Versatile Blogger Award

The lovely Tampa BookWorm has given me

For which the rules are:

1. Thank and link back to the person who gave you this award
2. Share 7 things about yourself
3. Pass the award along to 10 bloggers who you have recently discovered and who you think are fantastic for whatever reason! (In no particular order...)
4. Contact the bloggers you've picked and let them know about the award.

Seven things about me I don’t think I’ve listed anywhere else:

1. Perhaps partly as a result of spending so much time staring at books (and now knitting needles and computer screens) I’m short-sighted and have been a part-time wearer of glasses since I was 11. I refuse even to consider contacts because they’re just the sort of small, easily-overlooked thing I’d forget on my way out the door, and anyway I like my glasses.

2. My favourite part of any newspaper is the cryptic crossword. I usually don’t succeed in finishing them, but I do enjoy trying. My dream is one day to solve one of the Times cryptic clues that pop up in Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels.

3. I sometimes think I have peculiar taste in non-fiction. Among the books I checked out today, for instance, are a history of prostitution in London, and a book about how the Grande Armée was ravaged by typhus. I’ve also read books about graverobbers, the Black Death, Marie Antoinette’s wardrobe, cholera, the history of gossip, and a biography of an eighteenth-century rhinoceros.*

4. When I was in Years 11 and 12, classes ended at 3.30 instead of 4 and I would walk the three kilometres home rather than wait 45 min for a bus. And it took me one and a half years to figure out why passing motorists kept honking at me. Whatever my flaws, vanity obviously isn’t one of them.

5. But procrastination is. I’m terrible. Usually because I decide to leave things for later in the day, and then find I’m too tired to bother. Which is the downside to being a night owl in a morning person’s world.

6. I actually miss my hometown’s pea-soup fogs, the ones where you could look out the window and be unable to see the back fence. There was something magical about walking to the bus stop in a private cocoon of mist, watching the trees materialise out of the white and the dew-drops sparkling on the spider-webs, and feeling like I was alone in a quiet world.

Made it damn hard to read the number on the bus, though.

7. Not having had anyone both able and willing to teach me, I have never learnt how to ride a bicycle. And since that fact made me a laughingstock in primary school, this is the first time I’ve admitted it to anyone in nearly fifteen years.

I’ve been far too remiss in my blog reading over the last few months (procrastinating again...) to have discovered any new blogs, so Rules 3 and 4 will just have to be skipped.

* Respectively: Digging up the Dead by Druin Burch, The Great Mortality by John Kelly, Queen of Fashion by Caroline Weber, The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, Scandal by Roger Wilkes, and Clara’s Grand Tour by Glynis Ridley.