Nose Jose mose in Hot town, summery in the city - 2017

8. Tell us about your most unusual skill. Where or why did you learn it?

My most unusual skill aka my superpower? Yeah, I think so. I’ve been lying in bed thinking about what I could put and I thought of three unusual skills… so here goes.

1) I can move one eye at a time. You know, separate from one another. This came about by one of those, “I wonder,” moments. I wondered if I could. Since I can go cross eyed it crossed my mind that I should be able to slide one eye back to its natural position while leaving the other in its cross eyed position. And guess what? I did. I bet you’re all trying it now and discovering you can.

2) superpower number two is sleep. Sleep? Yes, I can sleep. I crash out, utterly zonk, in my insanely comfy bed with my gorgeously comfy pillow (although I can also crash out in any bed!) and I will stay absolutely oblivious to the world until either my alarm goes off or it’s 7 hours later.

Things I have slept through in my life:

• Circa 1980. My friends and I camped out in my back garden. When I woke and went in for breakfast my mum started to tell me off about the middle of the night shenanigans until she realised I was totally oblivious. Apparently everyone else was up in the night and were caught, by my dad, climbing the trellis to the bedroom of the boy next door 😱. Yep, I slept through the entire thing even though I was sleeping nearest the tent door!!

• 1983 we were on holiday in Scotland, staying in a house, and the house over the road burnt down. There were police, fire engines and ambulances and I was utterly oblivious until the morning while the rest of the family had been woken.

• 1995 I was an au pair in Florida and a few friends and I had been to a nightclub. One friend had driven to my house and then got a lift to the club, at the club she’d been drinking so when we got back to mine I insisted that she sleep it off on the sofa before driving home, utterly forgetting the house alarm. When I woke in the morning I was told that my friend had triggered the alarm when she woke in the morning, the family had been in a tiz, police had arrived, having been automatically been alerted by the alarm company etc. Yes, I slept through the entire thing!!

This superpower could well have come from spending the second three weeks of my life (ie from age 3 weeks old to 6 weeks old) on a boat travelling from the Indian Ocean, around the tip of South Africa, back down the Atlantic along the western coast of Africa and into the Mediterranean to Barcelona.

3) my last and most amazing superpower is my sense of direction.
Really?
Oh yes. This was illustrated by a conversation had several years ago while walking in Savernake Forest with the family. It’s quite a large forest (by English standards) and we had gone a bit off-piste. I stopped for a few seconds, looked around and said, “let’s go this way.” T (my eldest child and the worrier) asked if we would get lost and hubby said, “If mummy said it’s this way then it is this way.” We did end up exactly where I intended. My kryptonite is pregnancy. It turns out that when I’m pregnant I absolutely, totally lose the ability (illustrated by getting completely lost and going the wrong direction on Offas Dyke Path while pregnant)! This one is just an inbuilt compass system. Youngest child and I can both do this while hubby and eldest can’t. I was in my mid twenties when I discovered it was quite unusual.

The superpower I wish I had? The ability to obliterate toe nail fungus!