Half a Century!

No, it isn't my 50th birthday yet.  Just my 50th post on A White Horizon.

I thought I'd better do something to mark the occasion.  My initial thought was, "How about I write up fifty facts about myself?" - followed shortly by "That's a bit boring.  I should do fifty real facts and fifty fake ones, and mix them all up!"

So what you will see below is a list of 100 claims about myself, half of which are true, and half of which are a bit more on the fictional side.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it: work out (or at least take a guess) which is which, and post your answers in the comments area.  The truth will be revealed in a future blog post.

Advance warning: it’s not as simple as it might seem – a lot of the false claims are not too far from the truth, but with one or two details altered in order to falsify the overall statement.  But on the bright side, I think a few answers are given away in the previous 49 posts, so a certain amount of help is available if you can be bothered with the re-reading.

So here goes - FIFTY FACTS AND FIFTY FIBS:

1. I was born in Southampton.
2. If you follow my dad’s-dad’s-dad etc line back far enough, one of them was a second cousin of Henry VIII.
3. I hold Australian dual citizenship.
4. I am the oldest of 5 siblings.
5. I have a high-functioning autistic spectrum condition.
6. I’ve always been single.
7. I got dumped once, but it was a bit irrelevant because I didn’t know I was in a position to be dumped from.
8. My eyes are green.
9. I need glasses because I’m long-sighted.
10. I am a morning person.
11. Breakfast, for me, is usually some sort of cereal with milk on it.
12. I’ve got a random patch of hair on my lower back, and I’ve never been able to work out whether it’s meant to be there.
13. I’ve never had a filling, blood transfusion, broken bone, braces, piercing, tattoo, hangover, or basically anything.
14. I hate having anything tight around my neck.
15. I am allergic to lavender.
16. I have an irrational phobia of spreadsheet software.
17. My favourite colour is white.
18. I have three left feet.
19. My first home was in Havant, near Portsmouth, but we moved to Bristol when I was 3 weeks old.
20. After leaving Havant, we lived in Bristol for six years.
21. One of my earliest memories is of getting scared to death by the unexplained presence of a small, stuffed E.T. toy in my bedroom when I was about 2 or 3.
22. One of my clearest memories from my early childhood in Bristol involves our old Peugeot 104 breaking down in the carpark exit at Asda.
23. During my three years in primary school, I earned notoriety for accidentally flooding the men’s room.
24. One of my oddest memories from primary school was when my class was taken to the staff room and fed turnips.  I can’t remember the reasons, just the vegetables.
25. I used to be an avid roller-skater.
26. I set fire to my hair once, I think when I was 7 or thereabouts.
27. I’ve lived in a hotel room for about three weeks.
28. I once had an ice-cream birthday cake which turned out to be sesame-seed flavour.
29. I’ve lived in Hong Kong for two years.
30. While living in Hong Kong, one of my most prized possessions was a two- or three-inch-long snail shell which I found in a gutter.
31. Throughout our stay in Hong Kong, we had to get a non-air-conditioned bus to and from church, because the bus operator never bothered putting any on that particular route, the lousy so-and-sos.
32. I was forced to learn to touch-type when I was about 8 or 9.  I resented it a bit at the time, but I now find it extremely useful, so I’m retroactively grateful.
33. In my previous house, I had a playroom in the garage conversion.
34. I once helped to fell a giant conifer which had been irreparably damaged by a storm.
35. I have been to France, Germany and Poland in the last ten years.
36. I studied the piano (not sure whose idea it was) for a few years, but gave up after passing ABRSM Grade 4.
37. I was once in the same room as one of the guys who designed the basic audio-handling layer for the MPEG-2 video coding algorithms.  I didn’t get to speak to him, as I don’t know any Japanese, and the translators were busy.
38. I’ve been involved in three road accidents since passing my driving test in September 2007.
39. I only have a driving license for automatic cars.
40. I’ve had a week’s work experience with the BBC.
41. I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in Media Production.
42. The most expensive film I’ve been involved with was a final-year college project which cost just under £500.
43. I spent all three of my final-year Media Production theory exams rambling on about Avatar, after having seen the film just once, and ended up getting a First in the module even though I hated it (the module, not the film).
