Seven interesting things about myself:
1. I have been continuously alive for at least 3 billion years.
2. It is a fact both mundane and remarkable that after unimaginably many generations, my death will finally extinguish that particular long line of chance survival events.
3. I count dinosaurs as my kin though not among my ancestors
4. I am cheerful that prehistoric chance resulted in it being us who eats them in family sized buckets. It might so easily have been otherwise
5. Although long exiled, our family litany celebrates our shared ethnic identity as sarcopterygian fish
6. Genome for genome I am less than 1% human. Most of me is made of bacteria. For all my pretensions as an intellectual and artist, I am basically a walking compost heap.
7. Perhaps through a shared sense of identity, I make very good compost from the kitchen waste. However, it mostly goes unused because I am an inept gardener.
I am honoured to have been named for this award by another blogger who enjoys my posts http://theforesterartist.com/2012/11/01/tell-me-about-yourself-award/. Thank you. Tim seems to have an ideal life, working out of doors in big landscapes and also undertaking interesting and delicate drawings such as this one http://theforesterartist.com/2012/10/16/the-mystery-of-the-sunfish/.
I have to nominate seven bloggers. Now this is a benign exercise that makes me acknowledge some people whose blogs I follow. Still, these awards are in their nature memes. So I just want to say – please do accept the award whether or not you follow the rules, write seven things about yourself or nominate anyone else. For me, this post simply says that I like your blog. I have picked seven that I follow, all focussing on their own art work. there could have been many others.
http://outsideauthority.wordpress.com/
http://scribblah.wordpress.com/
http://eyespider.wordpress.com/
http://kleckser.wordpress.com/
kestrelart 
Has it not just been proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt that Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine and Guanine is on the oldest meteorites found, its almost impossible to manufacture, meaning you’re really 4.5 billion years old, at least, your much older than you claim Neil.
I’d love to try some kentucky fried archaeopteryx wings, 4 wings on each.
Really interesting points. Now I need to make clear that my response has all the in depth consideration of a pub discussion and is based on research solely from tertiary sources (aka Wikipedia). First, on the critical issue of fried dinosaur, I am not convinced that you would get 4 wings in your bucket. Archaeopteryx apparently did have some long feathers on its legs but like a chicken, the legs were still primarily a means of walking on the ground. I suspect, in bread crumbs, they would have been indistinguishable from chicken legs. By contrast, Microrapter really did have 4 wings, and may have glided like a biplane. I think land vertebrates have two kinds of muscle – the red meat works for sustained action, the white for short fast activity bursts. So how these animals would have tasted when fried might really relate to their ecological niche. Oh, one other point. Didn’t Col Sanders use 11 herbs and spices and are these not mainly derived from flowering plants? mmm – these evolved after the Cretaceous so when it comes to taste, this might be the critical factor. Along this line of thought, I realise with dismay that in the Cretaceous we would have had neither wine nor beer.
As for my ultimate age, I had to make some assumptions here. In a sense we are all as old as the Universe (14 billion years?) as we are made of the stuff of the Big Bang and the subsequent explosions of stars. This is not life, nor is the chance creation of organic molecules. So I am thinking of life as a form of combustion, a fire, the vital spark of metabolism that combined with a mechanism of self replication enables that chemical process, that entropic cascade, to have continued without break until it became me. If the fire had ever gone out, it could not have rekindled and retained its integrity. That is why it is so remarkable. But I think that that metabolic continuum is handed on only through the female line, at least in mammals, whereas as a bloke I pretty much contribute only to patterning the self-replicating template. So while I do have children, my personal spark expires with me. However, this is just a trick of thought and a rather solipsistic one at that.
Thank you, I don’t know what to say….. So I’ll say it again, thank you! I’ve taken the opportunity to have a look around the other nominees, great stuff.