Meming Cats and Dogs

1. Link to the person’s blog who tagged you: http://theindividualvoice.blogspot.com/
2. Post these rules on your blog.
3. List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself.
4. Tag seven random [?] people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog

 I’ve been memed by the Individual Voice for the above and below are my random thoughts.  I will tag some others for this one (sorry, apologies!)   Finding seven (random) people is a bit of a challenge but then, I have been randomly picked as well – I think.

 Seven random and/or weird facts about me:

1. Unusual or weird?  Very difficult, what’s normal to me might be quite weird to you and vice versa.  Currently I’m juggling my life between trying to be successful in my career/job (well, seven jobs during fourteen years in England who would not be? ) AND balancing that with what I think are life’s priorities: people you love/want to be with, writing, reading, that something else that somehow or other you never catch.  But I have been succesful as far as career is concerned: worked in three completely different countries and had a go at it! 

2. My first son was born in Isfahan,  delivered in a badly lit hospital, where women were walking around moaning and groaning and holding their bellies and I was wondering what on earth I was doing there.  Well, simple, after a merry evening of birthday celebrations where a good friend urged me to have a glass of wine ‘because then my waters would not break’ (and she was a nurse so I believed her!) my waters broke, of course, and the consultant due to carry out the caesarian (which was pre-ordained for medical reasons) did not want to leave his bed, told us to go to the hospital and wait for him.  Well we did not, and my friend the nurse and her specialist doctor husband found another gynaecologist who was willing to come to this (non-private) hospital and carry out the procedure…..  I don’t think many (western) women have been transported along the si-oh-se-pol bridge in Isfahan in the wrong direction of a one way system, with a policeman flagging the car on, because it contained a pregnant woman who was about to deliver and needed medical attention.  Unusual enough?  The child was worth it!

3. I am one of eight children, no not Irish and not Catholic, but Dutch and Calvinist, with the accompanying anger and rebellion that goes with that such as running away, moving to another country without parents knowing, and eventually  marrying someone that they totally disapproved of.  My parents had a house full of ‘good books’ though and so I read them and did not care as long as there was something to read.  I read everything, from the children’s books that were prescribed reading, to the bible, to ‘romantic area novels’ to books about the second world war (which there were plenty of) and anything else that the village library would stock.  I hid books under the mattress when they were deemed unsuitable and I myself hid in bycicle sheds and other places to be left undisturbed when reading.  I have always read, and once in England I changed from reading Dutch books to reading everything else from the great Russians and the French in English translation to Irish Murdoch (all of them) and other well known and less well known English authors and ended up doing a degree in philosophy in London.  The first girl of the Dutch village  I was born in ) with a university degree, and  I did that in England.  Lateron I added an MA and other diplomas in Education. 

4. I have lived, worked, cried and loved in three different countries.  I fled a revolution and returned with a suitcase and a child back on home soil, the Netherlands where my second son was born and my parents decided to bury the hatchet and acknowledge me back into the fold, ignoring the fact that I had meanwhile become a complete atheist.  I read philosophy in London…..

5.  My first wedding took a week or so, I was married in a Zoroastrian temple, but did not promise obedience, having carefully gone over the words with various people in the know and before committing.  My second wedding took all of a visit to registry office after which my just married husband promptly mislaid the wedding documents so that when needed them to show I was a legal citizen of the United Kingdom I had to go and have copies made (for which I had to pay!)

6. My granddaughter is half German and the other half divided into Dutch/Iranian.  She speaks German and understands my English, not sure what she does for Dutch though.

7. I am a frustrated writer who has started (for the second time) a novel and I am now getting on with it.  I have thoughts about lots of other stories for which I need time and am slowly building up my portfolio.  To improve my writing skills I am doing a one year Creative Writing course (as well as holding down that well paid senior managemnet job) with the Open University which I thoroughly enjoy and which has opened my eyes to so many possibilities that I had not thought of before, making me feel totally inadequate…  I read and write on trains, in hotels, in my workroom and anywhere else as long as I have got my notebook and/or laptop with me.  I read voraciously.  I do have some stuff published, but it is non-fiction and relates to research into education and to exchange programmes across Europe. 

Nothing weird, maybe slightly unusual?

My tags:

http://katesbookblog.blogspot.com/

http://insearchofadam.blogspot.com/

http://www.thatssopants.blogspot.com/

http://mattviews.wordpress.com/

http://exlibris.typepad.com/ex_libris/

http://alteringlabyrinth.blogspot.com/

http://canarislander.wordpress.com/

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