What are your hobbies/interests/passions outside film music?

I suppose I would have to say that the main interest I have is bird-watching. I have always had an interest in birds. I remember when I was a teenager having a number of bird identification books that I would study but the weird thing is is that I don't recall ever actually actively going out looking for birds! My interest back then seemed to be purely to pour over the books and read about the birds.

Probably this may be partly due to the some of the books I had featured birds not native to the UK - one book in particular (I learned only relatively recently) was an ID book for birds of Eastern Europe!

Taking a more active interest in the birds around me didn't really happen until relatively recently (about 10 years or so). Which is a shame considering I have been on some school holidays to the Baltic region and the Mediterranean back in the 1970s and all the times I went abroad when I worked for the medical devices company I used to work for. I sometimes think of all the birds I would have seen!

Goodness, no!

I’m a keen cyclist... but only in good weather. I tend to shred a lot of weight in the Summer only to put it back in the colder months. Mostly because my other passion is food and cooking.

I also love horror fiction and I’m a huge aviation geek.

I wish I could related to your first two hobby mentions Thomas, but alas, I'm no gamer or Netflix binger. But YESSSS to meeting friends in real life!!

Well - for some background - I trained as a chef in Australia after I dropped out of my first degree 12(!) years ago. Then I spent six months working at a Michelin starred restaurant in my home town of Birmingham in the UK... and learned A LOT. I just couldn't hack the environment of a professional kitchen. Now, I love cooking in my own kitchen at my own pace.

In terms of food I cook, I'm a big fan of South Asian and South East Asian cuisines. Spanish and Italian. I also love trying to elevate my own country's cuisine in interesting ways. I'm open to anything really... I just love filling my house with good cooking smells.

I WISH I were good at cooking. I'm quite interested in it. I watch a lot of cooking shows. But my own skill is fairly limited, even if I've lived alone my whole adult life and need to make my own dinners. I make a mean deep pan pizza, though (US-style....or 80s style, as we would say in Norway). And I have a particular pasta recipe that is to die for.

I don't like to put 'travelling' up as a passion, even though it is. Because everybody loves to travel, so nothing special about that. I did a lot of global trekking in my 30s, in particular.

As a kid and teenager, I had some definite interests. I liked, and was fairly good at, drawing. I created loads of comic book strips from a very early age. Took art classes and was a reasonable talent. I have some of those things in my basement; might pull them up for a Zoom meeting in the future. But then when I moved to Oslo in 1996, I kinda abandoned it.

Writing was another passion. I wrote LOTS of fiction in my sparetime as a kid and teen - two novels and a lot of short stories, all handwritten. Writing is what I do today, so I guess that kinda lives on. Although not so much fiction anymore; it's pretty much all non-fiction.

Playing the piano was yet another passion. I nooded around on an ancient grand piano that my parents had inherited when I was age 4 or 5 or thereabouts, and onwards. Even composed a few things. Without knowing notes or anything. I'm still kinda angry at my parents for not recognizing this talent and giving me piano lessons. Oh well, bygones. I can also get around on bongos and tamtams (played some perc in bands as a teen).

Girls and parties were a definite passion in the mid 2000s and all through the early 2010s, but that has waned to almost zero now, due to various circumstances.

Back in my fit days, I loved ball sports. Playing football (no, not the US kind), basketball, badminton, table tennis. I was also a sports nut, keeping updated ranking lists in all imagineable sports. I'm still interested in sports, but far more selective.

Beer is obviously a passion, truly awakened after my first visit to Belgium in 2010. I try to learn as much as I can (and I have Michael Jackson's seminal beer book -- no, not THAT Michael Jackson), but I feel it's all rather overwhelming.

In my "old age", I've become particularly interested in genealogy. Always been a history buff, but I love it when I combine historical context with specific stories. Whether they are from my own family history or someone else's.

Anyways, those were some things off the top of my head.

I'll try to find some of the art for the next meeting. Between that and the film/music books, there's a lot to show when that evening comes around in a couple of weeks.

I'm sure you would crush me in corn hole, although I have no idea what that is.

I know many interesting things about my family's history, but I want to explore further. And I'm totally obsessed by genealogy shows like WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? etc.

I love middle eastern cuisine, including those you mention. I visited an Ethiopian restaurant many years ago back home and enjoyed it very much. Forgive me, I cannot remember what I ate.

That's awesome! So glad you enjoyed it! The roasted eggplant dip baba ghanoush is one of my favorite things to make. And falafel too!



Haha, yes totally with you there! I have to make everything at home, because I live 5 hours from San Francisco and 6 hours from Portland where there is a plethora of international cuisine, and that's just too far to go for dinner! In my small town, there's only one (and sadly, not very good) Indian food restaurant, so it's definitely do-it-yourself around here. But when I lived in the LA area, it was so wonderful to eat all the international cuisines and frequent all their amazing groceries stores too. Other than friends I don't get to see often, it's the only thing I miss.

Given my interest in cooking shows, and EATING food, I'm fairly certain I would have had more interest in actually MAKING exotic food myself, if I'd had a bigger kitchen. My kitchen, if you can call it that, is basically just a corner of a room with a tiny kitchen counter. Probably the tiniest kitchen you'd ever seen.

But I can dig up that old pasta recipe for you, if I can find it. Something for our food thread:

http://www.maintitles.net/forum/discuss … d/#Item_20

Oh, I'm definitely resurrecting that thread since I was the one who killed it.