9 posts tagged “qotd”
How many houses have you lived in? How is where you live now different from where you grew up?
Fourteen, apparently.
Born in Oxfordshire. Moved before I was a year old, to ...
Lancashire, where my dad had a job. My mother thought that this would be their family home forever. It was a five bedroomed house with a decent sized garden and plenty of room for the family to expand (which it did, over the next four years, to the tune of 3 more children). However, in 1983, she discovered that my father was expected to take over the family estate, of which she had had no previous knowledge. Bit of a shock, that. So we all upped sticks and moved to ...
Somerset, where the family lived until 2001. However, in that time I went away to various boarding schools and college.
Prep school: gorgeous Jacobean manor house in the middle of the Dorset countryside, where we led an idyllic Enid Blyton existence, climbing trees, riding ponies, and roller skating.
Senior school 1: by the sea, near Bristol. I liked this, as we lived in a seaside town in Lancashire and I've always had a soft spot for grey, rainy, out of season days by the sea.
Senior school 2: hideous boxy house in a grotty little Somerset town. I spent the bare minimum of time here, and left as soon as I could.
Senior school 3: Back in the Dorset countryside. Sadly, as a girl, I was in a bland new-build house appended on to the main (gorgeously ornate Portland stone) building, but at least it meant we didn't have to walk on cockroaches when the fire alarms went off in the middle of the night, as the boys allegedly had to.
On leaving school, I went to Stratford-upon-Avon for a year, where I lived in two different houses.
House One was a student houseshare, where we lived in the usual squalor and had endless fights with our landlord, who lived next door, about him walking in whenever he felt like it. At the end of the year, when I thought I still had a month left on my contract, it was revealed that our letting agent had made a fuck-up and we were getting thrown out of the house because the landlord was selling. This worked out well, however, because it meant that the letting agent put us into accommodation for free for the final month of summer term.
House Two was an ex-brothel which had been newly converted (we were the first residents) into individual bedsits. It was also closer to college and to town, so was a bit of a result all round.
When I finished the course in Stratford, I failed to get into drama school and had turned down my place at Birmingham Uni, so I moved to London to do a secretarial course. I lived in for the course, in one of those fabulous four-storey town houses that West London does so well. We used to sneak up onto the roof for cigarettes, but got busted when the residents of the garden square below complained about all the fag butts we flicked off the roof. Oops.
When the course finished, I spent a miserable month living in Neasden, on a friend's sofa, while I looked for somewhere permanent to live. I was utterly depressed and used to scare the shit out of my parents by phoning them from payphones in tube stations, crying.
Luckily, before things got so bad that I had to leave London, I found a flatshare in Westbourne Park/Maida Vale (depending on how pretentious I was feeling). The girl that lived there had advertised in Loot and I made an appointment to see the flat at 8pm. However, I turned up early, while she was still watching Eastenders. We discovered a common interest there and then, and she offered me the flat straight away. It was great for a while, but sadly it all went pear-shaped when she moved her boyfriend in and then lost her job.
I therefore moved to Kilburn, to live in another student houseshare. A little different from my Stratford experience, the house was owned by one of the girls and we were far more likely to be found drinking wine and cooking cordon-bleu meals in a spotless kitchen than to be rolling in drunk and ordering takeaways at 3am. I lived there for four years, before moving out to ...
... buy my own flat, where I'm still living now. I like it, but I'm restless. The area has changed a lot in the ten or so years that I've been living here, and the last of my friends still living here are currently planning to emigrate. Maybe it's time to explore new places and push the number up to fifteen.
How many pair of shoes do you have? Out of those pairs, how many do you wear more than a few times a year?
Submitted by fightinggale.
I was going to answer that, but then I got distracted by a clothes moth fluttering around my face. There were a couple of abortive attempts to catch it and squish it before I eventually succeeded.
After a split second of triumphal dancing, I realised that splatting it into oblivion on the cream sofa probably wasn't the best idea I've ever come up with.
Drat.
What have you tried in life that you just weren't very good at?
Abstinence.
Someone's writing a biography of your life (to date). What is the best/worst chapter of the book?
Submitted by Ross.
Best: the one in which I meet Sean Bean, he falls desperately in love with me, divorces his wife, marries me and we live happily ever after.
Worst: the one in which I wake up and realise it was all just a dream.
How often are you wrong? Do you find it difficult to admit it when you are?
Submitted by emily ann.
1. Never.
2. See above.
Have you ever had plastic or elective surgery? Did you tell anyone? Why or why not?
Submitted by Beth Punches.
Ha. If I'd had plastic surgery then you could certainly take it as a recommendation against my surgeon.
No, I haven't had it. Would I ever? Yes, quite possibly.
When is the last time you stayed up all night?
Sadly not recently. I've listened to this song a lot, though.
What are some charitable causes that you support or would like to support?
I don't like to talk about my works of charidee - but I snogged a right minger the other week, if that counts.
What are the weirdest song titles in your playlist or music collection?
Submitted by Charline.
Off the top of my head, because I can't be bothered to trawl through nearly 5000 songs:
'Everyone's a Little Bit Racist'
'The Internet is for Porn'
'Another Dead Cow'
