LIZ FIELDING

I'VE BEEN TAGGED BY KATE HARDY...

...and now I have to tell you seven things about me that you don't already know.

Oh, dear. Is there anything left?  You all know about the chocolate addiction, the fact that I loathe housework, struggle with my weight, cook - intermittently, that my son had his first book published last year and I am about to become a grandmother courtesy of my dd.

I'll try, but stop me if you've heard this before...

1 I'm going to Rome in the spring.   You won't have heard that.  It's very new news since I only booked yesterday! This will be our second trip and we'll have more time to fit in stuff we missed a couple of years ago. We'll know not to wear ourselves out before being faced with the climb up to the Palantine.  And this time I'm defo going to throw a coin in the Trevi Fountain because I want to make certain that it won't be my last visit!

2 I started wearing spectacles when I was three years old. Those little round metal ones that these days look cool, but back then there was no choice. The specialist told my mother that he couldn't do anything for me until I could read the letters off the board. Yeah, right... I showed him!

3 My daughter was addicted to mauve when she was tiny -- a colour unheard of in children's clothes back then. I used to accost total strangers in the street if I saw a child wearing something in any shade of mauve and ask where they'd got it (I was the archetypal embarrassing mum). She still remembers the mauve jumper I knitted her (out of pure desperation!).

4 At a smigdeon over five feet tall and with size 4 shoes, I was the tallest woman and had the biggest feet of any woman on my mother's side of the family until my daughter overtook both at around the age of 10.

5 I renewed my passport today, which means it's ten years since I went to Washington RWA with my dd and met some lovely ladies including Anne McAllister, Anne Gracie, Grace Green, Shannon Short amongst them and got a bit of reputation on the dance floor.   The lady in the post office checking my photograph to make sure my ears showed said I hadn't changed a bit.  Wrong.  I've put on weight and the hair is white instead of blonde (it was white then, the blonde was courtesy of L'Oreal!)

6  I had a cheese and tomato sandwich for lunch.

7 I took my driving test four times before I passed (I was incapable of reversing around a corner), but I've been driving for 45 years without an accident.