Miss Universe

The lovely Natasha turns 30 today, and I'm very lucky to have known her for at least twenty of those years. Errr ... sorry ... she's turning 24. 24, I say! In honour of her eternal youth, a list of the reasons that everyone should have a Natasha as a friend.

Freaky memory power:
She remembers what she studied in school, unlike me. She can recite all the best lines from films. She is particularly good with numbers - I'd swear she could memorize a thirty-digit number after hearing it once. I have often considered paying her a yearly retainer to serve as my personal password management system.

Physical protection:
This is a woman with martial arts training and marathon-running experience. She rides bikes up mountains and across chasms, and can bench-press her husband (hi Pete!). She pumps iron and wears stiletto heels. You definitely want her on your team. (Thats her doing a jump on her bike at left - sorry it's so small.)


Your own personal think tank:
She has studied astrophysics, philosophy, architecture and law, making her very good at the hardest Trivial Pursuit topics. She also has uncanny research abilities. If I so much as mention looking for a job, she will, within the hour, email me eight exciting opportunities, none of which I'd have been able to find for myself.

A fashion consultant on call:
She appreciates the importance of kick-ass shoes, sparkly silver (but always modern) jewelry, and the colour black, and uses all to devastating effect. She forces you to buy things you wouldn't have otherwise, but immediately love.

Psychic powers:
She can post you fragments of old notes you passed back and forth in school in grade eight so that they arrive exactly on the day when you most need a laugh. From what corner of the Land of Lost Memories she retrieves these ancient bits of ephemera, I shall never know.

Makes anything boring fun:
The best (and most dangerous) person to have next to you in a dull class, school assembly, lecture, film or over-earnest theatrical production, or when you're being lectured by a teacher or parent. Without words she'll manage to convey the ridiculousness of the predicament, so that you dissolve into stifled giggles that erupt into an unseemly snort at the most inopportune moment.

Makes exquisite cheesecake:
I think this one speaks for itself.

Self-sacrificing to a fault (at times):
She will, with good humoured resignation and admirable panache, be the one to wear 'Dum' across her chest - at an age when it's just asking to be tormented for the next three years - when someone has the brilliant idea of dressing as Lewis Carroll characters for Hallowe'en. Of course, she hadn't yet become Lara Croft and I was approximately three times her size at the time, so perhaps it wasn't a fair fight.


I wish I had a photo that does justice to her beauty, but she lives across an ocean and a continent and I have hardly seen her since I got the digital camera. Rest assured she is also easy on the eyes, and deserves to have a fantastic year ahead. Of being 24 years old. Ahem.