Scribblings from the Mitchy Side

The following was on our internal e-bulletin board today:

"Firefighters scale Everest by ladder for charity"

Hands up if you thought that meant they were lugging ladders up the actual mountain? Yeh, me too, which is why I thought something was odd and checked out the article. Turns out no-one's leaving England - there's going to be a charity ladder climb this Saturday, where during the course of the day they will climb a fire ladder approximately 700 times totalling a height of around 8,848 meters, which is the same height as Everest. Which is still bloody impressive but not quite what the headline promised :D

(Incidentally, the money raised will be split between the Firefighters Charity, Alzheimer's Research UK, Bone Cancer Research Trust and the Isabel Hospice. Anyone wanting to donate can do so at www.charitygiving.co.uk/paulblande17070)

Meeeeeeme! kelemvor gave me age 23 to write about. That was in 1991.

I was dating:
I wasn't. I was in my last year at Sunderland Uni and hadn't had a relationship with anyone since I broke up with my boyfriend in 1989. Also, degree finals kind of dominated the first half of the year and I was a leeetle busy :P

I wanted to be:
I had no idea, actually. I was vaguely thinking about a career in marketing or advertising. I'd already abandoned ideas of being a journalist, engineer and a librarian (although I kept circling that last). Late in the final term, I applied for a post-graduate course in computing starting the following September, and was accepted.

My best friend:
I hung around with Val Kolacs and Sheryl Hopkinson, pals from my degree course. We kept each other sane during finals :) And there was the A Team, of course: Liz C, Jon P, Mike and Chris, role playing and drinking buddies since the second year. (Jon P was the ex-bf previously mentioned....)

I lived:
For the first half of the year, I was in a large, shared terraced house in Sunderland. Nice house, but my room was freezing cold. Most of my housemates were ok but we weren't close friends. I was at home for the summer and, on moving back to Sunderland to do the post-grad, I was in another smaller shared house near the campus. This place was a hole - no-one apart from me and one other guy ever washed or cleaned anything. The gas fire in my room did nothing to keep the room warm, so you had to sit in front of it all the time to feel any heat. The only advantage was, because you couldn't leave anything in the fridge in the communal kitchen because it would get nicked, the room was cool enough that I could keep milk and butter in a cooler box :P Oh and the bathroom? Had a hole in the window where an old air vent had been removed. Imagine taking a shower in there in winter. In Sunderland. With the wind whistling down directly from the Norweigian ice flows. And people wonder why I developed my lightening fast shower routine. *shivers*

Any fellow meme sheep want an age? :)