Seven weird facts about me

The rules of this meme are to share seven weird facts about yourself. I didn’t think it would be too hard to think of seven weird things about myself, but actually, I am having to think quite hard. Perhaps this is due to a slow-working brain, rather than any lack of weirdness on my part, though. I’m not sure whether all of the following facts are weird, exactly, but hopefully they are sufficiently unusual to count for the meme. Thanks to Helen for tagging me and providing me with something to write about!

1. I like making dishes with fish fingers that, conventionally, shouldn’t be made with fish fingers. For example, fish finger korma or sweet and sour fish fingers. Fish finger sandwiches with cheese are pretty good, too. I think this love of fish fingers dates from my student days, when I couldn’t afford real fish! I started making it during my final year. I also used to make it for Mr C when we first met and he’s still here, so it can’t be that bad.

2. When I lived in Salisbury (for 18 months) I ate tuna almost every day. I would alternate between one week of tuna with rice (tuna korma) and one week of tuna pasta. I think this strange diet was due to a combination of lack of motivation to cook anything more adventurous, hatred of food shopping and indecisiveness. I lived in a shared house with people I didn’t know and who I didn’t particularly want to spend time with and who didn’t particularly want to spend time with me, so I wanted  to be in and out of the kitchen quickly. I hated food shopping (still not a big fan) and couldn’t decide what to buy so I just bought the same things every time.

3. I don’t like escalators. I think I’ve written about that before, so I won’t bore you with it again.

4. I don’t like thinking about things going up people’s noses. And now I’m thinking about it. Oops.

5. I love the London Underground as a concept, even though I have now developed a fear of being stuck on a train in the middle of it so am having to travel across London on buses instead. It adds lots to the length of journeys (time-wise and literally), but is better than me having a panic attack on the Tube. I particularly love the Underground map and can look at it for rather long periods of time without becoming bored. It’s the station names that I love the most. I would like a book that tells you all about the reasons why each station was named.

6. I like railways in general. I used to have a map of Britain’s railway routes (in the days when  these were printed in timetables) and I would mark off all of the routes I’d travelled on. I would rather go by train than car, even if it takes longer. I think I might have inherited my love of trains from my dad, who likes to build model trains, and railways and my uncle, my dad’s brother. They were both train-spotters in their youth and my uncle still goes to various stations and writes down train numbers in tiny notebooks.

7. I used to sing Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside to myself (in my head) every night before I went to sleep because I thought it would stop me having bad dreams. I also used to count to seven in multiples of seven try to achieve the same end. I can’t remember whether I did one or the other or both every night and I have no idea why I thought that either of these things would help! I suppose I must have done it once and didn’t have bad dreams so I thought it would work again. Maybe it did in some odd psychological way.

I’m sorry the numbered bits aren’t done in the proper numbered list way, but I’ve now tried to get it to work about twenty times and I’m not doing it again!