I have been tagged by Carol Rainbow for the ‘Seven Things You Probably Don’t Know About Me’ thing…

The rules say you have to:

  • Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog
  • Share 7 facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird
  • Tag seven people at the end of your post
  • Let them know they’ve been tagged

So here you have it:

  1. As a young lad I played the cornet. This involved one class a week at a youth club with an old guy who lent me a cornet (my parents sensibly not wanting to buy a young teenager such an expensive instrument!). At the end of each class he gave me a Mars bar. This would probably get him arrested these days.
  2. On leaving university I worked as a stand-up comedian for two years, with a residency in Coventry and perfomances across the country including the Comedy Store in London and the Edinburgh Festival. I earned my Equity (actors’ union) card for my troubles. We once did a ‘warm-up’ gig at Stirling Boys’ Club in Scotland prior to perforing at the Festival. There wasn’t a boy under seventy in the room, and they didn’t appreciate southern softies with their political humour. I shared a performance slot at that festival with the inestimable Martin Soan and the Greatest Show on Legs, performers of the naked balloon dance on Tiswas.
  3. The funniest job I ever did was working for a premium rate telephone company primarily specialising in telephone dating, cricket scores, weather forecasts and horoscopes. This is where I learnt the basics of my computing skills, being sent for training on a behemoth at Marconi in Portsmouth. I also had to go to central London once a week to babysit the dull Russell Grant in a plush recording studio while he invented horoscopes…
  4. If I’d been born a long, long time ago I would have been French and my surname would have been Dieudonné. My ancestors realised that this was not a popular surname in Sussex and gradually changed it to fit in better. I have an ancestor who taught himself several languages whilst tending sheep on the South Downs. I like to think I got a few of his genes, but…
  5. I an not really English, having no interest in drinking tea, watching (or playing football) or driving modern cars at ridiculous speeds. I also have very little to say about house prices, generally. One Christmas my father made a vain attempt to get me interested in football by buying me a Billy Bremner strip, boots and a football. I wore it once, idly kicked the ball against the wall for a few minutes and then hid it away. This came on the back of my bedroom being wallpapered with football wallpaper – the nice touch being that my dad cut out some footballs from the paper and stuck them in random places on the wall.
  6. As a child I was terrified of monkey puzzle trees (not sure what the real name is) and I think it probably had something to do with spiders. To this day I’m not really a spider person and was distressed to see a large tarantula hanging over my bed on holiday in Costa Rica this summer. I survived…
  7. I was traumatised at the age of 21 by being stopped by a store detective in a department store in the south of France and being accused of shoplifting. When nothing was found on me (obviously!) I was accused of stealing the batteries in my walkman. After I had threatened the guy with the consulate he backed down and let me out. I still have an irrational fear of security devices on shop doors (in case somebody put something in my bag or pockets!).

So, let’s see… I’m tagging: Nik Peachey, Graham Stanley, Seth Dickens, Ana Falcao, Heike Philp, Eric Baber and Elek Mathe. Enjoy!