I was at the recording of a magazine-style television programme. One of the guests, a member of an influential 1960s rock band, was talking about his earlier career as a child actor, in particular, playing Pip for the TV. The programme presenter said:
“Oh, you played Pip did you? Did you meet him in real life?”.
The programme went to a commercial break while everyone in the studio laughed about ‘the stupidest question ever asked’.
I left the flat I shared with David Tennant to travel to the funeral. I had a police escort.
Later I started to distribute miniature Yorkshire puddings out of a bread crate, leaving them outside the front doors of youth hostels. Spanish tourists became crazy for ‘the Yorkshires’ and Yorkshire puddings became a global sensation.
My grandmother and my mother were attempting to get a body to the Battle of Britain reenactment and wanted me to drive them there in my stupid three-wheeler. However I was having trouble maneuvering it out of the parking space because of the double-parked sofas all down the street.
We attended a lecture about the differences between real Battle of Britain heroes and those represented by Hollywood. This is where we learnt that, in Hollywood, pilots wore fake ladybirds on their sleeves but real heroes wore fake beetles.
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.
TPR died a hero in an attempt to save an 8 year-old Brownie. The poor girl was held in the clutches of a mad woman who was set on proving a point about ancestors in Billingham, Teesside. TPR was crushed under the wheels of several vehicles as he tried to leap from one moving car into another across three lanes of the A1(M).
I witnessed this grisly sight thanks to my advanced time-travelling talents. When I returned to the present and his tiny blue bedsit (a garden shed which he rented from a woman who owned the house and land on which it was sited), I was tempted to tell TPR everything about his future fate. But what would be the point? We couldn’t change the future.
I was more enraged after the tragedy by the tributes to my late husband from ‘friends’ who couldn’t even get my name right. One former colleague publicly passed on his condolences to a supposed-wife called Caroline. I prayed that this was just a mistake. Surely when he said ‘Caroline’ he really meant me?
“Mick Jagger was there!” cried leading academic JS, as she secretly slipped a tiny oblong silver tab into my pocket.
“And we missed him!” TPR and I chanted in reply.
While TPR regretted that we had not stayed for the party, I wondered whether I would be brave enough to try the drug equivalent of left-overs.
Life had been difficult since TPR died of cancer, but I resolved to lead as ‘normal’ a life as possible, and went to work as usual.
I needed to tell the powers that be that the arrangement for collecting deliveries on campus was not working. When I popped down to the hall to find a late Christmas package, I could tell that someone had already interfered with it. I sorted through the remains, and put aside a ‘Merry Christmas’ banner and three bottles of wine. Not long afterwards, when I returned to carry the goods that I had saved back to my room, nothing was left in the bag.
I took a long walk across Edinburgh to ponder on all my woes (although principally my dead husband and my stolen Christmas parcel). I cheered up a little to admire the sunshine through the trees in Corstorphine, and the red brick waterworks in Dalry.
Then I remembered that I was due on campus for a meeting at 2pm, so I caught a bus back into town. It was only then that I remembered that I’d been in bed with TPR the previous afternoon, and that I’d witnessed him speaking on Skype with his mother the same evening. Perhaps he hadn’t died after all?
How did I know that I was at the University of Manchester? Because the walls were covered in Manchester band posters. Gathered together like this, you were forced to appreciate the impact of city’s music scene on the history of pop music.
I didn’t make it far into the library. I couldn’t make sense of the floating glass stairs that led up to the reading rooms. Every time I ventured to take a step, I feared that I would slip off a stair and crash onto the marble floor below. It was safer to return to the foyer.
Accidentally add porridge oats to a pan of tomato sauce et voilà, you’ve invented a new breakfast treat!
I was holding my own in a difficult game of Woodcut Dobble against DT-J, so I was sorry when she suddenly announced that the game was over.
DT-J was reacting to the dirty looks that her mother-in-law had cast in our direction. She interpreted these as the signal that we shouldn’t be wasting our afternoon playing games, but washing up instead.
Dreamaticus 