SEVEN RANDOM FACTS ABOUT MYSELF

1. THE BOOK OF GUILT

Whilst driving, I once told a car full of colleagues that it would be an easy matter to fill and publish a book with accounts of two or even three hundred things I’d said and done of which I was still deeply ashamed.

A voice from the back seat said, “I wouldn’t go there, Tris; that way lies madness.”

2. FALLING INTO GRAIN

I was climbing to repair a ladder bolted to the inside of an industrial grain silo in Scotland when it became detached from the wall and tilted sharply away. Unable to adjust my grip on the sharp metal, I let go and dropped feet first from a height of about thirty feet, expecting to break both legs, if not worse.

The augur mechanism that emptied the silo from the bottom had been broken and there was still about twelve inches of grain laying in the inverted conical concrete base. My heels sank in to it and I found myself sitting upright in a cloud of brown dust, shocked but un-bruised, and laughing.

3. THE FEAR OF QUICKSANDS

Lurid moments in a Lassie film, in an Egyptian Mummy film, and in a Tarzan film, gave me an early terror of quick-sands that kept me away from marshy places for many years. Aged sixteen and bored, I hitch-hiked to the south coast one wintry Easter and walked along the sands at West Wittering as darkness fell.

The tide was far out and the land had faded in to the evening mist and I followed the water's edge for some time before doubts set in, and eventually a tiny sign on a post loomed out of the mist ... i could only read it when my nose was almost touching it ... it warned me to beware of quicksands.

4. THE THREE-POINT TURN

In Spain, I was enchanted by mountains, having grown up in the south of England where nothing rises above a thousand feet. I once tried to drive across the Sierra Nevada to the Alpujarras in late September but the old road had been blocked by early snow.

Instead, I tried to drive the old Ford Transit up the long ramp to the Astronomical Observatory, but halfway up the back wheels began to wander sideways in the slush. It became necessary to make a three point-turn on the narrow track and I became fearful of the edge which gives way to hundreds of feet of loose barren scree. My fearless companion stood in the snow in her summer dress yelling “Back a bit more !” but I was shouting hysterically, “I daren’t go back another inch !”

5. RUNNING ON MY TOES

I miss sprinting from the bottoms to the tops of the various stone stairways in my childhood home town of Malmesbury, and running on the hard wet sand at Studland when the tide is out.

6. THE MOON OVER ICELAND

Flying north-west over Iceland in early March, so nearly on the snowy top of the world, I looked down on a conical volcano with a clouded top, and then beyond it towards the northern horizon where a pale full moon loomed in the mid-day sky.

7. FAILING TO RECOGNIZE MY ONLY CHILD

After another journey to Spain, I put on a suit to visit my daughter on her birthday and travelled by train from Brighton to Bath. Outside the station, we failed to recognize one another, she so pale and gaunt, myself so brown and plump.