Eight things you will never know about me.

Upon reflection I think I may have overplayed the grumpy old man card, so here's a revised 8 things. Bear in mind though that I am the very last person to do this, so I'm buggered if I can find eight others who've not yet done it.

1/. 'I am a churlish sod from time to time'- yeah well this stands. I'm prone to grumpines of the highest order, and I can be downright stroppy when hungry. I blame it on hypoglycemia, which is I think a made up complicated name for getting stroppy when hungry. Avoid me if I've skipped breakfast, and if in doubt, offer me a biscuit.

2/. 'I don't actually know eight people to pass this on to.' It's true, I am positively the last person to hear gossip, and internet gossip even more so. There are lower order primates more connected than me.

3/. Used to be in the Royal Navy as a trainee officer for a vanishingly brief and fairly miserable period. All I can say is that it wasn't as much fun as Sea Cadets, and that's where I'd got the idea from. The only upside is that they paid for me to bum around India and Thailand for three months when I was 18.

4/. I put all my worldy possesions into storage, moved out of my flat, and walked to Cornwall to see the eclipse in 1999. I'd finished uni, was fairly optimistic that something would sort itself out, and fancied a walk to clear my head. It was great, it was the fittest I've ever been in my life, and it really didn't matter that it was cloudy for the eclipse.

5/. The most sporty thing I did at school was being best at holding my breath and 'doing a mushroom' in the pool. That's not a scatological reference. I don't really do sport.

6/. Since turning 30 I have decided that it's pointless trying to pretend that I am in any sense cool, and that I am in fact a hopeless geek, perhaps even a nerd. I like cars and planes and tanks and documentaries about battleships, and toy soldiers and lego and spaceships and geology and computergames, and damnit I can't help it! I like poetry too, and the opera, and music 'n stuff. But I'm still a geek.

7/. I once appeared in the Brighton Argus pretending to be a scottish poet- I was helping run a poetry reading, and we'd got the paper to come down to meet the poets and do a shoot on the beach, but one of them went to the pub to see a mate, so I pretended to be him and stood in the background staring off into the Channel being all moody and poetic.

8/. I play pool left handed. Nothing else, just pool. Acording to the very lovely Chris McManus it's not at all unusual to do one or two things 'other handedly' to what you usually do. His book "Right Hand, Left Hand" does a brilliant job of explaining the may varied aspects of assymetry, and he was really kind to chat to me for an afternoon when I was an undergraduate at a totally different university looking at this area of neuropsychology.

Right. That's it. I'll have a think about who to send this too, but everyones so much more popular and connected than me that I doubt there's anyone on the planet who's not yet done this!