A Quick Meme

I need a break in the monotony of reading and writing reports on a long Friday afternoon, when I’m still recovering from my holiday and somehow cannot get into the swing of things.  🙂   So I visit a few blogs and read what others are preoccupied with and notice that Toujours Jacques is back from his holiday too, but now he’s off for another break, leaving me tagged for meme.  This, therefore, provides me with an excellent excuse to think about something totally irrelevant to work and perhaps I’m better able to pick that up again after I’ve completed this.

So, here goes:

What where you doing five years ago?

Well, I was contemplating staying in the job of an assistant principal for the rest of my life and wondered whether that would mean burying myself alive or whether that would be good for a pension build up (well, sometimes and in the real world these things are important)…   I did not stay in the end and moved on and now I’m so glad I did.  It was stultifying and it was not for me.  Moving on opened up the world again and meeting different people, providing that travelling time to think about books and writing, picking up on conversations on trains and along the road and then I started writing (again)….

Five snacks I enjoy ina pefec, non-weight-gaining world:

mmmm, only five?  ok then, kitkats, biscuits, carrot cake, icecreams, nuts

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

Fruit (especially cherries when they are in season, like right now), black and green olives, Greek yoghurt, cheese biscuits (only a few at the time!), more fruit (like pears, blackberries, peaches)

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

1. give my eldest son and family the financial space so that he can be a writer/poet (which he should be); pay off their student loan debts; make sure there is enough stacked away for my granddaughter to study at university when she’s old enough
2. pay off the mortgage for my youngest son and let him travel around the world for six months (but from then he will have to earn his keep again!)
3. stop working and do an MA in creative writing and spend the rest of my life writing and travelling
4. Donate to cancer charity
5. Adopt a village in the third world and make sure that all the children get schooling and clothing and go hunger free.

Five (non-academic) jobs that I have had:

Why non-academic? What counts as non-academic?.  Anyway, here are some five jobs: manager and teacher in a College in the Netherlands; teacher of English with British Council in Iran; Director of my own consultancy (in England); director with a research/support organisation (oops, is that academic?); babysitter; administrator, ….

Five Habits:

1. Have a capuccino halfway through the morning, somewhere, sometime, when I’m on the road and travelling
2. Sit on my exercise bike in the morning, listening to Radio 4 or reading the newspaper, when I’m at home
3. Writing in my notebooks, any time, whenever
4. Blogging
5. and, like TJ, I have such a bad habit of interrupting people too….. and I must stop doing this!

Five places I have lived:

Delft (The Netherlands); London;  Isfhahan (Iran); Kirkby-in-Ashfield (Nottinghamshire); Beaconsfield (England)

Five people I want to get to know better (and who should consider themselves tagged!):

Well, you may already have been tagged for this as this seems to have been doing the rounds for a while.  Never mind, here you go (purely haphazard, I swear):

Ex Libris; Matt; Alisia; Kate; gautami

And now: back to the real world and work!

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