EIGHT RANDOM FACTS FROM ZOLA
( I do this only once and only because I want to suck the web of Anna Mr who demanded this of me )

1. My grandmother had hair down to her hips although she usually wore it all up in a kind of big bun. The smell of my grandmothers bed remains with me today. I used to sleep there sometimes when my mother and father went dancing and the like. I would have been about 3 years old I guess. But the smell remains of her special warm bed.
2. As a five year old the Saturday morning was very special. With two friends of the same age I collected, between 8.00 and 11.00, any old iron, scrap, papers, rags and whatever from the local houses. The families expected us every Saturday and they were ready with the junk which we put on a two wheeled hand-held cart. Then we went to the scrap metal and ragman place to sell what we had collected. Just a fact that is strong in my memory. It was exciting and fun.
3. By 11 years of age my mother had learnt the right question to ask me when I came home from a school day. " How many times did you get caned today?", she would ask. Got caned once by a teacher and laughed because he tried to hit me so hard his glasses flew off and smashed on the floor. I had not laughed so much since one other nasty teacher had a heart attack.
4. By 17 years of age I was getting ok in the football and playing at a fairly high level but a goalkeeper ( damned great hunk of a fellow) kicked my leg to pieces. Six months in plaster cast. Got back to decent level football by about 21 but broke a leg again. The third broken leg was through climbing. Memory here was having the screws taken out after 8 months - as they unscrewed the screws and pins I felt no pain but I did feel the turns in the head. Weird I thought.
5. Oh yes I was made an honary member of the "Polar Bear Society".
6. Enjoyed canoes and kayaks. Even got a couple of Finnish medels and coached the Finnish youth team to silver medel at European Championships. Wonderful memories those. But also I remember kayaking around North Cape when a stone came down missing me by less than a metre. Some damned tourist wanted to trhow rocks down. But cannot complain I used to "trundle" ( throw rocks down mountains) quite often when I was active in the mountains.
7. As a kid I would often walk about 50 English miles on a weekend just for the fun of it and with a rucksack on me back. My mother had only one rule : be back by four on Sunday. That was the Suffolk coastline and countryside. The experience once with the daughter of the farmer ( I had asked to camp overnight on his land) remains in my memory as a vivid wonderful thing. Lust can be beautiful.
8. I was sent to Finland to work on a project in 1976. Never seemed to have lived in the UK after that although Sweden and Norway have been lived-in. Lapland, or the southern part of lapland, is my home. Our garden has many hedgehogs, squirrels, mousey-mousies for the cat, birds aplenty and for the first year I am trying to grow peas in the garden. But I do not like gardening, fishing or hunting so there......