Help I've been tagged- Five things people don't know about me

How could my youngest daughter do this to me. It put me in a fine panic I can tell you, I was thinking about it before I went to bed on Friday and had the most peculiar dreams. I'm not sure what she hopes to learn about her mother that she doesn't already know and I don't really think I have any secrets. Anyway if there are things she doesn't know then that's how it's going to stay. Oh I expect I can think up some fairly innocuous things that won't rock the boat. Now let me see how far shall I go back.....

1) Lets start with teenage years (children can be forgiven anything after all they cannot be responsible for their actions or so we're told) it's nothing drastic but something I knew I should not be doing. No on reflection it is something that would have appalled me if Sam and Becs had done it. Or maybe they did and I didn't know!! I used to skip some lessons- I didn't actually bunk off I remained in school hiding in the cloakroom and it was only for music. I used the time to either do my homework or read. I am surprised I was never caught. There is a reason I disliked music so much, let me explain. I come from a fairly musical family (my grandfather was choir master, he played the church organ and the piano, my brother could sing but would not join the choir). However when the music genes were being handed out I was passed by and cannot sing a note in tune (I hasten to add I do enjoy listening to all sorts of music). My grandfather, who before retiring had also been the headmaster of the local infant/junior school, was a hard task master and could not accept imperfection so having a non-singer in the family was something I was being reminded of constantly. So from an early age I was prevented from singing and as I got older I felt I would be totally ridiculed for singing out of tune. This meant there was no way I was going into music lessons when I knew we would be asked to sing to the class. I have a real complex and never sing in front of anyone, so karaoke is out, I do sing along to the radio when I'm home alone.

2) Another childhood secret which I cringe about is that I learned to swim in a brook not far from my home. So what's wrong with that you may ask. Well we had to share the brook with the cows and the area where they walked into the river was not very pleasant as you can imagine and us kids had to negotiate the same area to get into the brook as the banks were too steep. When I think of the health risk we were exposed to, but we lived in the country and the nearest pool was miles away, no cars and few buses, even if you had the money to go which we didn't. The positive side I did learn to swim albeit not correctly but I can poddle up and down the pool doing a sort of breast stroke. I would love to have been taught all the different strokes correctly, particularly 'free style'. I do not like my face being underwater no prizes for guessing why!! This was to be avoided at all costs when swimming in the 'brook' as you can imagine.

3) Now when I was a student nurse we had very strict rules about what time we had to be in and in our opinion this was quite unreasonable as it was so early and if you went into town it was almost impossible to get back by curfew (buses were as unreliable in the early 60's as they are now). So how did we get around this dilemma well it was climbing through the window of someone whose room was on the ground floor. Sometimes this was pre-arranged but there was the odd time when we it was unintentional because the bus just did not turn up and we had to walk back to the nurses home and knock on a window. I don't expect such rules exist these days- I don't even know if they have accommodation on site for nurses, probably not. (you could only live out in your 3rd year and then only if matron approved).

4) I may have mentioned in earlier blog that I used to be a keen tennis player and one of the +/- of this is that I am very competative and I always hated to loose and this put an awful lot of pressure on the family. We have a snoopy mug which says ' winning isn't everything but loosing isn't anything' which sums it up. I have a lot of good memories of well contested matches and a few trophies for my efforts. My best winnings were £50, 2 tickets to Wimbledon and lunch for 4 to 'The Post Office Tavern' a local pub.

5) Finally I've always harboured a wish to gallop along a white sandy beach on the edge of the water. Silly really but there you are.

Oh dear I may have revealed too much!!

PS anyone who has read Beccy's blog will have seen her secret about writing a book- well back in the 80's guess what I started to do ??? I may even have a couple of chapters somewhere.