List of the Month - Return of the Killer Factoids

My blog-friend JES has been passing on blog awards again. Such nods of recognition are always welcome, but I can't really respond to the exhortation to 'pass it on'. I don't really approve of the viral/chain-letter aspect of these things. And I don't read that many blogs (I think one of the awards asks us to nominate 12 other recipients!!!). And I've discovered in the past that the bloggers I do read have no interest in these trifles.

So, like grouchy old George C. Scott, I decline the honour. However, I will play along with the game element of the nomination - it's another of those 'Tell Us 10 Things About Yourself' ones. Now, I've done this before (twice!), so it might be getting a little difficult to think of TEN things I can tell you about me that are unknown, unexpected, and/or interesting... but I'll do my best. Here goes.

10 More Things You Didn't Know About Me

1) I have been in love 6 times in my life.

Roughly. Call it 6. At this advanced age, the memory of remoter events starts to get a little sketchy, and I am concerned that I might possibly have overlooked someone somewhere. Also, in hindsight one tends to reassess some of the encounters that were perhaps borderline cases, to downgrade what might once have seemed like a love to a simple infatuation. Naturally, I've suffered rather more cases of infatuation or lust than I have love. Not that many more, though. My averages all the way through the process are markedly LOW: I don't meet that many women; only a very small proportion of the women that I meet are sexually interesting to me, and only a small proportion of those develop into serious interests; even then, I seem to be unduly adept at dodging Cupid's Arrow (or Jove's thunderbolt, or whatever it is), and fewer than half of those I would call major loves; and most of my major loves have remained miserably unrequited or unconsummated. So.... the number of women I've loved and had an intimate relationship with is only TWO - which, for a man in his forties, is a wretchedly poor score.

2) I have only HATED one person in my life.

Strange, perhaps, given that most of my emotions pour forth so freely and excessively: my affection for friends or my enthusiasm for films threatens to be overwhelming. And my disdain for things I consider worthless or in poor taste can be pretty devastating. But this effusive negativity doesn't extend to people. I am very tolerant and forgiving, even towards people who have done me substantial harm. The only exception I can remember in my life was my housemaster at school. He was a 'jock', a PE teacher, a man who revered physical pursuits and despised intellectual ones. I was his polar opposite: a weedy aesthete with multiple health problems who was always looking to bunk off games, PE, and swimming; a natural academic who spent all of his spare time in the school library; an individualist who kept his own company most of the time, spurned team games (especially rugby, the school's major sport), and who derided the collective chauvinism of 'school spirit' or 'house spirit' as fatuous. He took against me with a passionate intensity, and I didn't seem to have much option but to respond in kind, for the sake of survival.

3) I have only ever cried during a film TWICE (in the cinema).

Over the last decade, I have developed a shocking propensity to cry very easily at films I'm watching on my own at home. Romantic comedies, especially, seem to tap into a deep vein of melancholia about the frustrations of my own love life, and will easily get the waterworks flowing. But crying in public...... I've only done that twice: when I was about 10 years old, at the end of Ring Of Bright Water (one of the best films made about the bond that can develop between a man and an animal; and it has a heartbreaking, and rather unexpected ending); and, twenty years or so later, at Schindler's List, during the closing scene where the surviving Schindler Jews queue up to lay rocks on his tomb.

4) I have some strange t-shirts.

Being a slobby bachelor, I spend much of my life mooching around my apartment in a t-shirt and shorts or sweatpants. I also generally wear a t-shirt under my shirt when I go out. And even when my tees have become old and threadbare, I still hang on to them, to wear when I go running. Thus, I 'collect' t-shirts: I buy a lot of quirky ones; friends often give them to me; some find their way into my drawers from sources I can't remember. Probably the oddest, most unlikely one in my current stock (the one I'm wearing now, as it happens) is from the Eton College Fencing Club. I did not attend Eton, and I have never fenced - but one of my old university buddies is a teacher there.

5) I have a blighted record with friends.

