Twenty things about me

Over the last couple of weeks the readership of this blog has jumped. Surtout bienvenue aux lecteurs francophones. Merci d’etre venus et je vous souhaite un bon cours d’anglais. This means that for the first time there are people who don’t know me from Adam reading these pages. I have decided to do something about this. Here is a list I wrote on the train on the way home from work tonight. It’s a list of twenty things I want you to know about me.
1. I can’t grow sideburns. A beard – no problem! But as for sideburns there is a point just above my mandible where no hair will grow.
2. I can tell you every yen / cent I have spent over the last two years and how I spent it: I keep a notebook.
3. My photograph appears in a Japanese junior-high school textbook. A photographer came to a community volunteer lesson I took when I first came to Japan. I think it was a civics book.
4. Tragically, I know what the smell of a decomposing dead body is like. The woman in the apartment next to me in Luxembourg passed away and nobody found her for days. We thought the drains in the building had blocked up.
5. The greatest terror I have ever felt is when my friend nearly drowned in Laos and I couldn’t help her.
6. For the last two and a half years I have cut my own hair. I estimate I have saved about 1,000 Euro in doing so. Hairdressers are not cheap in Japan.
7. I was first in my primary school to be able to tie shoelaces. I used to have to tie laces for all my little classmates, as well. This was the height of my hand-eye co-ordination. Now, aged 31, I can’t sew on a button or fuse a plug to save my life.
8. I am flat-footed.
9. One of my happiest moments of all time was scoring ‘hyaku ten man ten’ (100%) from a karaoke singing game there a few months ago. I sang the hell out of the theme tune from ‘Titanic’.
10. The physical thing I’d most like to change about myself: my speaking voice.
11. I have been forcibly removed from a fast food restaurant twice, and dragged back into a restaurant for spilling wine and trying to leave without paying once!
12. I was / am definitely a street angel / home devil. I have thrown remote controls and dishes at my sister and tied my brother up and put pins in his bed (which weren’t found for ages)…to name but a few incidents.
13. But I have also been wrongly accused. My sister still thinks I hit her in the head with a golf club on purpose and my brother thinks I tried to poison him with an unhealthy dose of chocolate powder. I was a victim of circumstance on both counts.
14. I have sung on Irish national TV and radio.
15. I can say ‘Kiss my Ass’ in Indonesian and nothing else. Not ‘Hello’ or ‘Please’ or ‘Thank you’.
16. My happiest childhood activity was watching the clock they showed on TV after the test-card but before the real programs began. You could put your finger on the screen and pretend you were making the digits of the clock-face disappear.
17. I have never broken a bone but I have fallen on my head more times than I care to remember. It explains a lot.
18. I have a real phobia of speaking on the telephone. And not just in an ‘I hate it’ sort of a way. I mean in a heart-palpitatingly, get-the-sweats sort of a way. And it’s getting worse with age.
19. I’m skinny but I can put away more food than anyone else I know. I think I would do great on one of those crazy all-you-can-eat challenges. But I will never participate in one as I think they’re immoral.
20. My heroes, the people I most aspire to be like, are my parents.