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.
XX’s research abysmal research proposal needed a lot of work. He hadn’t even articulated a research question. Instead, all he conveyed in the text was a broad interest in information behaviour and online shopping.
I had dozens of questions. Whose information behaviour interested him? What types of purchase were the focus of the study? What would be the point of conducting this research? I could go on…
I eventually persuaded XX to narrow his focus to the classification of purchase decision criteria of young people when differentiating between the sellers of identical items, and the relative importance of each criterion identified.
My job done, I put on a pair of knickers.
Four years later than anticipated, finally I was the guest of honour at a dinner to mark my retirement.
Former colleagues and long-term friends joined the celebrations. The locals included MS and IH from work. From further afield came university pals NF and JG, convinced that they had also booked a holiday in Edinburgh as part of their trip north, even though the postcode for their AirBnB indicated Duns.
I came in for some criticism from some former students at the event. They complained that I ‘forced’ them to rewrite sections of their Masters dissertations prior to submission. I countered that editing was a necessary part of the process of preparing dissertation work for examination.
TPR and my sister’s boyfriend CM managed to lift the shopping trolley over the back yard wall. I couldn’t scale it myself, so I went round to the front of the red-bricked terraced house in the hope that the owners would admit me through the main door. When they refused, I asked if they could instead give me a lift to the trolley’s final destination. They disappointed me again.
How would I find LP Hartley’s house on my own when I didn’t even know his address?
I was ‘swimming’ (hanging on to the side of a swimming pool) when I spotted a bathrobe-clad Tony Soprano walking towards me. He jumped in the pool and threatened me angrily, although I couldn’t understand what he was shouting.
Later, at the park, I let my dog off his lead and he sprinted to a hole in the ground and jumped inside. As I stared down into the hole, I saw that at the bottom, at least 20 feet down, a group of people were standing in waist-height water. They were wearing head torches and having a party.
Elsewhere fans would have chased him for an autograph or selfie. Only here in Edinburgh could international celebrity Sting emerge from a modest basement restaurant dressed in jeans and a plain brown long-sleeved shirt, a child in each hand, in full confidence that nobody would bother him.
I shed a couple of silent tears of relief, pride, and regret.
It was highly embarrassing that we had accepted two invitations to dinner, both on the night that I was meant to be at my book group meeting in Glasgow. The first was from my childhood friend ECM, and the second from KA.
In the end we elected to eat with KA. This was on the basis of the financial investment she had made in the meal: the ingredients for her chicken dish cost her over £1,000.
I was learning how to climb the castle ramparts wearing a pilfered riding hat for protection when a bunch of equestrians came looking for their kit.
My teacher – a rough lad mounted on a white stallion that could scale vertical walls – told me to ignore them. This was somewhat of a challenge when I spotted that the equestrians were bearing cake, and included in their number my school friends EF (was D) and AR (was H).
I also was keen to discover where AR had bought her gorgeous black and tan silk dress.
My long-dead friend BT turned up to my Wednesday circuits class.
I wondered how he would cope with the intensity of the exercises having been buried underground for over 25 years.
In a change to usual practice, all doctoral degree candidates now defended their theses in a classroom in front of the whole school.
When it was XX’s turn, the chair realised that he had a conflict of interest with the candidate.
‘Never mind’, he said ‘The student can chair himself’.
I objected to this, telling him that a PhD student doesn’t toil for 3+ years to this high point of the doctoral journey only to find that the staff are not taking the examination seriously.
I approached audience member GR to ask him to take over as chair. He agreed, then immediately passed the role on to SC. With all the arrangements now in place, XX took to the stage and I popped to the loo.
As I walked back to the classroom, I could hear whoops, cheers, and laughter as XX entertained his enthralled audience. When he stepped down from the stage with an admission that he hadn’t looked at his thesis in years, we all thought that the show was over. We were wrong.
XX’s PowerPoint slides switched to footage of him in pair of red underpants embracing an older man. His figure then leapt out of the screen, pursued by a different old man wearing a brown leather dress. The pair of them engaged in a mock fight Star Wars sabre style between sections of the audience. If XX’s thesis has been excellent, his final act brought the house down.
Dreamaticus 