As a child, I wasn’t very good at reading. (That’s a lie. I was always very good at reading, I just had a much more sketchy grasp of geopolitics in the 1990s, so The Times held less interest for me than it does now). Faced with the impenetrable wall of my parents’ newspaper blockades over breakfast, I would beg, therefore, to be allowed to do the ‘quizzes’.*
Until I was 11 I could tell you, with a conviction and surety that belied my weedy frame and oversized glasses, a great number of absolute facts about myself, such as What type of Conservatory I needed or What my Home Decor Personality was. (My parents took the actual parts of the papers, but generously shared the Homes & Gardens supplement). Entering big school initially threatened to disturb my by then fully-formed and adamantine personality, with it’s pursuit of independent thought and scientific discovery, but luckily I found a copy of Cosmo in one of the older classrooms.
My love for quizzes has continued, unshaken, into my adult life. (I was initially tempted to write “well into my adult life”, but remembered that I am a mere slip of a girl who has scarcely left university, and certainly not had sufficient time to achieve any of life’s major milestones, despite my peers’ evidence to the contrary). It was however shaken abruptly yesterday, when, in a brief moment of levity as respite to my usual schedule of worthy deeds and career-advancing diligence, I stumbled across an online quiz. I happily answered questions on ‘my favourite diva’ and ‘my idea of a perfect day’, and let them know that I would describe my clothes style as ‘glam glam glam’. (This was one of the options. If asked in real life, I would simply say one ‘glam’).
I couldn’t wait to re-confirm my Secret Celebrity Soul Sister or establish once and for all My Perfect Wardrobe Choices. It was somewhat of a surprise, therefore, when this was the answer I was given:
*Despite being good at reading, I was not at all good at recognising what constituted as a ‘quiz’, and regularly wasted valuable time laboriously answering the rhetorical questions posed by magazine adverts. Is she born with it? Is it Maybelline? I am yet to get a conclusive answer from anyone.
unfashionablylost 