25 LIES ABOUT MYSELF WHICH ARE ALL TRUE

Inspired by some stirling work by stirling friends on a stone-cold social networking site:

1. I went to ten schools before I was seventeen. I have lived in about as many houses as I have years. Because of this, I have frequently met new people and lied about my past to make it sound more exciting. DISCLAIMER: Some events from my life have been refashioned so often from re-tellings that even I believe some of my own stories.

2. My desire to make puns at all times is so intense that I genuinely consider it a disability.

3. I have three sisters, all of whom are smarter and more beautiful than they realise. All three are more thoughtful than I. I make up for this with grand overstatement of my abilities.

4. For years, I had a suspicion that any problems I had were caused by the fact that I was a genius.

5. I started going out with Kym when I was eighteen. That is 40% of our lives. We have been married for nearly four years, which is between 10% and 15% of our lives. We sometimes have a startling revelation that we are actually two separate people. For someone who lives inside his own skull, this is both startling and a comfort.

6. I write and I make music (see my blog and music pages in 'info' for evidence to the contrary). My dream is to have a beautiful bunker in the woods with my wife, some cats and a studio. Anyone who dreams otherwise is probably insane.

7. My Mum's Brother married my Dad's sister. Our cousins look just like us.

8. When asked to write a fifty word story at school, I wrote: 'A diplodocus has a very, very, very, very,very, very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very,very,very, very, very, very long neck. A combination of my sheer effrontery and a beautiful drawing of said dinosaur saved me from trouble.

9. I am a vegetarian, but I ate snails as a small child.

10. Injuries: I had an operation on my right eye when I was four or five to correct a squint. Even though it looked like I was looking over your shoulder, I was looking straight at you. FACT: If you have a lazy eye, you cannot see it by looking in the mirror. Well I couldn't: to me my eyes looked normal. Weeks after the operation I had to get stitches removed from my eyeball. Also: I once dislocated my shoulder/ broke my arm when ice-skating. I got beaten up once, and my face was so puffy I could see my cheeks and my brows.

11. I suspect that if purgatory involved a deep analysis of print-outs of statistics regarding my life, I would enjoy it. When someone says 'Do you remember when we used to always [insert activity here]?' I always wonder exactly how many times we did that particular activity. Some things I've done just once linger as if I've done them thousands of times, whereas others I did every day for years are forgotten. I'm interested in the mortifying facts, and yet in complete denial about them.

12. I was the perpetrator of a hoax email religion at college. It was called '2-d', and aimed to distress purveyors of false authenticity, a pet hate of mine, by celebrating all things obviously flimsy. I knocked out the power in half (well some) of Canterbury trying to send sonic messages to aliens. I also discovered (with fellow members of the Buns of Steel advance party) a mini Area 51 (area 51b, if you will) on the outskirts of the same city. It wasn't on any map. After we climbed the electric fence, I walked on for miles to find the source of a red light. When I got there, it turned out to be an incinerator, burning paper.

13. As a child I became obsessed with the number of letters in words. I became pretty quick at counting letters of words, and tried to use sentences that had an even distribution of letters. This was something that I only truly realised I did a couple of years ago, and tried to write a short story about it. I like the story, but the letter distribution is not even enough for my liking. Another mini-obsession involved touching a surface with my right-hand if I'd happened to have just touched it with my left. Problems would arise if the right-hand touch was much heavier than the left-hand one. This would require a complicated repeating the steps, only reversing them so that each hand had a balanced number of equally-weghted touches. I don't think I do this anymore. Talking about these with friends makes me aware that most people have similar/weirder processes.

14. I am left-handed, left-footed, and left-eyed. I am right-eared however, so if I listen to music at a loud volume, I am balanced and fall over less. When running the 200 or 400 metres at school, the bends (curving to the left) were almost impossible for me to navigate.

