A wet campus nude (Rousse)

While TPR found a parking space for our red Peugeot 205 near the World’s End pub in Edinburgh’s Old Town, I retreated to the Merchiston campus of Edinburgh Napier University.

On arrival in the department, I stripped off all my soaked cycling gear and hung it on the white Aga in the school office. I had made such a stupid mistake when dressing that morning. My outfit for a long road race in Scotland should have into account the rainy weather.

TPR walked back across town to campus to find me. Then he scooped me up and we sat in the corridor with some colleagues while we waited for my clothes to dry. It was only when MS and IH started giggling that I realised that wandering around campus stark naked was not a good look.

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A tiny, yellow-eyed baby (Rousse)

What was I supposed to do with a tiny, yellow-eyed baby?

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An orthopaedic surgeon’s cocaine sideline (Rousse)

I checked in at reception at OPD6 at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary for my appointment with Mr T.

The orthopaedic surgeon was much younger than I expected, and his preferred form of treatment for broken limbs most unconventional. He recruited his patients to a team of workers to stuff cocaine baggies. The dust swilling around our workbenches actually did have some therapeutic benefits for the pain of fractured bones, but I couldn’t envisage this  ‘medicine’ as a permanent fix for any of us.

At the end of my shift, the surgeon lifted me on top of a high red and white candy striped pole, then left me there with no safe means of descent. A fellow patient-worker next me suffered the same fate. With the encouragement of a big, burly, bearded man, we eventually found the courage to jump the twelve feet to the ground. Miraculously we made it, unharmed.

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Japanese beauties held captive in the White House (Rousse)

The White House, Hartburn, had been returned to residential use. I owned the upstairs flat, and someone else the ground floor. From their online descriptions, each property looked just like an ordinary Airbnb rental: people came and went, and the owners – myself included – could sometimes be seen sitting in the grounds enjoying the sunshine.

In reality, my downstairs neighbours were using their property as storage for illegal immigrants. Their ‘stock’ came from Japan. It comprised frightened young women, all extremely beautiful with long dark hair, clear pale skin, and ice-blue eyes.

I took it upon myself to rescue them. However, first of all, I had to get the obnoxious teenage friends of my nephew PMcC out of my own property. It seemed that this was a generation that thought that they could turn up at anyone’s house and stay there for as long as they wanted, no questions asked.

I fought with a French woman in my quest to release the hostages. One of her battle strategies was to hide my shoes so that I wouldn’t be able to get out of the building. However, I found a pair of brand-new designer loafers from an up-market Paris boutique in an unopened shoebox. They fitted me perfectly. So I slipped them on, rushed off on my mission, making the bedroom of the sports reporter the first place to look for hidden girls.

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Loving Timothy Olyphant? That’s Justified (Belle)

This was a hybrid library conference, held on an island in the United States (Alcatraz, but off the coast of New York). It was difficult to really enjoy the event, because the President kept trying to make himself the subject of every session. I had wanted to go to the Extrovert vs Introvert session – it was my idea after all – but I still didn’t know which team I should be on. As the event came to a close, I had not had the chance to speak to any of my school friends who had flown over from Birmingham.

The good news was I was in love with ‘The Sheriff’ and the feeling was mutual. I sat in the conference lobby, wearing a hairdresser’s cape while Timothy Olyphant cut my hair. He was wearing the cowboy hat he wore in Justified. Although we knew we must keep our love secret, when he finished my hair, he kissed the back of my neck in front of everyone.

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Retirement home regrets (Rousse)

We swapped our lovely, convenient city centre flat for a narrow terraced house in a former fishing village. The tiny settlement was squeezed onto a rocky outcrop facing directly west into waves of the Atlantic.

Surrounded by holiday rentals crammed with noisy families, and far from the facilities of even a modest-sized town, this was no place for an ageing couple to retire.

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Boris Johnson’s card reader (Belle)

The gang and I were stuck in a traffic jam at an underpass. We all tumbled out of the van and I was astonished to see Boris Johnson had been hiding in the back. As we all stood on the pavement, Boris held a massive wedge of cash in one hand and a chip and pin machine in the other. He was charging us each £5 for the privilege of transporting him here.

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Good times in a Toyota Yaris with Judi Dench (Belle)

It was a lovely evening and the park was illuminated by a bright moon. Dame Judi Dench entered the scene, acting as a Greek chorus. Embarrassingly she was announcing to anyone who would listen that I had just had sexy times in the very roomy back seat of a Toyota Yaris.

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A £5 reward for a £50 hand-in (Rousse)

I saw the end of a red £50 note peeping out from beneath the cubicle door in the gym at Edinburgh’s Omni Centre.

When I called to the person inside that she must have dropped it, she replied that it was not hers.

‘Let’s hand it in at reception then’, I suggested.

I waited for my fellow gym member to get dressed, then we walked upstairs to the reception desk together. The receptionist took the note and handed me £5 in return as a reward. This would cover two thirds of a glass of wine in a modest Edinburgh bar.

‘Do you fancy sharing a few millilitres of alcohol with me?’ I invited my new friend as we left the building together.

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Boredom relieved by bore (Rousse)

My summer project was to swim all the rivers of Scotland from the sea to source. On a very hot day, I started with the River Forth.

Other than a minor tidal bore which surged up the stream mid-afternoon, this activity offered little interest. It was both dull and lonely.

Later that day I reported to TPR that I would be abandoning my new hobby.

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