Getting To Know You: 101 Things

1. I laughed when born, instead of crying. This story has been told a lot.

2. My Mother drank 3/4 of a bottle of chianti before her waters broke. This story is told a lot less often, and never in conjunction with the first story.

3. My first word was "Hiya!"

4. I've written a novel but I haven't decided what to call it yet.

5. My favourite painting is 'Lake Keitele' by Akseli Gallen-Kallela.

6. Jessica Timms was the first girl I kissed, at age 15, in a cinema watching Speed. She was 14 and wasn't old enough to get in.

7. Without a single lesson to my name, I am a natural in-a-straight-line windsurfer. Just ask the Isle of Wight Coastguard.

8. I was producer for an hour (3am til 4am) on BBC Radio 1.

9. I went to school with the UK swimmer Darren Mew.

10. As a Student Union DJ, I worked with Jason Donovan, Keith Chegwin, Sonia, and Zippy and George from Rainbow.

11. My first job was working as a cashier in my local stationers for 2.50 an hour. I wasn't allowed to sell cigarettes or porn.

12. My first night at university, there were three girls in my bed when I got there.

13. On a three-month trip around France, Spain, Morocco, Italy and Greece, I was mistaken for a local in every country.

14. I speak what little Spanish I have with an Argentinian accent. (Apparently)

15. I have an expired glider pilot's license.

16. My middle name is Christopher, after my uncle, Chris Chapman.

17. When I met Dave at the age of thirteen, we both wanted to be airline pilots.

18. I have played Mark Anthony in 'Julius Caesar', Little John in 'Robin Hood', and Joseph in 'Joseph and his Technicoloured Dreamcoat'. I pulled out of playing Motel in 'Fiddler in the Roof' for fear of being typecast. I am not Jewish.

19. The first computer I owned was a BBC Acorn. I sold it for a hundred pounds without a disc drive, and considered it quite the coup.

20. I think the meaning of life is different for every single person.

21. I love to fly.

22. My acoustic guitar is older than I am.

23. I had an abortive attempt at reading The Lord of the Rings at age 13. I lost track of who everyone was.

24. My favourite whiskies are Fettercairn and Bunnahabain.

25. The most stupid thing I have done in the name of charity is the Three Peaks Challenge.

26. My favourite writers are Terry Pratchett, Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Kurt Vonnegut, PG Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gabriel Garcia Marquez...it's quite a long list actually.

27. My favourite band is Counting Crows.

28. My favourite albums are Air: Moon Safari, Counting Crows: August and Everything After, Third Eye Blind: Third Eye Blind, Bjork: Debut...

29. I collect different translations of Homer and Jules Verne. (Not Homer Verne - just Homer)

30. I am a sucker for charity shop books.

31. Three days after acquiring my first mobile phone, it was run over by a bus.

32. I received a wallet in the post in the second year of university - it had been stolen from me in Verona, Italy, three years before.

33. I like mornings, especially ones where breakfast and lazy time stretch out for hours.

34. I dislike unsociable and antisocial people.

35. I dislike excessive socialites - the kind of people who are eyeing up the surrounding crowds thirty seconds after crying hello at you, because they are incapable of sustained conversation, and want to cry hello again at someone else.

36. I love being generous.

37. I have only been to three festivals and two gigs. V97, Reading 98, Isle of Wight 2003, Dum dums at the Leicester Charlotte, Divine Comedy & Ben Folds at the Bristol Academy.

38. My favourite lager is Kronenbourg 1664.

39. I grew up in the same town as The Bees.

40. Karl Marx and Charles Darwin have both stayed in my home town.

41. I met the love of my life on a nine day trip to New York City.

42. I found out I was graduating two days before the end of my third year at university - I found out on a train when the Graduation Ceremony organiser rang me up to ask me if I would be attending my graduation at such short notice.

43. I dislike people basing their level of confidence in me on how much confidence I appear to have in myself. I'm acting, for fuck's sake.

44. Whenever setting out to write a book before the age of 13, I always started the pictures first.

45. Hamlet would think me slow to start.

46. I have as close to black hair as makes no difference.

47. I had lowlights put into my hair once. You could only see them if I stood under a bright red light.

48. I know people who are in their sixties who have never been off the Isle of Wight.

49. I truly believe that the Isle of Wight is twenty years behind the rest of the UK. That's why old people feel so at home there.

