Interview / Outofyou

Questions posed by not-just-another- girl Ria...and of course, now I've done it, I will invite others to request questions of me too. Feel free to.

1. If you could live in one place, any place in the world, for the rest of your life, where would it be and why?

Paris or Granada or Ventnor, Isle of Wight....I think I'll plump for Granada. I can imagine Paris/Parisians getting to me after a while, and I've already spent perhaps too long in Ventnor (but it is the Town Where Everybody Knows Your Name (TM)).
Why Granada? I choose Granada because the old town is beautiful and labyrinthine and packed with tapas bars and restaurants, because of the Alhambra, and the people and because the lot of it is jammed up against the snowy backdrop of the Sierra Nevada. To cap it all, it's in Spain.
Job's a good 'un.

2. Why on earth did you call your Venus Flytrap Victoria?

It was Victor to begin with, because it was the only man's name that I could think of beginning with V. Venus was meant to be a woman, so...

3. Bluebottles: Ruthless buzz-machines or heavenly angels?

Why the hell would anyone think they are heavenly angels?
They vomit and crap on our food, they irritate, infect and annoy and seem to do it all deliberately. Their only saving grace is that they...oh, er...no. They don't have one, do they? Ruthless buzz-machines.

4. Have you ever had deja vu? If so, where and when? If not, what would you most like to experience again?

Why the hell would anyone think they are heavenly angels?
They vomit and crap on our food....only joking. Yeah, I've had Deja Vu before. Quite a lot, really. So much that it's difficult to remember a specific time and place. I'll try and describe the feeling instead. Imagine that you have a drawing on tracing paper. This image is in your head. Real life is another picture, changing all the time. The feeling of deja vu that I get is a bit like the moment when you move the tracing paper-drawing around over the picture that it was traced from. Nothing makes sense until you line the pictures up and *click* you see both at the same time. When the image I didn't realise I had in my head goes *click* when it lines up with real life. It's that same moment of clarity.
Hella confusing though.

5. What has been the most embarrassing moment of your life that you're willing to share?

Ah. Well, it's a close-run thing between about six or seven moments that spring easily to mind, and doubtless Greenhamster Dave will bring up a few more.
I'll have to settle for the most...far-reaching moment of sheer soul-shrivelling cringeworthiness, and take readers back to the Bournemouth International Centre in the mid-nineties. I can't remember what year, and to be honest, a lot of the other details have become a bit hazy through willful forgetting. Every so often someone asks a question like this, and if I'm honest, I tell this story.
I had a huge coat at the time, made of what looked like an Aztec hearth rug. It had huge toggle buttons and cavernous pockets, and my family were taking a bit of a short Winter holiday in Bournemouth, and it so happened that a major international snooker tournament was taking place at the BIC.
My parents wanted to go shopping, and my sister was going with them. I however, was at that awkward age of about 13 or 14 when you never want to do things with your family when the option of wandering around large seaside towns looking moody is available.
After a long afternoon playing the 1p and 2p flipper machines I bought a ticket and went into the BIC to watch a few frames before heading back to the hotel.

There were a few games in progress. An enormous bank of seats angled down facing three segregated tables, all of which had games going on. Either side of the tables themselves were two smaller banks of seats - the tableside seats. I sat down about four miles from the tables and watched, squinting, for a bit. After the first frame at the table where James Wattana (the only player there at the time that I recognised) finished, people in the tableside seats changed over.
After the next frame, I walked down and asked a security guard if you had to have special tickets to sit there. He said no, so I moved in to sit down.

The event was being filmed by Sky Sports, and a couple of cameras could be seen in the rafters and behind screens above the table.
The table was being reset for the next frame. As the referee reset the cue ball and Mr. Wattana moved up to break, a lovely-looking couple asked (quietly) if I could move my coat so they could sit down.

I did.
Over the next tenth of a second, if I had heard it, the near-silent silky sound of over four pounds in small change slipping around inside an open pocket made of Aztec carpet material might have given me a warning of what was to come, and I might have avoided it.

As it was, it cascaded out of my coat pockets in a metallic torrent and ricochéd off in £4.30's worth of directions, rattling around under the seat scaffolding, bouncing down the stepped terrace of walkways and rolling almost gleefully off underneath the snooker table and hitting the shoes of all concerned, the players, the referee, the cameramen...oh god. The cameramen. The starting of the frame was delayed.

The worst thing was that people started picking it up and giving it back to me, being very kind, and almost certainly not realising that it was all coppers, I didn't care about the money...I just wanted to escape, to get out of there...run for my life.

Which is what I proceeded to do.