Getting To Know Your Karl

Well, I’ve had this blog for a while now, but I hardly ever put anything on it, averaging out at about one blog post per year. But I’ve now decided that I’m going to change that and start posting here a bit more often.

As to what I’ll be blogging about, well, it will probably be anything and everything. Such as whatever it is I’m up to concerning my writing, to what I’ve been watching on TV, to my views on life, the Universe, and everything. Basically, whatever happens to pop into my head at the time I come to write something.

For now I’m going to aim for one post per week. And when I write my blog entries I’ll be keeping this quote from Dr Seuss in mind, “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”

And so, here I am with the first of these posts! Hi! I thought to start off with I would write a post about my favourite subject – me! OK, this isn’t just me being big headed about myself, honest. I’m aware that the various people who cross my path may not actually know me all that well. Which is fair enough, as I can be fairly hard to get to know. Back in 1997, when I went back to my school to collect my GCSE results, I wore a t-shirt which had written on the back “Requiring secret knowledge to be understood”. My Head of Year (who had been my Head of Year for four years) said that what my t-shirt said was “so true”.

So, yes, it can be quite hard to understand the inner workings of my brain. There are people who can measure how long they’ve known me in decades who would still admit that they don’t really get me. Winston Churchill once described Russia as a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” I’ve been known to make Russia look like a kid’s dot-to-dot puzzle.

But then, of course, we’re all complex people, and maybe I’m just no more complex than anyone else once you delve beneath the surface. But there is still plenty that people don’t know about me, and so I’m going to try and remedy that here, slightly.

In this post I won’t be going through all the ins and outs about me, that would take far too long! But for those of you who know very little about me, this post should help you to get to know me a little bit better. See this as a crash course in getting to know your Karl – welcome to Karl 101!

Right then, here goes:

• I’m 32, and live in Harrow, north London, which is where I’ve lived most of my life.
• I live in a shared ownership property – I bought half (with a deposit and mortgage), and pay rent on the other half. I have the option to buy the other half in blocks of 10% if I choose to.
• I live on my own.
• I’m single (but would like to change this).
• I have a degree in Film & TV.
• I’m working towards a second undergraduate degree through the Open University. I’m doing an Open degree, which allows me to mix and match modules from various subject areas. Modules I’ve done (not all of which will count towards the degree) include modules in maths, science, creative writing, computing, business studies, Shakespeare, and philosophy.
• I work full time as a civil servant in central London, and have done for the past 10 and ½ years.
• I’m a trade unionist, and sit on the branch executive committee of my department’s branch of the Public and Commercial Services union.
• I’m an Excel expert. I can write functions that no one else at work can understand, but which save a lot of time, and can do some clever things with macros as well.
• I was a Games Maker during the London 2012 Paralympic Games, where I was based at the Olympic Stadium.
• I spent part of the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games doing clever things in Excel, which saved one of the managers there a lot of time. In fact, she said that what I had done was (and this is a direct quote), "The best thing ever!"
• I spend a lot of my spare time doing creative writing.
• Each year in November I take part in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. The aim of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in just 30 days.
• I have done NaNoWriMo six times.
• For NaNoWriMo 2012 I wrote 200,000 words – the joint highest total in London. (The other person to hit 200k got there two days ahead of me...)
• I tend to write fantasy novels, but not always.
• I am a big Doctor Who fan, and can remember back to when the classic series was still on the air.
• This year I’m working my way through every episode of Doctor Who – at the time that I’m posting this I’m about to start the Tom Baker era.
• I like to play video games, but haven’t had time to play them much in recent years.
• My favourite type of video games are Role Playing Games. I’m a particular fan of the Final Fantasy series.
• I love retro video games – my favourite console is the SNES, for which I own over 50 games.
• I come from a Jewish family, but don’t count myself as Jewish as I don’t follow the religion.
• I define my ethnicity as "English/British, and descended from eastern European Jews".
• I’m an atheist leaning agnostic. I broadly agree with scientific theories such as the Big Bang theory, and Darwinian evolution.
• I don’t drink alcohol – I simply don’t like the taste of any alcoholic drinks. I have never been drunk.
• I’m a pescetarian – I eat fish but I don’t eat meat. I have been pretty much all my life. I’m against the farming of animals for slaughter, but I’m OK with eating sustainably fished, ocean caught fish. I normally only eat cod, haddock, and pollock.
• I believe in equality and fairness for all.

Right, I think that’s plenty to be getting on with for now! That should give you all a rough idea of the sort of person I am. If there’s anything else you would particularly like to know about the Karl, please feel free to ask.

And so ends this first blog post. Don’t worry, future posts won’t all be about me! Join me again next week, when I’ll be talking about a love of real books...