Interviews - the second round

From Richard:

1. How many toes do you have (including your own and any others you might have collected)?
All ten. And ten toenails as well, which is 1½ more than my brother has. Really.

2. What's your favourite type of cheese?
None of the blue cheeses, that's for sure... probably Gouda or Emmenthal. Cheese is best melted and used on other foods, anyway, rather than eaten on its own.

3. If someone offered to make you the perfect sandwich, and you could have any filling you liked, what would you pick?
Is there a food theme going on here? The best sandwich I had was also in Canada (what can I say, they do very good food over there) - one of those enormous Club sandwiches, toasted, chicken, bacon and melted cheese. And hot. It was heaven, so I'll have another one of those.

4. Are there any machines or other devices, used by you on a regular basis, where you have absolutely no idea how they work?
I have a physics synoptic A-level exam this week (covering the entire 2-year course) and I'm planning to study it along with Comp Sci at university, so hopefully not too many... Okay. After ten minutes of sitting here thinking about the issue, I can now tell you that the machine of whose workings I have the least knowledge is probably the car I drive. The engine, more specifically. People have explained it to me on numerous occasions, and I'll almost grasp most of it, and then promptly forget anything that I actually heard once the explainer stops talking. But I don't mind. I find solace in the fact that even Jeremy Clarkson has admitted that he has no clue on how a car works.

5. If modern civilisation were to crumble around our ears due to, say, war or plague or alien invasion, what would you miss most about it?
This is going to be on a par with Arthur Dent not caring at all that the Earth has been bulldozed out of the way but suddenly feeling distraught that there is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger or a Bogart movie left in the universe. I'd miss paper and pens. Things to write with and things to read.

From Iona:

1. How would you describe your forty year old self?
I don't know, I've never met her. Um. I really have no idea how to answer this. So I won't. Sorry.

2. If you had a magical invitation to a dinner party that no-one would dream of refusing, who would you invite and what would you talk about?
For how many people? It'd probably be different depending on how large the dinner party was, and whether I would be able to talk comfortably to the people or if it would all be mis-heard snatches of conversation, knocking people's elbows and straining to be heard. But I don't have a clue really... so I'll say that I'd invite everyone on my blogroll and my regular commenters, and we'd talk about anything but blogs (if that's possible!)

3. Which is best: happiness, wisdom, wealth, health, mystery, adventure, sensible shoes, immortality?
Not immortality. Or sensible shoes. Eternal mystery could be frustrating if the mystery is never resolved. Eternal adventure would be tiring, I guess, and you'd get blisters if you didn't have the sensible shoes. Health is all very well, but annoying in that you don't tend to appreciate it when you have it. Wisdom is good, but if it's the sage-like kind of wisdom you may irritate other people because you're a know-all smart-alec all the time, and you yourself may get irritated whenever people don't follow your advice, because you know that you know best. Wealth... um, what's the standard bad thing you can say about wealth in order to take pride in poverty? Ah yes, it's the root of all evil. So that can't be good.

I'm left with happiness, which I'd have no complaints about!

4. What superpower would you choose?
Being able to read even faster so I could get through all my books? ;) No, definitely omniscience. Knowing everything on demand would be amazing, and you'd know how to forget about all the things you didn't want to know.

5. Which is scariest: vampires, werewolves, spiders, poverty, illness, loneliness, ignorance?
I'm not actually that scared of the first two, and ignorance is bliss, apparently. Illness is scary because, depending on the illness, you've had no control over it, and it can take over your life. I'm not so scared of poverty because, depending whether you meant UK-defined poverty or real poverty, in the former case at least you can still survive pretty well, and in the latter case I don't find it a likely prospect. Spiders can be scary - hang on for a bit and then I'll tell you the story of the scariest spider I've encountered - but in most cases it's more of a startled, jump-in-the-air and then avoid it like hell type of scary, as opposed to real fear. So it looks like loneliness - and that's real loneliness, as opposed to mere isolation (I can get really pedantic about shades of word meaning) - is what I find scariest from that list.

Okay, the spider story. (And please believe me when I say that I don't exaggerate, and what I am about to describe to you is the literal truth and not built up in any way. Apart from this intriguing introduction which is hopefully increasing the tension.) Everyone had gone to bed and I was just going downstairs to get a glass of water when I paused at the top of the stairs, as I had noticed a shadow at the top of the wall next to the stairs. I switched the light on and recoiled in horror (and leapt about three feet in the air) because, about four feet over and three feet up was the biggest spider I had ever seen, or ever hope to see. Really. Even on television I have never witnessed such a monster as this was, although, granted, I don't actually watch that many terrifying spider documentaries. It was huge. It was black. It had a large body and thick legs. It was about four inches from toe to toe.

I stifled a scream and ran to get my dad, even though he doesn't deal that well with Large spiders. Actually, it was out of the realm of Large spiders and into the realm of Sodding Enormous spiders. He stood with me - well, I made sure I was standing behind him out of the way - regarding said beast. Thank God, it didn't move at all, else I think I would have just screamed and run away. Getting a glass and a piece of card to trap the thing was clearly out of the question, since its legs wouldn't have fitted inside the rim. Eventually we got a vacuum cleaner with a pipe attachment - he pointed it at the spider and then I switched it on. Co-ordinated effort, you see. We left the vacuum cleaner running for a few minutes and then found some brown parcel tape to cover the end of the nozzle, just in case the thing had somehow survived that ordeal with legs intact and was thinking of spending some time crawling up the pipe and pursuing us to exact its revenge.

It was dispensed of in the morning - not by me, I shouldn't need to add - and I'm very grateful that my dad also saw it, else my protestations of, "But it was that big!" would have no doubt been put down to blind panic and hysteria.