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Mez posted me Q's on Friday...I have been remiss. I am sorry, Dued x

1)What's your favourite takeaway food?
No contest. Indian. All the curry I can eat. The vote will always go to Indian, though if it means I get out of cooking, then takeaway anything is my favourite...as long as it contains no corpses. A proper curry is one thing I miss that I can't get here. Not at all. And cooking curries myself would not be the same or indeed, probably not even very edible and most likely charred at the very least. Finding spices in this neck of the woods is still like looking for a small pointy sewing implement in a very large mound of straw. Add to that the fact that I can't afford to keep getting new saucepans after last week's burned and stuck rice debacle! But I do just love curry. Adore it. Would do almost anything for one. Seriously.

2)Have you ever been on a protest march?
In a word: no. When I first came here, there was a student occupation, which meant no lectures, lots of live music and beer in the different university buildings and loads of fun, really. Yes, my social conscience kind of got up and walked - well, it went and sat in a corner, listening to music and swigging beer into the small hours for quite a few weeks...And like mine, so did many others. I never saw the point then - the occupation ended, as we all knew it would and nothing changed. I know that if everyone sat back and watched the others, then nothing would ever get done, but to be honest, I am too cynical to think that marching will change much any more. It just seems so much a case of "Yes, yes, children, we see your point, now run along to Nanny and let the grown ups get on with things," these days. I didn't care enough to go on protest marches when I was younger and now I think I am too far removed from any real sense of community, and half the time, I don't even know what that means any more. Someone, in a former blipcarnation, once wrote what I thought was a brilliant rant that about sums up my world view when it comes to protest - his is about riots, not about marches - but it is well worth reading, and I would link to it if he were to put it back...

3)To the layman many sequences of numbers look totally random but mathematicians universally agree that all sequences have an order, albeit very difficult to decipher. How important is order to you?
Order and all sequences having one, albeit very difficult to decipher. Hmmm. I can only remember the Fibonacci sequence and that it has something to do with a golden ratio, which has something to do with proportion and stuff, but that is as far as my sequences go. I have next to no knowledge on the subject, although I never have any problem with spotting the pattern in number sequences, I couldn't tell you why or how I get there and scratch that once you start throwing symbols into the mix...
Order? No. Logic and arranging things alphabetically, putting things away tidily just doesn't work for me. "Organised chaos" does. Although no one else can see what is going on with it, the only tried and tested way not to lose things is to leave them where they are in the first place!

4)Which ancient population do you know most about?
Having watched the lovely Mary Beard - this week's ancient population of choice is indeed The Romans. I really enjoyed it! Not as much as I love Two Greedy Italians (did you see what I did there? They are quite ancient too, if you think about it...). I am such a big fan of Mary, who is excellent and communicative and brings an enthusiasm and a love of learning and an ability to impart that learning to others with her that the asinine and superficial AA Gill will never even come within light years of touching on, so busy is he playing the role of the jaded baboon-shooting ar$e.
There are lots of Roman artefacts and buildings around here, too. I don't live so far from the Flaminian Way and the old town of Forum Sempronii, so I've done a lot of reading of tour guides for work. Then we have the Furlo tunnel, which was dug out through the mountains with what looks like spoons - you can see the marks - on the orders of Emperor Vespasian, whose name, in Italian is also used to refer to the urinal, which Google tells me is because of the tax he placed on urine collection...All hail Vespasian, inventor of the pay toilet.

5)Do you find that Steve Cram is invariably associated with breakfast cereal in your mind?
Erm...maybe. Watching sport has never really done it for me (apart from F1 once upon a time, and the odd football match if plied with beer- Juventus), I'm afraid, and if I think back on who this person is, I vaguely remember some very blond guy telling me to buy something Kelloggsy that wasn't a Cornflake or a Frostie and since being some kind of sports dude, he wasn't going to be waxing lyrical about the Coco Pop or anything Honey Nut. I suppose that means he is associated with breakfast cereal but not very successfully, as I cannot, for the life of me, remember which.

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