I was tagged a little while ago by Lou over at the always-entertaining The Archers at the Larches (I’m sure most of you know and love her already, but she’s in my blogroll at the side there if you don’t. Visit now! But come back afterwards).
I must say, I enjoyed being probed by you, Lou. In fact, I haven’t had such a thorough probing for quite a while. You brought things out of me that I didn’t even realise were in there, they were buried so deep.
Right, that’s quite enough of that.
1 Snog, Marry, Avoid (this exam question relates either to David Cameron or President Obama)
Marry Obama, I guess. Avoid Cameron at all costs. But then get blind drunk at the White House Christmas party and snog Cameron under a table. Get divorced by Obama. Oh God, why do I always make such a mess of things?
2 What’s the worst Christmas present you’ve ever received?
It was a Tiny Tears doll, when I’d made it quite clear to Santa that I wanted a pony. A pony, Santa. Can’t you fucking read?
3 Describe the worst public toilets you’ve ever visited.I’m afraid to say they were in France. It was 1983 and we’d stopped at some garage/service station en route to our campsite, and I was confronted with what looked like a shower tray embedded in the ground, crusted with merde. No lock on the door, of course; I had to take one leg out of my pastel-blue pedal pushers and hover.
4 What is the food you most dislike and why?
Primeval-ly things that look like they belong in the Jurassic era: mussels, oysters, squid, octopus. Swamp food.
5 Do you prefer the curtains/windows open or shut when you sleep?
My curtains are permanently open, baby! Well, they are since I had the children. The GP says it’s possible to have them fixed, but I’d have to go private.
6 How competitive are you?
I don’t have an alpha personality. I am happy to admit that most people can do most things better than I can. Apart from spell – I can spell like the wind. Anyone wanna be in a spell-off with me? Huh? Step up to the plate and let’s see what you’re made of! Hey, loser, there’s no ‘e’ in Wedgwood!
7 What’s the best wedding or birthday party you’ve attended?
Being hugely, almost pathologically repressed, I find most weddings and formal events a little uncomfortable. I want to shrivel up when people talk about their love for each other, and particularly when they read each other poems. ‘My true love hath my heart and I have his…’ TOO INTIMATE!! Now I’m getting unwelcome images of Nigel pounding away at Kerry over the coffee table in the Holiday Inn Bridal Suite.
8 What’s the best chat-up line you’ve ever heard/used?
I grew up in the West Midlands in the 1980s – we didn’t have chat-up lines. A bloke on the pull would just rub the legs of his shellsuit together, and while you were distracted by the high-pitched squeaking sound, he’d get you in a headlock and drag you into his Ford Capri.
9 What’s better, a bath or a shower?
For saving the planet, a shower. But you can’t beat lounging in the bath with Radio 4’s A Book at Bedtime playing in the background. Plus, your breasts float and look 20 years younger.
10 How superstitious are you?
I’m not. Although I do swear by my ‘lucky’ steroids; you might scoff, but I really believe they helped me win the mums’ race at sports day last year.
Now I have to nominate five bloggers to answer my own questions. This will require at least another week’s thought and a few lie-downs on my chaise longue. I’ll be back.
Not waving but ironing 
PMSL! France, Eurocamp, 1983, hole in the ground! Christ I even had pale blue bermuda shorts – that was a really weird read 🙂
Yes, we were on our way to Eurocamp too! Perhaps our paths (of wee) crossed at the very same petrol station! Mine was the orangey stuff (I was a bit dehydrated)
Oh that would be too weird – Summer 1983 – Vias Plage just along from Cap D’Agde before it went all nudist. I just had a wee look at it now and boy it’s changed in the last 27 years!
Our Marina broke down on the way back to Calais so we had an unscheduled overnight stop on a Sunday in the arse-end of nowhere in the grubbiest guesthouse known to man – well non French man – the toothbrushes in the bidet was a nice tough we thought.
Me too, me too! I remember staying on numerous French campsites as a child and the toilets were, without exception, disgusting. I’m telling you, no amount of crepes could make up for those toilets. I still have nightmares…
Sorry, French people, but it seems your toilets have traumatised a whole generation of British women. Or maybe you just directed every Brit tourist to the special ‘Tourist’ loos, while you reserved the pristine, Japanese-style, freshly bleached toilets for yourselves? Ah yes, we see your game…
Stop cracking me up or I will be forced to write “LOL” and “BWAHAHAHA”. I may even have to resort to an emoticon or two. It’s just not acceptable.
It’s okay, there’s an emoticon amnesty on my site. Bring them forth! I’ll show you mine if you show me yours!
Oh, who am I kidding? I’ve no idea how to do them.
Mate, your toilet anecdote is NOTHING. You don’t know toilet horror until you go into a Macdonalds in Barcelona in August to find that a circus troupe of women on Lady Week have been before you- at least two of whom clearly in the midst of some kind of gastric illness- and left it all for you in the one cubicle that was free. It was over ten years ago and I’m still traumatized. And I’m, allegedly, a cat.
Ooooh, nasty! Yes, that definitely tops the shower tray. But what were you doing in Macdonalds, Kitty? Surely you have your own gold-plated Travellitter Tray (TM)?
It was an accident. I wasn’t even meant to be in Spain.
Oysters? oysters? who ever thought that snot in a shell would be good to eat? agree with you about the toilets/weddings/spelling and most of the others…I’m still in the West Midlands….but working on an escape tunnel….could we be related?
I know a man with a van who could smuggle you out, Libby. Unless you’re in Cradley Heath. He refuses to go there.
If Archimedes had been a woman he might not have ever got out of that bath.
