Daibhid's Journal

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FLASH! Ahh ahh! Saviour of the universe!

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1. All the time.

2. I don't remember...

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The Hobbit was always up there. Apparently when I was very young, I seriously impressed my Gran by being able to read whole passages to her. I probably wasn't actually reading as such; I'd just had it read to me so often I could recite it from memory.

At primary school I remember finding Green Smoke and sequels by Rosemary Manning. They were about a Cornish dragon who told a little girl about King Arthur. At the same time, I was seriously into Roald Dahl.

I also got a lot of great books handed down from my uncle, including various fantasy novels, Hitch-Hiker's Guide and several Peanuts collections.

And then, at about 12 or 13, that uncle gave me The Colour of Magic, and the rest was worrying obsession...

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When I was a kid, we went to London for the summer regularly. We were in a cafe or something near the South Bank, when my sister looked round and said "That's Dempsey from Dempsey and Makepeace!"[1]

Despite the fact I only watched Dempsey and Makepeace because she did, I was so taken aback by the presence of a Real TV Star in the same place as I was that I had a mild panic attack. My sister and cousin went to speak to him, and said "hello!" from me as well.

I've gone out of my way to meet the Doctor on a couple of occasions (Tom the first time, Colin the second), and one of my ambitions at DWCons is to actually speak to Pterry, but by and large celeb-hunting doesn't interest me (although, if it happens, I'm just as overcome as I was that day in London).

Edit: Oh, and a couple of years back, Mum and I saw Gerard Kelly in the car park at Tesco's (he was appearing in The Odd Couple at Eden Court. He looked like he had a lot on his mind, so even though we'd met him before[2], we didn't say hello.

[1]Dempsey and Makepeace was a 1980s "odd couple" detective show about an easy-going male American detective partnered, for reasons that now escape me, with a by-the-book British female detective. It was on for years, we watched it frequently, and the only thing I remember about it now is the throwaway line "Your chips aren't chips." "No, my chips are crisps."

[2]The first time he was in The Odd Couple at Eden Court, my uncle the journo introduced us, and he'd spoken to us again at Edinburgh.