Feb 4, 2020

Fifteen questions for Fat Roland (contains raisins)


This blog post is about me. Which is why it's accompanied by a picture of me.

There's a 30-question Facebook quiz doing the rounds, so for the sake of content, here are my answers. I should point out that I deleted half of the questions: they were so inane, they made me want to go to a wedding reception with Westlife. Here, readers, are 15 questions about me.

1. Who are you named after? Not a who. A what. I'm named after a Roland JP-8000 synthesiser. I am not named after the chubby lad from Grange Hill, although there are worse people I could be named after. I could be called Dan Widdecombe.

2. Last time you cried? I cry at everything. Movie endings, children's choirs, wasps, anything. Jojo Rabbit had me in floods of tears. Seeing arbitrary insanity through a ten-year-old's eyes, in appropriately dis-tonal primary colours (comedy Hitler, rabbit blatherings, "clones"), made this a deeply moving and exhilarating film. Roberto Benigni meets Wes Anderson. Go see.

3. Do you like your handwriting? Actually, I do. It's a bit cartoony. As a child, I refused to learn joined-up cursive as it made no sense to my bookworm brain. Books didn't do cursive, so I shouldn't either. I'd have good handwriting for cartoon strip speech bubbles.

4. Would you do a bungee jump? Plop off. I'd hit the ground so hard, I'd come out in China.

5. What is your favourite kind of cereal? When I do eat cereal, which isn't often, I plump for something with raisins. Got to love a raisin. It's one of those foodstuffs people really baulk at, but they're idiots. Smother me in raisins.

6. What is the first thing you notice about someone? Tentacles.

7. Rugby or football? Neither. Both sports remind me of the horror of school changing rooms, the bullying tackles designed to injure me for fun, the cold mud and rain. Also, each side should be given a ball to make everything easier.

8. What are you listening to right now? Finally a question relevant to my website. I'm currently enjoying Mason Bee's debut album Play Flights. He's the bloke who makes nice guitar sounds and bleepy melodics in Plaid, so it's like someone's taken all the harmony from Plaid and tied a big beautiful bow on it.

9. If you were a crayon, what colour would you be? I've kept this question in here to show how bad the deleted questions were.

10. Favourite smell? Not this quiz, coz it stinks. It's all the cliche answers, I'm afraid. Cut grass, fresh bread, nice flowers, old books, kittens in blenders. Some people like the smell of babies or hair, which is weird. If you scratch this blog, it smells of warehouse raves.

11. Colour of your hair? Brown. Not a particularly interesting brown. A general hair brown. The colour of a horse that's just eaten two jars of Marmite. Like I say, not an interesting brown.

12. Scary movies or happy? I'll choose scary. Actually, I'm watching fewer scary films as I get older. Maybe the torrent of existential terror that is modern life has finally got under my skin. Boo! Was that scary? No? Okay, I'll choose happy.

13. Last movie you watched? That Armando Iannucci film about David Copperfield. More gentle than I expected; more Cock & Bull Story than Death Of Stalin. Dev Patel is perfect casting. Made me want to fly kites.

14. Favourite Holiday? Why is holiday capitalised? I don't really do holidays. If I wanted to lounge around doing nothing, I can do that at home. If I wanted to see interesting sights, I can use Google. If I wanted to sit by some water, I can find a puddle. Sigh. I'm happy, honest I am.

15. Best acid house tune? Great question. For years, my go-to acid tune was Fish & Chips by Hardfloor. It was on a Harthouse CD and I played it to smithereens. Amazing build-up. Sorry? What? Yes, you got me. This wasn't one of the original questions, I just wanted to big up Hardfloor. Is this over now? Can I go?

Photo: Alex Winton (taken at Mother's Ruin at Hope Mill Theatre, Manchester)

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