15. A calming habit I have is to mime cricket shots. At times of panic I mime a solid and safe forward-defensive stroke, using the back of my hand as a bat. When I'm really stressed, I'll do this to the mirror, and hold my position at the end of the movement, looking down to admire the solid position of my front leg and elbow, and see how the position of my head over the ball would mean that it would take all day for the invisible bowler to bowl me out.

16. I frequently have dreams about people I haven't seen for a while. Sometimes these include encounters that are so memorable that I don't call anybody for ages because I think I've recently spoken to them. Social networking sites only assist this fallacy.

17. I'm really tall. Despite this, I have an incredibly light footstep. I can walk in near silence.

18. I sometimes conduct commentaries/interviews in my head. They include such Billy Liar/Rupert Pupkin scenarios as being interviewed about my brilliance at something or other, or telling my parents that I am buying them houses. Sometimes, it is just an internal monologue describing what I am doing or where I am to a family member or friend. I've noticed this habit doubling since I've moved overseas.

19. I once wet myself at school. We were sitting on the mat, listening to a story, when I decided that rather than interrupting the teacher, I would just wiggle sideways until I was sitting on the stone floor, wee in my pants and then slide back to my original spot and deny all knowledge. I feel this is illustrative of my nature in ways even I cannot fathom.

20. Some nicknames I have been granted: Spud, Sparky, Sav, Savo, Savo Milosevic, Savicevic, Savits, Macho Man Randy, Fred, Lily, Shorty, Deadeye, Jarvis, Disco Mark, Elvis,

21. I lived in England until I was 29. I now live in America with my wife Kym. The reasons for moving were many, both big and small, and I don't even feel like I could articulate all of them. A big one for me personally is that once we had the idea, it loomed over me like a dare. I though that if I didn't try and live in America, I was a coward. Don't get me wrong: I know, of course, that I am a coward. I just hope that on a sliding scale from 'coward' to 'hero' that I am at least a couple of notches further from the extreme yellow left than I was a year ago.

22. Having said that, being a foreigner in the right circumstances is fun (and being English in America is, I concede, one of the easiest transitions, and surely easier than the other way round, give or take the British phobia of the terrible lands outside the island). Your most banal features from home are shiny and exotic. Your mistakes are unnoticed, or put down to translation issue. Your mundane obsessions (following a struggling football team back home) are seen as delightful eccentricities.

23. My hair doesn't actually take that long to do.

24. For years I would act out games involving kids from schools I had moved away from. It might be years of test matches using a tennis ball against a wall, or an entire football league season (with cup competitions) using a sponge ball and a settee for a goal. I'd keep pads filled with fictional statistics of these games. Some kids at some schools I may have spoken to only a couple of times, but in my long character histories they had fully-fleshed quirks and sporting personalities. I would 'act' as each member of a team, trying to perform in their true (ie my fictional true) style. I would attempt to be fair, and not make myself the best player on a team, but I would always be an unpredictable enigma (I was once banned from my own team for wearing political slogans on my shirt). This would all be recorded diligently. If you went to my school: I have possibly written your name in a notebook more times than I'd care to admit. My teenage diaries are mostly like this:

FRONT: Poetic slogans/drawings of myself in silver outfits singing on a stage/outlines of space-operas with lyrics and song-titles (one of which I attempted to record, aged sixteen- my first recording project. The musical, about a cult leader who steals the youth by co-opting all cool references and leading them Pied-Piper style into a mountain included the non-hits 'They Love Me/Him' 'Nostalgia Is Luxe' 'Cin-Fu-La' 'My Posse It Really Rocked' and 'Spaceship'. It is something I'd love to realise in full ridiculousness one day) /cut-out pictures of old movie stars such as Dietrich and Valentino/ To-do lists (a sample might be: 1. Finish song. 2. Give tape to James. 3. Write letter to Jayne. 4. Do 50 sit-ups a day. 5. Finish Crime & Punishment)

BACK: Fictional sports results.

I was in denial about the existence of the back part of these notebooks for years.

25. I can make a very good stir-fry. The day that Kym (an amazing cook and a firm critic) told me that I could make stir-fry better than her was one of my proudest.