I’ve been tagged by Charon QC and must tell you 5 things you didn’t know about me (with bonus trivia added):

1. Although I was born in Twickenham, I spent my formative years in apartheid-era South Africa. Despite having returned 30 years ago, my vowels are still flat and people still ask me where I’m from (the answer is SW14) and assume I support the Springboks (the answer is No, I passed the Tebbit test before he invented it).

2. Three of my immediate family have birthdays within 3 days of mine. If conception dates were randomly distributed, I calculate the odds of this at 1.8 million to one. But many people tell me their family birthdays are also concentrated. So we must carry a best conception date in our genes.

3. One of my first tasks in publishing was to expedite the delivery of a set of galley proofs, by personal delivery on a day return, to the eminent Professor Julian Farrand who I met on the platform at Manchester Picadilly. In those days authors prepared their work on manual typewriters or even in manuscript, editors used Tippex, scissors and Pritstick and books were printed from frames of type set as slugs from hot metal.

4. I live 100 yards from the primary school that Tim Berners-Lee attended. (Avid Binary Law readers will already know this.) They’ve named their new school hall after him.

5. I was a huge Sherlock Holmes fan in my youth, but my interest has waned over the years. I tell the gullible that he was my great grandfather. He’s also useful in clarifying the spelling of my name. The classiest version of the Sherlock Holmes Canon and other materials is at Camden House.

To break this meme out of the UK blawgers group, I tag:

Kevin O’Keefe of Lexblog (USA), blawging champion
Simon Fodden of Slaw (Canada), the legal info blog co-op
Francis Irving of mySociety, responsible for civic and community websites such as TheyWorkforYou

And a couple of long shots:

Jack Schofield (Guardian Technology Blog and Ask Jack), the Guardian’s technology editor, who awoke me to the web in 1994
John Naughton (Memex), whose Observer Networker column is compulsory reading