My Twenty Firsts Meme

I have been tagged by Paul Linford to answer the questions in the Twenty Firsts Meme and to add them on. So here goes:


First Job
Helping my Dad in the garden for £1

First Real Job
Assistant Manager of local Scope Branch (Unless my year out as expenses paid Resident Assistant Warden at a Church of England Retreat and Conference Centre counts! Didn't think so)

First Role in Politics
Press Officer for North East Herts Constituency Labour Party. Was appointed in early 2003 and am still in that role

First Car
Have yet to pass my test

First Record
Double purchase of We Can't Dance by Genesis and Greatest Hits II by Queen

First Football Match
Have only watched them on TV. My ambition is to visit Leicester and see my fav team, Leicester City, in action

First Concert
Can't remember. A school orchestra concert I think!

First Country Visited
Sweden, 1982, just before my seventh birthday. Interestingly the same month ABBA recorded their last songs, nothing to do with me though ;-)

First TV Appearance
Background on BBC News, when a student colleague was interviewed over his failure to get an Oxford placement or something like that

First Political Speech
Apparently my Point of Order at the Labour Party Conference in 2004 was judged by the Chair that morning, Tony Robinson, as a speech!

First Girlfriend/Boyfriend
Late starter at 23. Lasted a month.

First Encounter with a Famous Person
Lord Soper, at the Methodist Church where I worshipped, 1985. That said Graeme Garden lived in the same village as me when we were in Oxfordshire and my parents knew him, although I never met him until I bumped into him at Paddington Station some 20 years later

First Brush With Death
Probably being involved in a car crash when I was in my early twenties. It was raining heavily, the car in front went too fast over a large strech of water and we caught the tail end of it. My Mum who was driving did some quick thinking as we skidded across the road and crashed into a fence. We weren't even bruised, only shock!

First House/Flat Owned
Yet to happen

First Film Seen at a Cinema
A Disney film (forget which) at Cinema in Melton Mowbray when I was about seven years old

First Time on the Radio
Being interviewed on a latenight TalkSport programme about Barack Obama last year

First Politician I Met
Clare Short. At an open meeting hosted by the Luton University Labour Party around late 1995.

First Book I Remember Reading
The Mr. Men books

First Visit to the London Palladium
Never been.

First Election
Campaigned for Labour in the 1992 school mock election. After that it was when I stood as Candidate for Baldock Town Ward in 2003, eight months after I joined the Labour Party

Tagging five others as requested: Cally's Kitchen, Rupa Huq's home on the web, Recess Monkey, Tim Roll-Pickering, and WongaBlog