Five things you don't know about Neil WD
So I got
blog-tagged by Ashesh. Hmmm! Thanks, I think...this has been going around for at least two months now, so I was kind of expecting to have escaped. Perhaps it says about where I stand in the blogerarchy...
At this point, it's customary for the taggee to tell 5 things that people don't necessarily know. So here goes:
1.
I released an album and made a rock video. I was in a band and taking it really seriously for about nine years, and the high point was releasing an album through Universal - which was largely funded through our fan club. The best part was a fan in Japan emailing us a photo of the album on a shop rack in Tokyo. Ultimately it sank without trace ;-)... we kind of lost momentum after that, then I started MWD, my wife became pregnant and life got very different very quickly. Just a few weeks ago I finally got some time to start playing the guitar again.
2.
I had and recovered from cancer. When I was 20 and studying as an undergrad I got Hodgkin's Disease, which is a form of thyroid cancer. The lucky break was that if you're going to get a cancer, this is probably the best one to get. These days the cure rate is pretty high if it's caught fairly early, and the other lucky break was that it was caught early. A few days before my 21st birthday, after a few rounds of chemotherapy and a month of radiotherapy I got the all-clear, and I've never looked back. I actually feel pretty lucky to have been through that experience, which probably sounds strange.
3.
The strange surname goes back 4 or 5 generations. Despite that there's only a large handful of W-Ds around, as a lot of the kids along the way have been girls. The bizarre thing is that neither Ward nor Dutton was from a wealthy background so they had no obvious need to both preserve their surnames: AFAIK they were both domestic servants.
4.
I spent 7 years at a boarding school and loved it. My Dad was in the RAF, and so we moved around a lot when I was a kid. The first year was hell - the headmaster was awful and had no control, so the prefects ran the place and were pretty sadistic. After that things got much much better and by the time I was 18 it had become one of the happiest times of my life. My big sister also went to a boarding school, but unfortunately her experience was nowhere near as good.
5.
One of my most treasured possessions is a BBC postcard from astronomer Patrick Moore. For those of you not from the UK, Moore was pretty much a national institution in the 70s and 80s - doing lots of TV stuff on space and astronomy. I was completely nuts about space and was desperate to be an astronaut. Aged 7 I wrote to him to ask him if he believed in aliens. He wrote me back a few type-written words on a plain white BBC-postmarked postcard saying yes, he certainly hoped they existed. I couldn't have been happier.
This has been going around for a while, so it's not that easy to find 5 blogger acquaintances who haven't already been tagged... so I'll choose
Dale Vile,
Sandy Kemsley,
Sandy Carter,
Matt Deacon, and
Jon Collins. Over to you, people!
Labels: MWD