50. I once had to introduce druggie friends to Drug Squad friends. Socially.

51. I was never officially in Sardinia.

52. I once had a dream so vivid that it depressed me for a week. If I were to kiss the world's most irresistably beautiful woman, she would die. I kissed her anyway and she died in my arms.

53. I often dream that I can fly by lifting one leg and then the other.

54. I can often scare people by simply remembering random bits of information.

55. I make myself laugh by remembering something funny. Sometimes in the middle of meetings.

56. I think Shakespeare and Elvis were of the same species.

57. I can put five shots inside the area of an old 10p piece at 100 metres range, given a .22 rifle I set the sights on. A 'martini' preferably.

58. I have never shot another living being.

59. My parents have an African Grey parrot called George. He imitates the microwave and laughs at sitcoms. He lets my Mother cuddle him.

60. I have a sister called Jemma, three and a half years younger than me. She studies Psychology at Portsmouth University.

61. My Dad, Keith, recently graduated with a first class degree from Portsmouth University.

62. I studied Engineering Design and Appropriate Technology (EDAT) at Warwick University. Try explaining that to your new-found university flatmates over beer and loud music.

63. My Mum is a superlative human being. In addition to this, she is solar powered.

64. I spent my first ever night alone in the house scared out of my wits about the many-limbed spiders at the end of a microscope. When my parents returned home it was established that the little 'orgasms' were in fact my eyelashes.

65. When I was little, my Dad used to scare me with tales of the Magumba Man.

66. I own a disturbingly large number of blue clothes.

67. I once played the barman in a film that was set in my favourite club. 'Twas cool fun.

68. I can't shake the deep-rooted childhood fantasy that one day someone will walk up to me and give me a large amount of money.

69. I once pushed a peanut into my best friend's ear during a science lesson. I was meant to be burning it.

70. I have yet to find a satisfactory answer to a question I asked at age 15: If a photon at lightspeed has mass, how come its mass is not infinite? Nobel Prize please.

71. The more complex the mathematics of fluid dynamics, the more I can see the liquid in the notation.

72. I think poetry is at it's best when it gives impressions, strung together, lending emotion and evoking memory and stealing breath.

73. I have seen glimpses of beauty in science, but they are few and far between. I wish there were more.

74. No one knows Ventnor beach like I do.

75. I love to swim underwater.

76. I love the feeling I get at the tops of things.

77. I can't help but love some people.

78. I have a growing feeling that blogging is taking time away from my writing.

79. I am so in love that I am emigrating to be with her...

80. Since I found that it is added after distillation, I can taste caramel in most brown spirits.

81. The only diet I've ever done was the Atkins Diet - for a month. I stopped when my kitchen was in danger of being enveloped in grease unto the end of time.

82. I think Horace was the most switched-on Greek philosopher.

83. My 'Top Five' are Virginie Ledoyen, Jayne Middlemiss, erm...I'm too indecisive to really have a Top Five.

84. I once felt as though I had fallen into a stage musical dimension. I pressed play on a song whilst DJing and the entire crowd spread out evenly and began to do a dance routine to the music, perfectly co-ordinated for the full song. They turned out to be a music theatre company.

85. Sometimes I like being out in the rain.

86. I never start fights. Arguments, maybe. Fights - never.

87. I have a relationship with my hair. Most of the time I leave it alone, and I trust it won't make me look stupid. When I get involved and try and tell it what to do, it makes me pay.

88. It takes me a long time to feel comfortable with new shoes and clothes.

89. I sometimes have more energy in the morning after staying up all night than after a night of eight hours' shuteye.

90. I have a thing about redheads. Well, to be honest, I have a thing about women, but especially redheads.

91. I am not a chauvinist.

92. I am not a feminist, but sometimes, looking at the evidence, it is difficult to stay this way.

93. I like to be spontaneous; because as a child I got so excited about impending treats I became ill and missed them.

94. The way it snows sometimes without laying disappoints me.

95. I love the coolness in the mornings of really hot days.

96. I know how I like to take my absinthe.

97. I think that wine and absinthe produce the nicest inebriated feelings. Not simultaneously, mind you.

98. I love lo-fi or acoustic versions of great songs.

99. I find it very difficult to walk away from a challenge. Hence I play too many computer games.

100. I need to live somewhere where I can hear either the sea or the sound of wind in trees.

101. I didn't think I'd get to a hundred things.

Thanks for reading, you inquisitive soul.