To celebrate my birthday a week ago (lookit my birthday flowers from T!), here are 20 facts about your hostess:
1. Esmerelda is not my real name, but a pseudonym taken from my favourite Terry Pratchett character, Granny Weatherwax.
2. I was a vegan for six months at university. Then I moved to Argentina, home of the most mindblowing beef steak sandwiches. I lasted two weeks.
3. I love mushrooms cooked, hate them raw. Conversely, I love raw carrots, but find their cooked counterparts insipid.
4. I don’t really have a favourite colour, being an equal opportunity spectrumologist, but if pressed, I would have to say green.
5. I listen to FolkAlley online radio at work. It is fabulous, free and eclectic as all get out, but a bit repetitious if you are plugged in for eight hours straight. Support online radio!
6. I am allergic to sunscreen, it appears. Oh, goodie.
7. I love swimming in the sea, but hate swimming pools with a passion. Have I become a lobster? Is that why they are trying to boil me in their over-chlorinated water?
8. I prefer cold weather to hot. Maybe this is because I live in a country where hot weather is so unexpected, I am totally unprepared for it. Plus, the knitting opportunities are far superior in cold weather countries.
9. Drinking full fat milk in my tea or coffee makes me want to gag.
10. My favourite flowers are tulips and dahlias, y’know, just in case you wanted to get me a bunch!
11. Being a perfectionist with low self-esteem has one major flaw: you never start anything for fear of ballsing it up.
12. My first and only pet was a white mouse called Benjy. Whilst at university, my flatmate and I went to a petshop and asked for two girl mice. Instead we got two boy mice, one of whom murdered the other and then went on to die of lonliness. I have been far too traumatised by the experience to consider getting another pet.
13. After reading Spanish at university, I then decided that four years’ higher education was not enough, and went on to do two years’ of postgraduate legal studies. I have yet to use either Spanish or law in a professional capacity.
14. I have visited every country in North and South America except for Guyana, French Guyana, and Surinam. I was mugged in Argentina and Brazil, but would go back to either in a heartbeat.
15. I am quite talented at various things, but am complacent and tend to lack the application to become more than ‘quite’.
16. Matchy-matchy does nothing for me. Hence why we never have the same pillow cases and duvet, and I am often to be found wearing odd socks. Although I expect both stem more from laundry mishaps than personal style decisions.
17. When I grow up, I want to be an actress, an astronaut, a yarn-shop owner, a patissiere, a costume designer, or a clown. I haven’t decided yet.
18. I went to the Turner exhibition at the Tate on Thursday, and was so moved, excited and inspired that I picked up brushes, watercolours and paper in the gift shop and practically ran to the checkout. Then I realised I hardly have time for all the other obsessions I have (knitting, sewing, photography, reading [yay - been rekindled!]) and put them all down, feeling rather foolish.
19. I still get scared of the boogie man, probably more so now that I am older and know that the real danger is not in myth or folklore, but in the dark heart of man. I cannot sleep with my back to the window or door to this day.
20. Further to the last one, I did not sleep in a double bed until I met T. Growing up in borrowed Army accomodation, boarding schools and student dosshouses with miniscule rooms and narrow cots, I was totally accustomed to sleeping in a single bed. When T and I met, we lived in a rented house in North London: I had the boxroom above the entrance hall, and he had a big double overlooking the garden. He went away for a week to Rome and so I stayed in his room (hell, wouldn’t you?) – I couldn’t sleep the entire week, so alien was the space afforded me by having a double bed all to myself. Plus, you know, those boogie men could have been hiding in the cupboard by his bed…
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Apologies for the unannounced break – it was very needed though (I had to come up with 20 vaguely interesting things about myself). Thank you all for coming by in the interim, and for the cupcake-love – there will be knitting content again soon. Also, thanks for the book suggestions from this post - a book-related prize will be going to deknit soon.
Edited: Bit freaked about a blogging related scare one of my friends had, so some more pertinent information has been removed.
; then there were various problems with getting the pattern right…oh, so troublesome. And yet, I love Monkey so much that I dashed-well signed up to the 
