Lord Sugar had ditched his Rolls Royce for a dirty green e-type Jaguar. He’d also lost his chauffeur. So what? I was still his new apprentice! The modesty of our means of transport was trumped by the state of the Lord Sugar’s business premises. The run-down office block at the edge of the city had the appearance of a derelict housing scheme, with all the windows on the ground floor boarded up, and untidy blinds hanging out of broken windows further up the building. Two “security guards” attempted to extort money from us as we headed towards the main door, but they soon scarpered when Lord Sugar pulled the blond wigs off their heads and demanded that they return to their mean little lives. Although this was not what I expected as the winner of a job with a £100,000 salary, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Lord Sugar is not, in fact, permanently grumpy. Here he was a cheery source of endless amusement. His own jokes about his height had me in stitches.

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Something very strange had affected my sense of sight. My vision told me that Debbie was a short, bubbly, curly blond-haired young woman in her late teens or early twenties. She had been brought up by itinerant parents who had recently dumped her on the Isle of Lewis without any notice of when they would be coming back for her. As a consequence, Debbie was feeling homesick. When my full set of senses returned to me it was revealed that Debbie was, in fact, a 6’1″ tall African studying for a Masters degree in horticulture. She was here to write up her MSc dissertation on the cultivation of baked beans. In the coffee queue I warned MO that you should never believe everything that you think that you can see.

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My work colleague LC decided that it was time to reveal her secret talent. I helped her arrange the seats into lecture theatre format in readiness for her recital.

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There’d been some changes at the guest house on the Isle of Lewis. A Yorkshire terrier was now in residence at the bookcase, and at dinner each night every family was given a giant set of Russian dolls (presumably in place of glug jugs) to play with at the table. I couldn’t wait for our next visit.