Carole Finds Her Wings is seven years old today – Hooray!! *balloons and streamers everywhere*

To celebrate I thought I’d do a little post about the person behind the blog – namely me, Carole (or Carole-Heidi as I am generally known online… and offline when I’m in trouble 😉 )

I started this blog in 2010, fresh off the back of the Alt Fiction literature event in Derby, with no real idea of where it was going. Seven years on I have realised that it isn’t really going anywhere – it’s just my little corner of the internet to play with as I wish.

Anyway, I’m a whole paragraph in and I have already managed to make this post about me, not about me. So, back to it! Here are 10 things you may or may not know about me/find interesting.

1.  I am the youngest of three siblings. There’s a fairly big age gap between me and them. Here’s a photo of us all in 1989:

2. I love books and have always been known as a bookworm but I’ve actually read very few of ‘The Classics’ and other ‘Books You Should Read’ and of the ones I have read, I’ve generally hated them. The Lord of the Flies is an exception – that one was ace. I never even finished Les Miserables Volume 1…

3. Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Carol gives me nightmares. I have received many copies of this over the years (side-effect of being called Carole) and they’ve all had the same effect. Even The Muppets version makes me twitchy.

4. My favourite type of food is Chinese cuisine. I could eat it every day quite happily. We went to Chop Chop in Edinburgh earlier this year and it is my new favourite restaurant – just a shame it’s so far away from home!

5. When I was little I wanted to work in a pet shop when I grew up. I have now grown up and I don’t work in a pet shop but I do live next door to one, so I came close!

6. I plucked my blog name out of the air in 2010 and then in 2012 Caius got me a falconry experience for my birthday and took the photo that quickly became the ‘face’ of Carole Finds Her Wings. The barn owl it features is called Cosmos and he was lovely.

7. I was a Games Maker at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and it was utterly incredible. When I wear my uniform t-shirt out in public, I still get asked about it and ocassionally even thanked! It always makes me smile and reminds me of the amazing, friendly atmosphere the Games created. It was a magical few weeks.

8. I have never seen Game of Thrones, despite it being right up my street. We tried to watch it once, but it failed to play so didn’t actually manage more than five minutes of the first episode. The first book sat on my bookshelf for about three years until I passed it on to someone else because I realised I was just never going to pick it up.

9. I didn’t learn to drive until I was 27 and my first car (well, it was Caius’ car really, but it was the first one I was insured to drive in) was called Felix. He was a red Ford Focus estate and he died with no warning in a service station just south of Glasgow when we were trying to drive home.

10. I always said I was never having kids but getting lots of dogs instead. I appear to have gone horribly wrong somewhere and ended up with two kids and no dog… Luckily the kids are pretty cute so I decided to keep them anyway 😘