I’m up for the spell-a-thon. I know there’s an extra ‘i’ in liaise.
Didn’t you go to Cambridge or something? Think I might be a bit out of my depth here. Can I have ‘Danish fashion designers’ as my specialist subject? (Those years spent checking the fashion spreads on a women’s magazine have got to be good for something). ‘Day Birger et Mikkelsen’ – top that, you boffin, you!
ok, no.8 is still killing me…
I only wish it were a joke, Big Mamma. All my romances were conducted in Ford Capris. Ah,the smell of Brut, the sound of Level 42 on the car stereo, the wind not having any effect whatsoever on my hair (damn, Insett hairspray was GOOD) as we cruised the streets of Redditch…
Oh god, you just parachuted me back to a campsite in St Benoit sur Loire, summer 1984. The horror, the horror… (and I was in bright pink cotton knickerbockers – Marimekko, if you don’t mind. Ah, happy days….)
Knickerbockers – God, I’d forgotten all about them, Potty Mummy. Now I recall that I wore bottle green corduroy ones to a school disco once. Why did you have to remind me? Why??
Spellathon… floccinaucinihilipilificationismisticosistology.
Oh, shit, think I missed out that ‘e’.
Loos??? Rome. 1976. No loo paper. Time of month. Hell hole. Had to use old loo roll to wipe, as it were, and then had to dispose of THAT in my bag and look all fresh when I emerged. I am still damaged.
As for your curtains…
You’re a bad girl, but hell you make me laugh…
Yep, that also tops the shower tray. There are some very traumatic stories coming to light. I can only imagine your pain, Ladybird.
I am considering posting a picture of my (pre-op) curtains. They are scarlet with a lovely floral pattern.
God what a laugh… and I’d also like to moni… nonim… nommi… put myself forward for the Spellathon… I’m a real wordmonger, me – I even know about the 2nd R in prerogative – so ner!
I’m starting to regret laying down this particular gauntlet. I see that I can’t dazzle you, Debs, with ‘desiccated’ and ‘discreet/discrete’. We’re now getting into the murky waters of Bobby Brown lyrics. I am retiring to lick my wounds…
Fab! That could almost be me answering those questions! As for the toilets…. shit (literally) I lived with them for 5 years. I can offer lessons on how to use them and remain upright/sane. I’m up for the spellathon. I can spell baccalaureate and bourgeoisie, see, I can do it in two languages!
Are French toilets much improved, Previously? I confess I haven’t been back for a good 20 years. I’d like to think people there actually sit down nowadays when nature calls. Please expand!
The curtains quip is filthy and I wish I could pinch and use it myself, but somehow I don’t think it would work. Given the obsession with toilets in this thread I’m surprised no one’s attempted to spell diarrhoea.
Very impressive, Mr Fathers. Do you, like me, keep a 1,786-page Collins English dictionary beside your computer for those awkward moments? No?
Oh.
Defenetly up for spelawotsit. Cunt me in.
Hee, hee, that’s brilliant, Deer Baby!
Deer Baby’s comment wins the “Best Comment of the Week…nay Month…nay possibly Year Award”.
Just found you via Deer Baby and so glad I did. Feel I know you, er, very well now. Particularly liked the mating call of the shell-suited male. And the wedding night imagery – nobody ever talks about it but we all know they’re going at it like rabbits (or drinking cups of tea, talking about how tired they are). Look forward to more.
I fell drunkenly asleep on my wedding night before any coffee-table shenanigans (thereby setting the pattern for married life, heh, heh).
Hope you’ll come back again, Life.
Breasts look so much better in the bath, tis true.
It’s when one’s stomach starts breaking the surface of the water that it all gets a bit depressing…
In 1984 I had a pink knickerbocker suit too, Potty Mummy and NWBI, which I loved wearing …it was only years later when I saw a photograph and my son almost wet himself that I realised what a horror I looked……you’ve just reminded me of something I should have forgotten completely by now…memories coming back to haunt me. As for the spellathong I think I’d be exselunt..
A knickerbocker SUIT, Diney? You mean, with a waistcoat and everything? That Lady Di had a lot to answer for!
Ah, the tray toilet. It’s popular here in the Middle East too and the local “spray-don’t-wipe” culture means the loos are always without paper and swimming in water.
How does one spray oneself while standing above a tray toilet, Kate? I’m afraid I actually do want to know this (it’s for my book, ‘Toilets of the World’)
I didn’t get ‘spray-don’t-wipe’ either. Couldn’t bring myself to touch the spray thing due to imagining who had just done what and now I have to share the tool…….? No no no.
With you on the French toilets. Had one interesting one in a Paris ‘hotel’. Wasn’t especially filthy but had a timer light switch – outside the door. Nice. Wasn’t room to sit anyway with the door shut. So…… face squashed against this door, knees crushed together, arm jerking out backwards to find the toilet paper *click* now plunged into total darkness……… Who needs the Folies Bergerac?
Did I spell that right?
PS Just wondering about living in Tunbridge Wells amongst all those curtain tweekers…….. Get you!
We all tweak our curtains like mad round here, Madame. It’s that kind of place.
As for the toilet-in-the-dark, how fantastically French. Sounds like some brilliant art installation. ‘Alone in ze darkness, one can muse on ze ultimate uncertainty of life – will you wipe your behind on ze toilet paper, or ze face flannel?’
‘scuse me I must have been cleaning the chickens out when you posted this! Just laughed and laughed. Santa is a git isn’t he?
Not EVEN going to comment on number 5! (but if you get the name of a good surgeon, let me know….)