Five things you didn't know about me

I've been tagged by another meme - this time by Martin Eyles. Thank you - particularly for your description of me :)

So, five things you probably didn't know about me.

1. I used to play the french horn (until I left school). I guess I was fairly good at it; I passed my grade 8 exam, albeit only just. My favourite thing to play was Richard Strauss's first horn concerto. Wonderful music, particularly the slow movement. Whenever I listen to it, it takes me back to when I was 17.

2. I lived in St. Andrews, Scotland, from when I was two to when I was five-and-a-half. Not a long time, but a formative time - that's where I first went to school, learned to read, learned to talk lots, etc. My earliest memories are of St. Andrews - wading in the burn at the bottom of the garden, fishing with the little nets we got at the corner shop, walking on the beach, covered with jellyfish which looked like fried eggs. Surprisingly few memories, given my age when I left. The main thing I've taken from this time is a love of the food we ate there (and not afterwards): rollmops, kippers, and haggis. Mmmmm...

3. In the primary school nativity play, I was chosen to play Herod. Later the same year, my class did a play on tooth decay, and again I was the villain. Typecast? Maybe the teacher just didn't like me.

4. I wasn't always a pacifist. Earlier in secondary school, I was really into military history. My third year English project (age 13) was a biography of Field Marshall Montgomery. I won a prize for it. My dad then got Montgomery's son to sign it for me - he signed it with his hereditory title, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, which looks very impressive :)

5. I once wrote a computer version of the board game "diplomacy". I did it in a weekend (two 18-hour days). It was written in BASIC. It implemented all of the game rules, could be played single-player or multi-player, and even had basic Artificial Intelligence so you could have a computer player. My first programming job was working for a games company, although I'd written games as a hobby before then. Like everyone else in the industry, I'd started writing lots of games but usually never finished them. When I was 18 or so I came up with the idea for a computer game where you built and ran railways (this was before Railroad Tycoon). I've tried to start writing it several times but never got very far. It's still on my "to do" list - not least because although many other games on the theme now exist, I don't think any of them are quite as good as mine! Or at least, as mine would be, if I actually wrote it. I could claim that up until now it's been 17 years in development - something of a record, perhaps?

Ok, tradition dictates that I should nominate five other bloggers who read this who should do the meme themselves. Well, if you're reading this, then go ahead, but I'm going to break with tradition and nominate:

Derek di Giovanni
Karen Rackham
Hugo Chavez
Michael V. Hayden (director of the CIA)
Christina Ellis
Sarah Thomas
Richie Edwards
Dylan Harper
Polly Rose
Catherine Darwen
Stephen Binnie

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