Who are you?

How many of you have friend requests on Facebook, look at the mutual friends and end up thinking "They must have gone to school with me."

The trouble is when you look at their profile they don't look like they used to; they have wrinkles and bags under their eyes, grey hair or hair that's dyed to cover grey hair.  I genuinely struggle to recognise these people.

The other things that make it tricky to identify who they were is whether they've changed their name or whether you even remember their name from your list of fellow pupils.

There were 180 people in my year at secondary school (I think) and there's no way I can remember all of their names and further, remembering whether I liked them, or they liked me.

I think all friend requests from that far back should be accompanied by a picture of the requestor, as they were then.  Then at least the visual memory gets a chance to try and facilitate the remembering.

I've made a start and I've uploaded a few pictures from my school years; some are flattering, some not, but all are definitely me.  So if anyone wants to know if they knew me, they can have a look and see.  The Facebook album is here.  But for those who aren't Facebook-enabled, here they are:

First year at Primary School

Later Primary School years

Secondary school

6th form/Technical college

Carbon offset

Along with my Olympic tickets, for mountain biking in Hadleigh in Essex, I received Travelcards.  Yay!  Except "I'M TRAVELLING OUTSIDE LONDON TRAVELCARD ZONES" so can't use them.  Muppets.

Also included in my ticket package was a weird thing from BP.  There were six QR coded tickets that talked about carbon offset.  I scanned a code and followed the instructions.

Apparently BP was kindly offering to carbon offset my journey to the Olympics.  Well offsetting my journey to London because that seems to be where the Olympics is happening, apart from all of the events that aren't happening in London (LIKE MOUNTAIN BIKING!).

As I meandered my way through the carbon offset process thinking "Why am I bothering offsetting a journey from Brentwood to London when I'm actually travelling to Hadleigh" I noticed that the QR code didn't know where I lived.  In fact, its default assumed location for me was America.  It appeared I could choose the journey I wanted BP to offset.  It also appeared I could choose the number of people in my party and BP would offset all their journeys.

The words Deepwater Horizon seeped from my subconscious into my conscious mind and started to control me.

Believe it or not there are four in our party and they are all travelling from Australia.

I have five more QR codes to play with.  I plan to get BP carbon offsetting a heck of a lot of carbon.  I figure the environment is owed.

If you've just received your tickets then why not do the same.