Tagged Again

I've been tagged by someone different for a change. Contessa over at 1001 Ways To Be Naked not only has an interesting title for her blog, but she's also a parent to twins, takes some superb photographs and has a fun sense of humour to boot.

The rules:

1. Get tagged
2. List five things that have not been revealed on your blog.
3. Tag five others.

I'm not sure what is harder: Coming up with five things or tagging five people who read this blog!

Anyway, here goes:

1) I almost drowned when I was about 13 in the school pool. I can't swim. We were playing water polo. I was on the team defending the deep end and I was (and still am) quite short. Oops.

2) I once had a court case for avoiding paying the fare on a train. I used to travel by train to work on a daily basis, travelling about 15 miles but having to swap trains half-way through. With downsizing most of the village train stations did away with the person manning the ticket office and introduced "Permit to Travel" machines. The idea of these is that you put some money in, got a temporary ticket and then exchanged it at the first available opportunity for a real ticket where you would also pay the difference between the permit and the ticket. I used to put the minimum in (about 5 pence) and if the ticket conducters didn't come around on the train I used to get to travel all the way to the destination for that price. Sweet.

One Friday after work I was only going back to the changeover point which was the main city station and caught a taxi to my brother's house. A plain-clothes British Rail guy caught up with me as I was exiting the station and asked to see my ticket. I'd already ditched the permit in a bin. Lots of feeble excuses followed. He wrote down most of them and read them back to me.

I received his report from the magistrates court and it was completely different to what I had said and made me look more of a fool than I already was. Me being me I didn't want to go to court so I just let it go and they sent me a fine of around 150 quid. I've had bigger phone bills!

3) I've sung on stage with a couple of bands. Well, had the microphone thrust in my face for a few lines of songs. One was a covers band where I've been known to help out with vocals on Black Sabbath, Guns n' Roses, AC/DC, the Beatles, the Stones and even Gary Glitter. The other band I sang with was a cover of a Slade Christmas song. I was pissed. Say no more. (I won't do Karaoke though)

4) When I was pretending to be a metalhead in the late 80's I had to hide from my friends that I secretly liked Belinda Carlisle and some other pop stuff of the era. That would have been like coming out of the closet to admit it at the time.

5) I once stole some money. From a church of all places! I can say that I was lead on by the guys I hung around with. We were on a primary school trip to the local church in my village and there was a small cup containing probably no more than two pounds in loose change. Between at least two of us we pilfered the money and went and bought something with high sugar content from the shops after school. I don't feel guilty now because in 1997, while we were showing some overseas visitors around the village I grew up in, we stopped by the church and while no-one was looking I put around five pound back in the collection box. Even with inflation I think they made a profit. There have been no near misses with lightning bolts, so I think I've been forgiven.

I tag: Amanda, Miss Smack, Jo and ... umm ... no-one else reads this blog so I'll have to stick to just those three.