Delicious cheeses, ways of using bits of animals that you never even see in UK supermarkets, pastas, gnocchi, preserved meats, spectacular breads, glorious wines...

Yup. I could very, very happily live in Italy.

I think my Mum picked up a giant carrier bag of these incredibly exciting books at a car boot sale when I was about four or five; I'd read the whole lot within a couple of days. I wasn't a particularly gifted kid, I just had a family who took the time to read to me from a very early age, and who encouraged me to learn how these 'word' things worked.

From then onwards, books became my favourite way to escape. I'd read absolutely *anything* I could get my hands on, from newspapers to encyclopaedias and back again.

Nothing much has changed. I'm even getting fond of reading books on the eye-watering screen of my iPhone in quiet moments at work.

a strange twisty thing that goes 'plink'.
Because you're not going to have one of them any time soon, are you now?

a perfectly preserved gooseberry from 1952.
Ditto.

a penguin of my own.
Then I can give yours back. Hah.

Make Consultant.
Because my six years at med school and endless professional stressors have got to count for something.

Give up medicine.
I'm looking forwards to a nice leisurely retirement writing books, possibly coupled with running a gastropub somewhere scenic.

See penguins and polar bears.
They're my favourite animals, and I wanna see them in the wild!

Figure out what it's all about.
Because sometimes, I really don't know.

Go to Mars.
Space, the final frontier. Well, something like that. I have always held this silly little fantasy that one day, I'm going to get off of this rock and go and do something spectacular out there in the stars.

Don't think this one is going to be achievable.

Teleporter

I would love a teleporter. This little gizmo would make my life better because it'd let me flip to work and back home again without the HORRORS of driving on the motorway in fog or rain or snow or silly season (which is when everyone drives like a pillock).

I wouldn't have to spent money on petrol. I wouldn't have to worry that I was going to reach my destination a crumpled bag of bones. No concerns about what lane to drive in. Just blip-blip-blip and whee, I'm gone.

Of course, some killjoy will probably realise that they're worse for the environment than cars. But I don't think I'd let that stop me. Wheee!

... but if we're talking about little cars, I'll have my VW 1.4 Polo, thanks. It does manylots miles on manylittle petrol, it's cute, it's bloo and it goes yay vroom.

Hooray for Polos!

This book remains one of the funniest I have ever read. It's so laughably badly written, so removed from any form of reality and so completely based on the author hammering his one point home, that you'll laugh yourself silly...

... before you throw the damned thing across the room and pick up something truly entertaining.

Seriously. Whoever heard of a smart car that you could 'gun' the engine of? It reads like a second rate film script (and made a second rate film) from start to finish, and I'm happy to say that I only read it once. Huzzah!

But if you've got to choose between someone staring at you or someone who wants to make conversation, I think it's pretty obvious which is going to make the miles go a bit faster.

Red and colorful parrot

In 6th form, there was this 8 inch tall wooden parrot thing that was a bit of a mascot. It used to sit on top of the board in one of the chemmy labs. Apparently, it had appeared in the lost property office one day, and our teacher had been fond of it, so kept it. Goodness knows where it originally came from... all we knew it that it was a tempting target for a bit of harmless mischief.

As our time at the school was nearly at an end, it was decided that we'd kidnap the parrot, hold him hostage and paste wanted posters all over the school, making him out to be some dangerous escaped criminal.

After extracting the birdie from the top of the blackboard (about 8ft up, mind you, so requiring some skill), and whacking him on the scanner in the computer room; this was before everyone had an iPhone, don'tchaknow, El Parrotto's wanted posters were made and duly plastered throughout the school site. Said criminal parrot took up residence in our form teacher's office for the duration.

Long story short: they knew I was the ringleader. Not hard to tell, really. A couple of days later, a letter appeared addressed to me in our class register with a photo of a very cute little fluffy parrot, pleading for El Parrotto's return as his little brother Chico was pining and refusing to eat.

Well. We couldn't live with ourselves after that, so El Parrotto was returned to the top of the blackboard, along with an inflatable girlfriend-parrot that one of my friends had acquired from somewhere and a diary cataloguing his exciting five day adventure in the wilds... and he was soon joined by his little fluffy brother, Chico.

I believe the three of them still live there to this day... I really ought to go back to the school and check!

It's weird how fondly I look back to 6th form. We were a bunch of bright gels, all looking forwards to shiny futures. We had some good laughs; making sock puppets and playing with them under the table when the headmistress walked in, marching a kazoo choir along the corridoors, growing weed* in the classrooms, trying to persuade one of the slightly barmy chemistry teachers to explode the hockey pitch... all pretty tame compared to some of the things that kids do, I guess. Still. Good clean fun, and I don't think a giggle from time to time did anyone any wrong.


*they were calendula dasies, and we presented them to our favourite teachers as leaving presents after carefully cultivating them on the sunny windowsill for three weeks.

Hey there Delilah by Plain White T's

Nothing makes this a good post break-up song, it's just stuck in my head at the moment and it's refusing to get out. So it's at number one.

So. Many. Great. Lines... I think the top 3 have got to be:

3. I won't argue that it was a no-holds-barred adrenaline fuelled thrill-ride, but there's no way that you could perpetrate that amount of carnage and mayhem and not incur a considerable amount of paperwork.

2. Have you ever fired your gun up in the air and gone "ahhhh"?

1. You wanna be a big cop in a small town? Fuck off up the model village!

It has to be the bear! Has to be. 4 sets of grabby claws versus one thrashy tail? The shark stands no chance.

Also, sharks solely aquatic. Bears combine versatility with clawy-ness. Also, they don't have those stupid under-carriage teeth. Okay, so the bear might have fun trying to corner the shark, but I reckon a bear has the brains to sort that. Sharks have brains the size of a peanut, don't they? Also, if they stop swimming, they die. That might not be 100MPH fact. Hmm.

Anyway, dude. The bear wins. Hands down, no contest, a bit of raaaaaaaaring and sharkburgers for all. Yaay!