44. I’ve been to five consecutive Root Hill camps, and have no intention of stopping if I can help it.
45. If I had to pick a favourite bit of the Bible, it’d probably be the last two chapters of Revelation.
46. The Screwtape Letters is one of my favourite pieces of literature ever.
47. I own four Rubik’s Cubes of different sizes, and can solve any of them within 10 minutes.
48. And I know the solution to a 2x4 Rubik’s Magic too.
49. I have met Ratatouille writer/director Brad Bird.
50. My favourite animated film is Kung Fu Panda.
51. Shrek 2 is the only animated film which I’ve seen at the cinema more than once.
52. I have seen some episodes of The Simpsons, but never seen any Futurama.
53. I have seen all 74 episodes of Doctor Who aired since the show restarted in 2005 (i.e. Rose onwards) at least once each, and several of them twice or more.
54. Continuing the point about Doctor Who: I can even remember who wrote each one.
55. The Lord of the Rings is the only multi-film series for which I’ve seen every instalment on the big screen.
56. I have all six Star Wars films on DVD.
57. I own exactly three films on Blu-ray: Inception, Up and How to Train Your Dragon.
58. The composer responsible for the greatest number of CDs in my collection is Howard Shore.
59. Continuing the point about CDs: the second is Lady Gaga.
60. I am a fan of 3-D film technology, and one of my ambitions is to obtain a 3-D camera.
61. I once made my own pair of 3-D glasses and used them to watch a DVD.
62. I went to the UK premiere of TRON: Legacy.
63. I have never used a computer with a Linux-based operating system.
64. When I was younger, I used to like building towns out of wooden blocks, cardboard boxes and Lego, and I’ve got photographic evidence to prove it.
65. I used to have a model railway in the garage, but I gave up on it in the end because the board warped, the tracks kept getting stupidly dirty and the trains never ran very well.
66. Both of my current computers are iMacs.
67. I did some C++ programming once, but I’ve forgotten nearly all of it now.
68. I have dabbled in computer games programming in Visual Basic.  My biggest project was a Breakout clone.
69. I am proficient at coding web pages in PHP.
70. The bus I used to get to sixth form was so unreliable that I wrote a poem about its failings.
71. I have produced a series of small sculptural works from a broken Shloer bottle.
72. I have built a 5 x 7 ft mosaic, using over 400 custom-designed and hand-crafted tiles.
73. I sometimes like devising writing systems for the languages spoken in my fictional worlds, and in more recent years I’ve made a point of never giving them 26 letters.  Ossirow has 23, Dyngarria Eribit has 30 (well, sort of 29 and a half), and Grud Ballum has 24, 27, 38 or 41 depending how you interpret the system.
74. I have written nearly 2000 comic strip episodes, and the total is still climbing.
75. I can draw geometric stuff, and cartoon people, but I tend to fail epically if I ever try to draw a realistic picture of a human.
76. I’ve been known to draw something, and have absolutely no idea what it’s meant to be.
77. I have owned three camcorders.
78. One of my life ambitions is to make a big-budget film adaptation of The Pilgrim’s Progress.
79. I have a vague, half-baked contingency plan in case I ever get invited to write for Primeval.
80. I have a vague, half-baked contingency plan in case I ever get invited to write for Doctor Who.
81. My bedroom walls are yellow.  I chose the colour.
82. I love Marmite.
83. I once took six months to eat a Bounty bar.
84. I dislike Creme Eggs as I find them too sweet.
85. Most of my favourite foods are French.
86. Most of my socks are green or brown.
87. I dislike centaurs – not for any philosophical reason, just because their physiology is so badly thought out.
88. I have a basic first aid qualification.
89. I have eaten kangaroo.
90. I go swimming two mornings per week.
91. I like watching jellyfish.
92. Guinea-pigs freak me out.
93. My favourite town in the world is Exeter.
94. I’ve got an old diary (started when I was 7 going on 8), whose cover features some remarkably well-preserved petals from my back-garden sunflower crop of 1995.
95. One of my friends is an Oscar-winning film composer.
96. I once got a 50p coin from Gibraltar in my change.  I’ve kept it ever since.
97. I have an antique fibre-optic lamp, on indefinite loan from my Grandad.
98. I usually vote Labour.
99. I firmly believe that you are never too old for Lego.
100. This is my fiftieth blog post.

This could get confusing...


- The Colclough