I’ve been tagged!

I was tagged by Sheila Stuart

Tell seven random and/or interesting things about myself. Get five blog buddies to play, too and link to their blogs. Don’t forget to post the rules.

Of course I don’t have seven interesting things to tell! I’m a writer, all the interest in my life, thank God, goes on inside my head 🙂 Still, I’ll try.

1. I am trained to lead a Regia war-band and to fight with spear and hand-axe (blunt, of course). This is with my Saxon re-enactment society Regia Anglorum.

2. My family and I have appeared on Blue Peter (the famous children’s TV series in the UK). Again this was with Regia. We invaded the studio to illustrate a piece they were doing on Up-helly-aa, which was all very embarrassing because normally we have nothing to do with people who think Vikings wore horned helmets.

3. I currently have only one front tooth, the other one having been pulled out to deal with an infection at the root. I’ve got to wait for about 6 months until the bone is healed before I can have a replacement tooth screwed in to the bone.

4. I know how to spin, weave, make leather shoes, light a fire from flint and tinder, embroider, play the deer-bone flute, recite Caedmon’s song in Anglo-Saxon, cook bread on an open fire, carve a spoon, use a shave-horse and a pole-lathe, thatch a house and lime-plaster its walls. And I’ve been part of a team which has created an Anglo-Saxon longhall and village in two acres of land in Kent:

5. I visited Soviet Russia while it was still the USSR, saw Lenin in his tomb and bought woodwork tools from G.U.M the one and only department shop in the country.  While I was there, I also rode in a troika through snowy forests at a temperature of -20 Centigrade.  The chocolate icecream in Moscow was the best I’ve ever had.

6. I was married in the same church that Oscar Wilde was married in.

7. I married my first ever boyfriend, and we’ve been together 18 years this year 🙂

I tag Erastes, Lee Rowan, Charlie Cochrane, Lee Benoit and Emma Collingwood