Remember chain letters?  Remember the dire things that would happen if you broke the chain?

‘Tags’ or ‘memes’ seem the Internet equivalent of the chain letter, but having received one from Dot, whose angelic tones fill much of our church, it would be churlish not to make some response.

The rules were:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.

2. Post the rules on your blog.

3. Write six random things about yourself.

4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.

5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.

6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Six random things:

1. At the age of fourteen, while on a school day trip to London, I walked Downing Street with Jim Callaghan, then Foreign Secretary, and the deputy prime minister of Egypt.  Callaghan chatted as we walked, asking about where I was from and about my school, until saying, “Well, we must go, the prime minister is standing on the doorstep”.

2.  I met my wife in a youth hostel in Co Kerry when her paper bag of potatoes burst and the potatoes fell down the stairs.

3. My asthma was so bad when I was young that I was educated at a special school on Dartmoor.

4. I attended the ‘Monsters of Rock’ festival at Castle Donington in 1981; as far as I could see, I was the only person in the seventy thousand not wearing denim.

5. I once drank foul concoctions like lager and blackcurrant, vodka and lime, and warm, flat beer.

6. I spend much of my car allowance on skiing; this is more environmentally friendly and is a cash injection into an otherwise poorly developed Alpine rural economy.

So,

Number 1 – done.

Number 2 – done.

Number 3 – done.

Number 4 – pass.

Number 5 – pass.

Number 6 – done.

Four out of six, 66%, upper second – that’ll do me.