Self-Referential

So, a friend had to write a bio for her new post and welcome dinner (and jolly good for her, too!). I thought I might try a stab at mine. [clearing throat noise]

[Your faithful author] has no life. It is sunny today, 60F/15C (roughly) out and the only time outdoors was the walk from the subway to her office. She is miserable. She is procrastinating and writing this instead of making the dreaded phonecall she needs to make in order to find out what more work she should do. She will not be watching the opening game of the baseball season because she will, again, be stuck in the office.

Not much cop that. How about less self-pity and more bio?

[Your less self-indulgent author] is from Catford, whose claims to fame are Gary Oldman and a giant cat on top of the now seedy and desperately sad shopping centre. She spent her formative years, like many a 90s youth, obsessively listening and re-listening (thanks to the power of cassettes) to the Evening Session and Mark & Lard on Radio 1. Unlike many, she also managed to watch Starshaped, the Blur film, every single day for a year between the ages of 15 and 16. During that time she also went out with cousins of both the Rebel MC and Kenny from Grange Hill. She wanted to be an astrophysicist at King's College, Cambridge. That has not happened. University didn't lead to the career she wanted, but did help her reclaim her Catford accent after hearing the public school overprivileged brats without a trace of a Dorset accent because Mama didn't let them play with locals.

Through various twists and turns, she ended up being terrible at physics but ok at the history thereof, combining her two loves of feminism and war in her undergraduate and graduate theses, for which the Arts and Humanities Research Board was trusting enough to award her a grant. She has done nothing with her theses. She may not even have a copy of either, although the graduate one is, in theory, in the Imperial College library.

After periods messing around as a personal assistant and being a terrible teacher of English as a foreign language to unsuspecting Catalan children, she is now a lawyer. This is all very much Once in a Lifetime territory. How she found herself here is not clear, but is undoubtedly linked to a big Yorkshire oaf with an extraordinarily kind and generous heart who still gets up to make her tea before 7 in the morning most days, even after a decade of being together. Despite currently working ungodly hours and seeing far too little of her family and friends, both in NY and from back home, she is a pretty contented person.

She hates camping, has no known allergies, and thinks that Chime by Orbital might just be the greatest record of all time.