Happy Birthday to me and 51 things you may wish you didn’t know about me

Good day, my friends. Today is my birthday and yes, I am 51. Last year, I told you how I love being 50; I still love it and still think that there are many advantages to getting older. And no disadvantages that I can see so far. May be some of these will show themselves when I am 85 but there is a long way till then.

Being 51 sounds like a good excuse to share with your 51 things you may wish you didn’t know about me (toyed briefly with ‘you don’t know’ or ‘you may wish to know’ but discarded those as assuming too much).

So here we go and let’s see whether I could get to 51; if not, you will have to use your imagination.

1. I was born in the year Bulgaria deflated its currency.
2. I was born a year after Gagarin went in space and belong to the age of space travel.
3. I have always felt very suspicious of the whole ‘I will go in space in a tin can’ thing and believe it may be a con (just joking).
4. I share a birth date with Margaret Thatcher.
5. This almost destroyed my relationship with John (not the similarities in character but he always got depressed on my birthday).
6. I was breastfed till I was 18 months old.
7. I remember being weaned.
8. According to Meyers-Briggs I am an ENTJ; translated this means I have the personality of a field-marshal.
9. I won my first battle with the world at the age of three – I refused to go to nursery.
10. I lost my first war at the age of three: I was sent to live with my grandparents.
11. Between the ages of three and six I lived with my grandparents (my parents had to work).
12. I never forgave my parents; or discussed this with them.
13. I never did any homework.
14. I always got top marks at school.
15. I’ve always read voraciously.
16. My top three most favourite books: On the Road; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; and The Little Prince (this is a hard one, though).
17. Can’t stand Zola.
18. Love Marques.
19. I very rarely read short stories.
20. I never read poetry.
21. I can’t read a newspaper that has been already read by someone else.
22. I don’t have Aspergers but am a very high scorer (just below clinical, really).
23. It all comes from obsessions.
24. I seamlessly slide from addiction to addiction interspersed with the occasional obsession.
25. I love cinema.
26. When I look at paintings even the paintings get bored.
27. I think opera is over-rated and should be avoided.
28. I love dance and multi-media performance.
29. My music tastes are eclectic: I listen to Faure and Dr. Dre.
30. I have two step sons and a much younger son.
31. I want a female dog.
32. My youngest son was conceived by IVF.
33. I have never won a raffle; or lottery.
34. I don’t play the lottery.
35. I didn’t know what money is until I was six.
36. I learned to read when I was four.
37. I think I was born at the wrong part of the economic cycle: we were unemployed when starting out and some are unemployed now.
38. I have a job.
39. I have a personal chair at a highly ranked university in the UK.
40. People started referring to me as ‘distinguished’; this smacks of expanding waistline and grey hair.
41. My name is ‘Nedeva’, which means ‘not a virgin’. I had to live with this name through my school days.
42. I get called ‘Nevada’; I hate it.
43. I (we) had £100,000 ($160,000) pounds consumer debt.
44. We paid it off in three years and one week.
45. I want to be a ‘best paid’ writer.
46. I can’t write ‘Fifty shades of Grey’; I have too much imagination and class.
47. I want to walk 300 K of the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage. This has little to do with religion.
48.  I want to spend a month in Granada, Spain learning to dance Flamenco from the gypsies.
49. I want to ride a motorbike across the US.
50. I will run the Comrades in South Africa in 2015; the race is uphill that year.
51. Starting to blog was the best thing I did after having my son.

Wow! There is actually more but I’ll save it for other birthdays. Now it is time to celebrate!