Who AM I? Here are some fun facts. It’s up to you to decide which of them is not true.
My favorite kind of chocolate is white.
I have made more than 30 different kinds of liqueurs.
My favorite color is purple.
My earliest surviving writing dates from preschool.
My 2D logo for a sculptors’ association, in use since it won their competition in 1986, is a bit of a joke, impossible to make as a sculpture; it only works in two dimensions. All my efforts to persuade them to adopt a tweaked version, workable in three dimensions, have failed.
I have discovered a family of infinite sets of fractal tiles (tessellations) in dimensions 1 and above.
My favorite birds are the hoopoe and secretary bird. They are both on my bucket list of things still to photograph.
I shot about 11,000 frames of 35mm film over 30 years (about 1 frame per day) before changing to digital photography in 2008.
I once did some proofreading and corrections for online voice-to-text transcribed lectures by Stephen Hawking.
I have met the same sitting Georgian president twice, and his successor before he became president.
I was in Moscow in the summer of 1991 when the coup d’etat against Gorbachev happened, and photographed much of it. This was my only visit to the USSR.
My favorite pop song is Annie Lennox’s Love Song for a Vampire (1992).
The Svan painter Guram Khetsuriani once offered me a whole notebook of his sketches for 1000 lari, then gave it to me for nothing.
My now-dispersed coin collection included a Siberian 10-kopek coin from 1774, for which I paid US$3 in Rivne, Ukraine.
I bought a mint-condition copy of the Giant-size X-men comic for $60 as a teenager, then sold it for the same price about 5 years later.
It took me 29 years to see my mother’s grave for the first time, in Zimbabwe.
I was born on a Friday the 13th, after several false alarms.
My wife and I both learned the same four languages in reverse order to each other; our fathers shared a birthday one year apart; and we both have sisters with a son named (some version of) Luke.
I have corresponded by email with authors Anna Politkovskaya, Greg Egan, Greg Bear and Douglas Hofstadter. The author whose works inspired me to visit the USSR was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I missed his return from exile in Hampshire, USA to Moscow, Russia in 1993 by one day.
My 4x great-grandmother was Britain’s most famous woman photographer of the 19th century: Julia Margaret Cameron. I am also related to the author Virgina Woolfe.
In my early years in Svaneti, I was under the protection of its Aprasidze mafia. The family asked me to photograph the funeral of its boss, Evgeniy, and his son, Omekhi.
I owned but ended up never using a potter’s wheel and an upright piano.
As a teenager I learned color and black and white photographic printing.
I have visited every part of Georgia except South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
I was once mugged, knocked out and robbed in an apartment stairwell in Tbilisi. The thief didn’t take my photographic gear. A Svan cap likely saved my life; a Svan surgeon stitched me up; and some Chechen friends took me in for a week afterwards.
My earliest craft hobby was origami.
I used to be a screen printer: my first full-time job, right after high school. I have also worked as a short-order cook in Canada and England.
My first name means “inestimable” in Greek; my middle name means “beloved” in Hebrew. My last name is the name of a small village in North Wales, my family’s origin point.
The difference in weight between the first and second fish I ever caught is 18 times.
As a teenager I had posters of the heavy metal band KISS all over my bedroom walls.
I have canoed in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans off Canada.
One item which has traveled with me from Canada through five other countries, from 1989 to now in Georgia, is a wok, given to me by the mother of a dear friend from Hong Kong.
I have a phobia of heights.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
