Two Awards

I have been really grateful to receive two awards recently, but have been so busy I have only just managed to post them!
The first one I got ages and ages ago, (sorry) from Old Kitty at Ten Lives and second chances.

And the second more recently:

from Alijane at Gingercat.

Both awards require quite a lot of thought from me to come up with 7 interesting/unknown things about me, I'm cheating slightly (as usual with me) by combining the seven things from both, as I'm sure I really can't think of fourteen. And I think I may have been supposed to do something else as well and possibly haven't done things quite properly but I'm so busy right now this is all I can manage! By now most of you realise I won't be actually passing anything on to specific people, but I do appreciate them both, thank you both of you very much.

So I leave you with seven random things, not sure how interesting they are! (they are a certainly long enough, I got a bit carried away once I'd started, for which I apologise.)

Perhaps the most interesting, although it's not about me really:

1) My mum is/was the first woman to read the news - she's not famous as it was only the regional news on a programme called Points West rather than nationally, which is why nobody really has ever heard of her. Here she is in 1957:

Now sadly the press cuttings from the time are buried somewhere in her hoarded papers and I can't wait to find them again one day, they contained some amazing letters from people, expressing opinions along the lines of - "how can we allow a woman to read the serious issues of the news - she just cannot give it the gravity it deserves" and "we don't want our husbands being distracted by looking at a woman" - I can't remember exactly but these were the kind of sentiments being voiced, really incredible and so interesting to see how things have changed.

Of course to me my mum is my mum, but she has had an absolutely fascinating life, involved in travelling theatre as an actress and even in 'A Town Like Alice'

She's the woman on the left. She only had one line, and died in the desert!
Anyway, that's my most interesting thing! Perhaps one day I'll share some more about her.

2) I grew up in a Sixteenth Century timber-framed cottage - reputedly the oldest house in the village. The walls were originally wattle and daub, with brickwork later, and I had holes in my bedroom wall that I remember plugging with pink toilet paper. My mum still lives there.

3) You wouldn't know it to see my DiY now but in my student days I wrestled our (I lived with a girl friend) dying twin-tub onto its side while it was half-full of water and somehow fixed it (I think prayer may have been involved in this process somehow - seriously!)

4) When I was seventeen I camped half way up a welsh mountain in gale force winds and rain, with other people from our youth group - we had gone on an activity week at an outdoor pursuits centre. It felt like one of the longest nights of my life. I don't camp any more.

5) One summer holiday when I was a student I got a holiday job in a cafe on the edge of Lake Winderemere in the Lake District. I hated the pressure, couldn't use the till and one day flooded the whole cafe with milk from the milk machine because I forgot to turn it off. Apparently everyone did it once. I decided to leave after a couple of weeks to make sure I wasn't the first one to do it twice.

6) I used to work full-time in a reprographics department with a massive photocopier, it seemed ten-feet long but was probably only six or seven. It did whole booklets at once, and with an attachment even folded and stapled them. Surprisingly very happy days, due to my lovely colleagues.

7) I was a terribly deceptive child - I used to hold the mercury thermometer over the heater while my mum went out of the room so it looked as if I had a temperature (got to be careful with this though to avoid making it too high). I coloured my thumb nail in with a pencil to make it look bruised so I could get out of a piano lesson (could only use this one once) and when I was fifteen I managed to get out of a whole half-term's swimming lessons by lying creatively, for a whole six weeks (I absolutely could not bear to be seen in a swimming costume). I can't believe I did all this now!

Well, that's quite a lot of information, not sure if anyone will have made it to the end!
Have a good week everyone.