Questions, piffle and spice!

Interview courtesy of Doris @ Gran's on Bran - I knew they'd be good!!

If you were a cartoon character which would you be?

OK, if I was a cartoon character I would be a strange mixture of Ariel from The Little Mermaid, Nala from The Lion King & Wile Coyote! Why? I am always singing like Ariel and I have this "need to know" which she has all the way through the film; she has a passion for seeing other parts of the world! Nala was a rambunctious, mischievous, and adventurous cub in the Lion KIng who became brave and loyal, with a strong sense of justice. I'm not particularly adventourous anymore, but I am loyal and I'll stand shoulder to shoulder with my friends; supporting them in any way I can! And then there's Wile Coyote - I have such good ideas, (a sad combination of brute force & blind ignorance!) which when I have the guts to follow them through, so often blow up in my face & I love fried chicken!!

Right, I am off to try and photoshop them together!!

What is the most unusual present one of your school kids has given you at the end of the school year/Christmas?

I am always incredibly grateful to anyone who buys me a gift @ Christmas or at the end of the school year. I have a job that I absolutley adore & I get paid & then someone buys me a gift! The children always say "if I was going to buy you a present, I'm not going to but if I was going to, what would you like?" No prompting from parents there then eh? So I always say "tell Mummy/Daddy I like red and flowers!" However, over the years I've had lots of awful crystally things, like this!

This is absolutely not the worst present I've ever seen. A colleague of mine had a present from the "unusual parent of an unusual child" one year. It (see below) still lives on the shelf in her office ..... just in case the parent/child comes back and asks to see it!!

The best present I ever had was in my first year in the present school - I cried on the playground as I brough the children in. The parents had got together and bought me vouchers for Ikea which were fab BUT they also gave every child (and their siblings) in the line a rose; so they all trooped past me and gave me a rose as they walked into school - *breathes deeply* it was beautiful!

You've been to lots of places in the world - what is the strangest toilet you have used?

Oh boy! In my third year of university I went on a study visit to Botswana. We travelled through the country with teacher training students from Tlokweng College in Gabaronne; the students were fantastic - so friendly/welcoming. Most of them came from rural areas in Botswana and as part of their teacher training, they went on a journey around Botswana to find out about their own country. As honoured guests, we were invited along with them - a 4 week journey in the back of a cattle truck, through the country from north to south and back again. We slept each night on the floor of a local primary school, on a mattress that we carried with us - not your usual 4* Safari tour. I feel really priveleged to have made this journey with those young people; down into the Kalahari desert, north through the Magadaki Salt pan, the Okovango delta (where we travelled by mokoro - dugout canoes), into Chobe National Park and finally into Zimbabwe and Victoria Falls - the world's biggest wet t-shirt competition!

Public toilets in Botswans were few and far between - I got quite adept at finding bushes in the desert to scoot behind. When there were loos, they were tiny, little concrete buildings perched over a pit ..... it took me 8 weeks to remember that Basadi and not Banana was Setswana for women, so going to the loo was always a lottery! There were huge spiders; Sarah and I always went to the toilet in pairs, so we didn't have to close the door to imagine the horrors behind them - we couldn't see as it was pitch black in there! And then in week 2 of our journey I picked up a stomach bug - probably water that I hadn't purified properly but it knocked the feet out from under me! Oh and then the toilets became even more of a horror - I could no longer "hover" over the black holes in the concrete slabs, instead I lined the abyss with wet wipes and was as quick as I could be!!

Strangest toilet - small concrete hut containing a concrete slab with a hole in it over a pit, with no roof in Bokspits (most southern point of Botswana, on South African border) - there was no road into Bokspits, we had travelled along a dry river bed in the lorries. Sarah and I went to the loo (we became very good friends by the end of the trip!) I can see stars (that I can't recognise being in the southern hemisphere), I'm peeing as quickly as I can; I can hear lions calling in the nearby Gemsbok National Park, something was scratching around by my feet and then this little voice says "wine gum Jo?" Truly and beautifully bizarre!

A few Botswana piccies for you to enjoy

How old were you when you first learned to use chop sticks?

I don't remember learning to use chop sticks, but I do remember the excitement when the Chinese take-away opened up in our village! This was West Wales circa 1979/80, I was 10 or maybe 11 I can't remember exactly. Ok there were Chinese restaurants in Swansea (10 miles away) but nothing in the village. No black, brown or yellow neighbours or friends; the Italian families who ran our local cafe were still considered "exotic". We had one black girl @ our primary school, she had been adopted by a white family in those days before political correctness went mad and left black/Asian children in local authority care unless there is a suitable family of colour to care for them (oh I am opening such a can of worms - worse than the caravan comments - eh Doris!?!)

And then in the October the Chinese takeaway opened - my mum & dad were going out for the night, my grandparents were baby-sitting and I was given money to get dinner from the Chinese! My grandfather was horrified; he had been in the merchant navy for nearly 60 years and had been to pretty much any country in the world with a sea-port. His memories of China (and Chinese food) were of the ports he had visited - Shanghai, Xiamen and Ningbo - were dog and cat were often on the menu in the restaurants and markets around the docks. I had sweet & sour pork with fried rice and chinese vegetables. I can still remember the taste, the delicious crispness of the batter on the pork, I still don't like water chestnuts - & if memory serves me correctly, I used a fork!

If you were a TV reporter what would you be reporting about?

Africa; drought, starvation and AIDS - more people need to now what's going on! Live 8 has been and gone and relief agencies are still having to ask for money for starving kids in Niger - come on guys!!

Now the rules
Leave me a comment saying 'interview me please'.
I will respond by asking you five questions here on my blog (not the same questions you see here!)
You will update your blog/site with the answers to the questions
You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post
When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions

I don't expect anyone to ask me to interview them ........ I won't be upset *smiles broadly* it was just that I knew Doris's questions would be fab!!