As we took our seats in the shabby auditorium, I struggled to remember why we had bought tickets to this show. Perhaps we’d been unsuccessful in seeing the act during the Edinburgh Fringe last year, but instead managed to catch the national tour that followed? Whatever the reason, it didn’t look very promising when a small, dark, tattooed lady spoke softly from a shadowy corner of the stage. Like many other audience members, I could barely see or hear her.

Then the whole room suddenly came to life when dozens of other performers appeared – at first apparently out of nowhere – on roller-skates! Some emerged from stage left, right and centre, others from the back of the auditorium and through gaps in the seating. Some even flew in over our heads. What a spectacle, what a show!

Afterwards TPR and I returned to our new house. We had just bought a low white-washed bungalow in a quiet village. The negotiations of the sale had been quite difficult, not least because the vendors wanted us to purchase the contents as well as the house. Why anyone would want multiple sets of identical nick-nacks dotted around their house, we could not understand – until we realised too late that we had been conned into undertaking both the ownership and management of the village gift shop.