With the release of our Platinum business mentor programme, I have been labouring the point and repeating it over and over that your website needs to show who and how you are. Ideally, your personality gets to come through and you demonstrate the person that you are. Of course, we do this through blogging, audios, video clips, and various other means…

Recently, after some discussion with people on the business mentorship programme, I thought that I’d share some things from my younger days with the people I was talking to. We laughed so much that I thought I’d share some of them here too… So today’s blog entry is a day of random facts about me from the first 15 years of my life…

10. I was once handcuffed to a lamppost by kids in the year above me during lunch break at school. It was a joke. They went into town and left me there. Then another kid said he knew how to get them off, he squeezed them tighter and they did not pop back open. My fingers went blue, the fire department were called out to cut them off me and I made front page of the Basingstoke Gazette.

9. I got a flan ring stuck on my head when I was 6 years old. Yes, Adrian Mole got an airfix model stuck to his face, I got a flan ring over my head and around my neck and it would not come back over again. My Dad was too embarrassed to take me to hospital, so we eventually used a combination of butter and soap to prize the thing off me. I suspect I was damaged on many levels by this experience.

8. I was born 4 weeks overdue and eventually was a forceps birth. Because of it, one of my eyes was wedged shut for a while after birth and I was bright yellow with jaundice. I have a subtle scar on my face that shows up in the sunshine and have a slight squint in my left eye as a result. Despite this, my mother still maintained I was the most beautiful thing she had seen up to that point.  I was once told by a regression therapist that this probably accounted for much trouble in my later life… This was nonsense of course.

7. I used to have an imaginary big brother who left the room when my friends came round.

6. I subscribed to Roy of the Rovers comic throughout my childhood. I still fondly recall the days when Bob Wilson played in goal and the Kemp brothers from Spandau ballet were signed up and played for the Rovers. Seriously. My favourite strip in the comic though was ‘Billys Boots’ which was all about a footballer called Billy who had a really old, crappy pair of boots that belonged to a golden age footballer from the past and the boots were enchanted with his memories.  Hot Shot Hamish was my second favourite.

5. I played the cello until I was 13 years old and got up to a mediocre grade. Sadly, football won the day and I sacrificed cello for my aspirations on the field. Plus carrying the cello to school was tough and when we put our bags down prior to school to play football in the playground, the ball would hit the cello and I’d get into trouble.

4. I was a dedicated cub scout. I won the title of ‘Supercub’ in the Hampshire region once. I got all my arrows, many badges (including grade 3 swimming, a green one) and my link badge. My cub pack won 7 football tournaments while I was there and I still have the medals. I was a sixer for a good period of time, though did not go into Scouts. I can still tie a very good reef knot and set up a fire and bivouac in the woods.

3. I went to the cinema and watched the 15 rated film Platoon when I was only 13.

2. My first music purchase was a tape cassette album entitled “hits of 81” and one of my first singles that I bought was a number one song called “Frankie” by Sister Sledge. It had a very bright pink sleeve for the seven inch single to slide in and out of. My first theatre stage show was called ‘Time’ at the Dominion in London which featured Cliff Richard and a hologram of Sir Laurence Olivier  in the backdrop. I cried at the Mary Poppins film once and still get my leg pulled by my family at Christmas about it.

1. I was scared of cows until I was around 12 years old. Made all the worse by the fact that my grandparents lived and worked on a dairy farm.

Ah yes, the things that make us who and how we are, eh? Random facts to help you know a tiny bit more about the man behind the hypnotherapist veneer…  Please feel free to share a random fact about yourself in the comments section below…. I’d love to hear from any of you.

Thank you.

Ok, so I may well actually get around to writing about hypnosis tomorrow… For now though, get ready for some finger clicking… We’ll play out today with Sister Sledge… take it away ladies…

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