Well, when I was very young, anyway, I had an astonishing run of bad luck. I don't think it made me wary of or pessimistic about friendship (the friendships I made later in life have proved much more stable and enduring), but it did leave me feeling rather depressed and isolated as a child. My first best friend was an army brat, the son of the commander of the small local training camp. At that age, I didn't comprehend why - or how quickly - such postings are rotated. He moved away, suddenly and without explanation, after just one year. Shortly afterwards, I developed a new best friend (someone who, bizarrely, had briefly been an 'enemy', a bully at first); but after a year or two, I lost him too - when I was advanced a year in primary school (which involved switching to another campus; it was quite nearby.... but not when you're 8 years old). Within a year or so we found ourselves back in the same school, but by then we'd grown apart. My deskmate during my first year at secondary school became an even closer attachment. Early on in our acquaintance, he intervened, quite unprompted, to defend me in one of my confrontations with the hated housemaster. He had absolutely no reason to do so, to put himself in the way of this vile man's rage and scorn - no reason other than innate decency and courage. I still get a bit misty-eyed recalling that incident: I have never again experienced such an immediate and profuse upsurge of gratitude, affection, and admiration for someone. His parents moved him to a more prestigious boarding school in London at the end of the year. My next best friend was a bizarre sort of 'forbidden bromance' - a guy from the local state school that I started running into every day at the bus stop on the way home. I went to the town's private school, and there was a deep-rooted animosity - often a violent and dangerous animosity - between the two constituencies of pupils. The prevailing peer pressure of our community dictated that we should have hated one another, should have fought; but.... well, this bus stop was a little way outside of town, and we seemed to be the only two people using it at this time of day: it was a 'secret' rendezvous, where we didn't feel obliged to act out the expected antipathy. In fact, we got on extremely well. But, after about six months, he too abruptly disappeared from my life. After this, I did kind of give up on the friend thing for a while....

6) I am a cat person rather than a dog person.

Not that I don't like dogs. I get on pretty well with all kinds of animals. But you have to make a choice, don't you? And I choose cats.

7) Only two nicknames have ever really stuck to me.

At my secondary school I became universally known as Swampo (short for 'Swamp Creature' - a name that arose after a classmate once quipped, when I'd dozed off in a French lesson, with my hand on the side of my face distorting my features, that I looked like The Creature From The Black Lagoon). I didn't like that one much, but at least it was humorous, and not disparaging. Even some of my teachers started using it. When I became a schoolteacher myself, no stable nickname seemed to emerge for me - at least, not that I was ever aware of, not amongst the kids I taught. However, I was also an assistant housemaster, supervising the senior year dormitory, and I became pretty tight with those boys. For a while they called me 'Eddie' (a very positive appellation - after Eddie Murphy, because I was 'cool'!); but then we all became rather obsessed with David Lynch's Twin Peaks television series, and I was dubbed Agent Cooper, after Kyle McLachlan's nerdy-but-cool FBI investigator. That one I liked.

8) Only once in my life have I made a 'perfect score' of 180 in darts.

And that wasn't in an actual game. I used to practise a lot on my own at home during my last couple of years of school, as a kind of meditation, a way to unwind from the stresses of study. I never became all that good, and haven't played much subsequently. For some people a first 180 might be a threshold moment in the development of their skill, and they might go on to repeat the achievement more and more regularly and become formidable players. With me, the experience just underlined how darned difficult the game was; and rather than feeling inspired, I think it actually discouraged me from attempting to repeat the feat.

9) I'd love to be able to play blues guitar.

But I lack the requisite application. And I think I'm inhibited by a conviction that I could never become a really great player. Unless I can do something extremely well, I'd rather not do it at all. I still fantasise a lot, though - how I wish I could play like Marc Ribot on Downtown Train, or like Billy Gibbons on Blue Jean Blues, or like Angus Young on Ride On, or....

10) I have a strange attraction to the game of backgammon.

I used to play A LOT at university, and it's about the only game I think I might just possibly have been good enough at to take up professionally. It seems to me to be a perfect, compelling balance of skill and luck. I haven't played much for years now, but I just met a guy who's trying to start up a club here in Beijing. I wonder if there's any of the old magic still there underneath all the rust?