fix it, having dreamed the solution!

3. For charity I once abseiled down a twelve story building. It was a fantastic experience but it was also the only time I have actually seen my legs shaking. Halfway down a big building on the end of a thin rope is as far away as it is possible to get from any other human being on the planet. And I managed to land on my feet, not my backside - there was an audience.

4. Despite being vegan I once swallowed a fly on Ayers Rock. Having climbed to the top I decided that everyone around me was looking tired and might feel better if I put on a distracting display of exhaustion, so I laid flat on my back, wheezing and zzzzzzzzzzzip - the biggest, fattest, juiciest bluebottle in Australia disappeared down my throat. To most folk it must have looked as though I had struggled to the top of the Aboriginal's biggest and most sacred rock only to vomit on it while on all fours... So much for "Dreamtime".

5. I spoke more Cantonese than English when I was the age you see in the photograph shown above. This was useful for the parents, because I could translate from Cantonese into pidgin English for them. When we moved back to England no-one else spoke it so the skill atrophied.

6. I am only alive today because of the incredible bravery of an un-named, unknown (to me) RAF Pilot - we lived in Hartford close to RAF Wyton and the American base Alconbury, and this fantastic chap stayed in his jet when the engine conked out to make sure that it didn't crash on the school that I happened to be in at the time. Thank you, thank you, thank you Sir. I was also the only kid in the school looking out of the window before the crash and witnessed his demise in a mushroom-shaped fireball and a pit of wreckage about thirty feet deep about a hundred and fifty yards beyond my classroom window. The scary part for me was being interviewed in the Headmaster's office by the crash investigators.

7. When I was a young sprogling I was so weedy and sickly sometimes that if someone closed the door of the room that I was in I was trapped! I was too weedy to turn your average door handle. Moving to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides sorted that one out! I have a few weird memories of strange (to me) clinics but no idea what the medical problem was. All I can remember is that my bones seemed to hurt as though with pins and needles if I tried anything hard. What a wuss! I had a perfectly ordinary childhood though, whatever it was didn't seem to affect much other than leaving me with those few weird memories.

8. One of my work-commutes used to involve three motorways twice or often more a day - M61, M6 and M55 - usually at unsociable and/or rush hours. On one particular occasion I was - like the two dozen or so other cars in our impromptu convoy - on autopilot and not thinking at all. Driving through multi-lane roadworks I and the other two dozen idiot drivers followed the big lorry at the head of our hold-up into the roadworks. The first we all knew about it (baaaaa! baaaaaa!) was when the going suddenly got very rough and we were on the wrong side of the cones and flashing yellow markers... and no roadway, just the rock hardcore they lay as foundations. Then, to add motoring nightmare to motoring horror, we all discovered that the car at the back end of our convoy was a Police Patrol - on came the blue strobes. Most cars stopped, very meekly, to be booked ... while I and a couple of other drivers reckoned that Mr Policeman probably hadn't recorded our registration numbers yet and might have his hands full enough. We smashed very unsympathetically up through the layers of half-built tarmac and harcore underlay, through the cones and tapes and screeched off. Fortunately, the Police stayed to book the two dozen others for, presumably, driving while asleep, while I and my fellow Chancers made off at very high speed. Sometimes the lions go for the easier, if less tasty, meat.

9. On the subject of cars... I can perform a proper full "J-Turn" (or "Rockford Turn"), a 180° change of direction from slamming it into reverse to sliding the car around and accelerating back the way I just arrived without the car stopping. Automatic and manual gearbox (although I am out of practice now of course). My family only ever see me driving like an Old Biddie these days, and mostly, I do. In my younger years I completed the Police Advanced Driving course of the era, part-time over about ten weeks - and drove like a nutter.

10. I have looked a County Court Judge in the eye and lied while under oath (but it was a very "white lie"). NB., if pressed on this matter I shall lie again! After all, I have experience...

OK - who's next?