Seven interesting things about me? It's more than a slight stretch, and would be so much easier if I had to name interesting things that happened to people I know (which include, among other things: near-arrests, Fear and Loathing episodes in Hampi, and getting driven down a road at 40mph...while hanging on for dear life to the bonnet of the car), but here goes anyway.
1. My favourite smell in the world is wet dust- to the uninitiated, it's the one that comes after summer, when the ground has been all but baked dry, with about an inch of dust everywhere. And then it starts raining. I've never been able to put a name to the smell that comes off those first raindrops hitting the ground and sending the dust flying before soaking it (and this is rain that means business, not a wussy little drizzle), but I settled for wet dust, because it smells the same way when the plants at college get watered on a hot day. There's nothing quite like it.
2. I have a tattoo. I quite like having it, even if it looks like a child drew it with a marker pen. And in the twenty-four hours after I first got it, I had to wear a bandage over the spot, which led to a lot of people asking me what happened. Nosey idiots thought I'd slit my wrist, you see.
3. I also have a weakness for fallen leaves that look like they're dry enough to be crunchy, and have no qualms about going slightly out of my way to stamp on them. Even if I do look around first to make sure that no one I know is watching.
4. Ditto puddles of rainwater- the bigger, the better . Some of them just beg to be stamped in (of course, we do go and clean ourselves up afterwards), which spells doom for pretty shoes. The last time I did it with a couple of friends, we ended up splashing so much water around that when I got back to my room to change, I found bits of grass in my hair.
5. Fantasy movies are a bit of a weak spot for me- no matter how much I moan and groan about how I'm sure it'll never match up to the book, I always get suckered into watching the lot. Though I'm quite excited about the movie version of Northern Lights that'll be out this December- His Dark Materials is one of my favourite series of books ever, and they seem to have got the casting of Lyra absolutely perfect. Ok, enough with the movie plug..
6. I'd be more likely to choose my soap, shampoo and moisturiser on the basis of how they smell than because of whatever they promise to do. That logic has worked fairly well for me so far, I don't intend to abandon it now.
7. I know this isn't really about me, but- one of my ex-classmates from school swindled a bank out of a whole lot of money. This got into the papers when I was starting my last year of school (at a different school), and given that the girl in question had dropped out of my old school several years earlier, the news that she could speak eleven languages and had successfully impersonated a senior adoption society executive to get the money, while the police chased her across four states for the better part of a year, was nothing short of staggering. And we only got to know who it was because one of the local papers printed her name and the name of her former school- not something that's usually done, given that she was seventeen at the time of her arrest. The ultimate kicker is that she happens to have the same name as my best friend (who was in another school altogether, and never knew her at all) - who got slightly freaked out by the fact that a lot of people were calling her up asking if she'd been robbing banks.
I really can't draw to save my life, which may be the reason why arty, artsy things have been fascinating me of late. And when I do draw things (usually the same thing) and feel like I've got it right, my first instinct is to keep the evidence, or at least know where it's gone if I give it away- like on someone's good-luck card or some such thing. Which may be why I find the idea of Adam Neate's art so odd- the idea of an artist actually just leaving his finished paintings around the city for people to find and keep, is a distinctly strange, yet appealing one to me. Graffiti art is something I quite like, and also something he's done, but the randomness of never knowing where a bit of your work- pretty good, even great work too, if you ask me- went, would drive me nuts. And it takes courage to do it. Though I do think the idea of the Art of the State experiment in which one of his paintings was taken and photographed in assorted places in London (third pic, go look at the rest) was immensely cool.
