Alan Little tagged me in a recent posting. This is what I’m supposed to do:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.

2. People who are tagged write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.

3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

4. If you fail to do this within eight hours, you will not reach Third Series or attain your most precious goals for at least two more lifetimes.

The chance of my responding to anything within eight hours is remote, especially this week, but fortunately I have no idea what Third Series might be – so I guess what I don’t know won’t hurt me – and I don’t believe in reincarnation anyway. Here goes:

1. I’m not a night owl any more. Maybe I never was, really. I wake early (around the summer solstice, very early indeed) and am most active early in the day.
2. I haven’t been on an aeroplane since December 2005.
3. I’ve lost about 12kg of body fat in the past 7 weeks. (It’s OK, don’t worry! I needed to lose it, it’s a medically-supervised programme, my doctor approves, and I feel much better for it).
4. Tomorrow is our tenth wedding anniversary.
5. I love to dry laundry outdoors. I study the weather forecast and wait till it’s going to be a good drying day before starting the wash. I arrange the clothes in patterns on the line: first a row of T-shirts, all with orange pegs, then a row of socks, all with yellow ones…
6. I owned a horse for a while, a few years ago. It didn’t work out well. It was a learning experience.
7. I’m scared of heights. It’s a problem when boating sometimes (especially when negotiating deep locks).
8. I visit Venice most years, usually by train (the night train from Paris is best). I mean the Venice in Italy, of course, not the one in California.
   

The difficult bit, as Alan found, is thinking of eight people who might not mind being tagged. I don’t read very many blogs. Here are the least unpromising seven from the list in my feed reader:

1. Rod
2. Animoose
3. William (but his blog is really too serious for this kind of trivia)
4. Vicki and Alasdair (though given their posting frequency, a response is unlikely)
5. Tromey
6. Derek
7. Paul Butcher? Unlikely, though – his is not really that kind of blog

I’m editing this post to remove people from the list if they don’t want to play. My original 8 is now already down to 7!