me me me me me me me me meme

The lovely Red Rum ("Your money's no good here, Mr Torrance...") has tagged me. I must write ten interesting and honest things about myself. "Interesting" is subjective, "honest" less so. This will probably be the last one of these I do for a while, as you all now know me better than is entirely healthy, given that we've none of us ever met in what I like to call "the flesh" (mostly because there's so much of it).

1) I've just this second sold a book to the blonde Aussie one from Sheila's Wheels. She was thoroughly charming and if I had a car I know where I'd be getting my insurance from.

2) I have only ever once made hollandaise sauce - it was perfect. I am now so worried that it'll never turn out that well again that I have never reattempted it.

3) I once shared a flat with an inordinately cool Zimbabwean guy called Dumiso; during the course of one rainy Sunday afternoon doing the ironing and watching Zulu we discovered that we were, respectively, descended from Gonville Bromhead and King Cetshwayo. We decided never to speak of it, although whistling "Men of Harlech" became shorthand for "I'm trying to annoy you".


4) I will eat anything except tripe (I hate the consistency), brains (not sure I like the idea of eating something that has ideas) and andouillette (made of bowel, smells of bowel). In my defence, I'm not particularly squeamish otherwise - I will happily eat kidneys, tongue, sweetbreads, black pudding, snails, etc, and in my time have eaten crocodile steak, water buffalo, snake, peacock, a scorpion, and a bee (on purpose, crystallised in honey).

5) I went on an anti-Vietnam War march in 1972 or -3; I was a small child at this point (!) and my deeply peacenik Canadian babysitter took me (I grew up in Montreal). At the age of 6 I knew who Nixon and Ho Chi Minh were, what "impeach" meant, and why there were so many American men suddenly living in Canada...

6) Further to the Canada thing, I was also living there when the October Crisis happened - so am the only one of my contemporaries who has, albeit briefly, lived under martial law.

7) I would sell my soul for the ability to drink a double espresso after midday without turning into a sleepless and jittery speedfreak. I love coffee, love it, love it, and it has ceased to love me since the day I turned 30, fickle swine that it is.

8) My family motto is Nil Desperandum. Which is a toughie to live up to on a drizzly day like today. Mostly I'm an optimist though.

9) I collect nice shiny facts like a magpie collects sparkly bits of tinfoil. In fact if I lived in Philip Pullman's world my daemon would undoubtedly be a member of the corvid family - maybe a rook, because they're sociable, highly acquisitive, and according to myth they like to tell stories.

10) My idea of perfect hell is massage. If there's one thing I hate more than being covered in oil, it's having to make polite conversation with a complete stranger while naked.

I'm going to tag Naweed, because I know for a fact he's never done one of these. Go, dude, make me proud...

Why I Love The Internet

It's all been said before, and by people far more clued-up and techno-geeky than me, but I LOVE THE INTERNET. Damn, but it's a boon to mankind. I speak as one to whom the phrase "knowledge is power" is not just a phrase but a way of life, and I literally cannot imagine how I used to live before I had this wealth of facts at my fingertips. I will give you but two of the million examples of this :

1) Recently, in France, on a fairly remote country road, my friend's car had a minor wobble. She has a Honda, and a small but doom-laden amber warning light started flashing on the dashboard. It was in some peculiar shape we couldn't work out (I thought all cars were idiot-proof these days???). Mr Fishwife, who fancies himself as Jeremy Clarkson (thankfully without the paunch and the perm), made all sorts of manly noises, but admitted defeat when all four of us decided the only shape it remotely resembled was maybe a gastro-intestinal tract, or a kohlrabi, neither of which play a huge part in the functionings of a Honda. THANK GOD FOR THE INTERNET - which she could access via her iPhone - where we found not only the Honda homepage (it was a warning light for "the engine", helpfully unspecific there) but also the phone number for her Honda Garage, who made reassuring noises and booked her in for a check-up when she got back. All we needed to know was that it was safe to keep driving the car with the dash warning still flashing, and lo we were duly reassured. And stopped for more ice cream rather than racing home before the kohlrabi exploded.

2) I had lunch a few days ago with my 95-year-old grandmother (not the dead alcoholic one, the living Swiss one) - I won't use the phrase "marvellous for her age", although she is, because what does that mean? Why is it surprising to be marvellous over a certain age? She forgets things a lot - but then when I think about it, she always has. And when I think about it, so do I. However, get her onto something that doesn't involve what she's doing next Tuesday week, and you're away. We had a long chat about the etymological derivation of the words "discreet" and "discrete", and then she said to me "What's the rest of that poem, you must know, it, something about "pense à Andromaque", or is it Andromache?" ... How sweet of her to have thought I must know it, which I didn't. So I Googled it. It's from "La Cygne", by Baudelaire. Which I printed out and am posting to her. God bless the internet.

Everything is there in fabulous cyberspace, it's just knowing how to find it - I couldn't for the life of me remember where the lyric "trying hard to recreate what had yet to be created" came from, and Googling a line of text is so much easier if you slap quotation marks around it, and was it worth the effort to find out it came from "What A Fool Believes" by crooning falsetto Santa-clone Michael MacDonald? Yes it was. Watching a film and can't remember what you've seen the tall girl in? Internet. That hotel you stayed in 5 years ago and can't remember the name? Internet. It'll never replace the dictionary for settling a potentially fatal Scrabble row, or Brewer's Phrase And Fable for the collective noun for crows, but it's up there in my pantheon of gods. I'm often thankful I only use it for reference, email and blogging, and not something more time-consuming like those vast online role-playing universes, but there's always time...