No sooner do I write about the composer Sorabji and the licence he enjoyed when interviewed by pushy people who wanted to know such fundamentals as his date of birth, than I am tagged by the egregious Matt Brown to bare all before the blogosphere.
I have to confess that I am a sucker for this sort of thing. I’d love to appear on Desert Island Discs. Indeed, I have been a guest on something very similar on BBC Radio Norfolk, which, starved as it is of anyone or anything showing even the vaguest twitch of intellectual pretension, jumped on me almost as soon as I set foot in the county.
And my kids debate earnestly whether I’d prefer to be on Strictly Come Dancing or I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. Some small experience of fieldwork predisposes me to the latter, though I wouldn’t mind the former, so long as I could get to dance with Karen Hardy. Not that such shows would have skimmed even the most superficial layers of Z-list celebrity before the public will have tired of them, so that bottom-feeders such as scientists, writers and science writers will never get a chance to be dragged in.
Though, I must confess, I did take part in University Challenge, representing the University of Leeds. We were doing rather well (we edged past Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; trashed Girton; and ground U of Wales Swansea into the dust by 415 points to 70) until our wipe-out in the quarter finals by some suave graduates from Dundee. A better argument in favour of a separatist resolution of the West Lothian Question has never been made.
That was almost a quarter of a century ago. This is now. What one has to do is fill in some answers to some impertinent questions and then tag four other bloggers, who will feel themselves obliged to do the same.
Brian Clegg has rebelled against this as he doesn’t like chain letters, so if one feels the finger of fate tapping on your shoulder, remember it was just the salmon mousse. I must say, I agree with Brian to some extent, but his moral stance conflicts with the fervid desires of my not-so-inner Media Tart. I have finessed this conflict with what I think is a very crafty strategy, which should, I think, be the nemesis of this memesis. I hope Brian doesn’t mind, though. And, while I’m here, and in that Sorabjian spirit, don’t expect my answers to bear any relationship to the truth. You have been warned.
- jobs you’ve had:*
1. Milk-tanker calibration assistant;
2. Reclassifier of fossil fish;
3. Labeller, fruit-squash-factory production line;
4. Potions Master.
- movies you could watch over & over:*
1. This Is Spinal Tap
2. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
3. Monty Python’s Life of Brian
4. The Lord of the Rings, extended DVD editions (buy one, get the other two free).
- places you’ve lived:*
1. Leeds
2. Cambridge
3. The Hundred Aker Wood;
4. Cromer, Norfolk (hooray!)
- TV shows you love to watch:*
1. Footballers’ Wives (series 1)
2. I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here
3. Strictly Come Dancing
4. Blue Cow (on Story Makers on CBeebies)
- places you’ve been on holiday:*
1. Stiffkey (about 20 miles west of Cromer);
2. Lydstep Holiday Park, Tenby, Wales;
3. Cromer (until I moved there permanently)
4. Polmassick, Cornwall.
- websites you visit daily:*
1. Nature Network
2. Nature’s manuscript handling site (A guy has to earn a living)
3. Nature’s remote access portal (ditto)
4. Petrona
- of your favorite foods:*
1. Waitrose coconut yoghurt;
2. The Great British Delicacy – Fish’n’Chips;
3. Sunflower seeds;
4. A proper cheese’n’onion sandwich, which must consist of proper granary bread cut at least half an inch thick, lashings of proper butter (none of this nancy-boy running-about-knees-bend-advancing-behaviour donkey-bottom-biter animal-horse-trough-water so-called monsieur low-fat spread nonsense), proper mature cheddar, and red onions that you have grown yourself. Pukka.
- places you’d rather be:*
1. Cromer
2. Did I say Cromer?
3. … er …
4. That’s it.
- lucky people to tag:*
1. Brian
2. Brian, which is called Brian
3. It’s your round, Brian.
4. Has anyone seen Brian?
I now have the strong urge to edit my post to tag you back, thus creating a circular reference that will presumably disappear up its own orifice. I’m reminded of my programming days, when the ‘structured go to’ was all the rage, and I could never understand why no one wanted to use the ‘structured come from’.
I might have known you two would find an innovative way to end the Curse of the Meme, between you.
And thanks, Henry, for the lovely compliment re Petrona. And, unlike the Nature Network, Nature web portal and Nature manuscript tracking system, I get a live link! I am doubly chuffed (as well as relieved that you did’t break your infinite loop with Brian and ask me to do this thing as I don’t think I could answer any of the questions, with the exception of LOTR times 3 EEs.)
Hah hah!
Brian, I once edited a book on computational genomics, and pulled the ‘recursion, simple: see simple recursion’ trick in the index.