Wealthy TV producer RJ invited me and a couple of others for a ride round town in his enormous car.
The vehicle was a huge black and chrome gas guzzler with room for at least nine passengers. As guest of honour I was invited to sit up front with our host.
Heads turned as we sped round Cardiff with Bruce Springsteen blasting out of the speakers.
My cousins’ farm was looking splendid. It was more spacious than ever, beautifully decorated, clean, tidy, and filled with friends. I was particularly impressed that B and J managed all the house work on their own.
I wondered, however, at the expense of entertaining the steady stream of visitors, some of whom were merely passing acquaintances of their hosts.
Then I spotted the film crew. Everything that I saw was story-boarded by a production team, and funded by a major television network. My cousins had sold their souls to so-called ‘reality’ television.
My sister arrived in Edinburgh with a present for me: a box of mismatched cutlery.
“It’s OK”, I whispered to TPR, “We’ll use it this once, then take it to the charity shop”.
I fell head over heels in love with L. She felt the same about me, so we embarked on a passionate affair.
Everyone else was disgusted with us. We argued that it could have been worse – at least we weren’t blood relations.
There were two problems with this game of Scrabble.
First, there were far too many blank tiles. This made it impossible to remember letter sequences placed earlier in the game.
Second, several (ordinary) tiles had been stolen by others playing casual games with our Scrabble set. You simply could not rely on simple Scrabble statistics to calculate your chances of picking up the tile required for a 7-letter minimum 50-point word.
I had the best night’s sleep with TPR in a tent in a field at the foot of the Pentland Hills. The original plan was to pack up the tent in the morning, then head to the hills for a picnic lunch. First, though, I thought that I would pop across the road to Sainsbury’s to buy a couple of croissants for our breakfast.
This plan was cancelled when my parents brought the news that I had won £1000 in some competition. They arrived in their 1970s silver mark II Granada. The car was plastered with large round yellow stickers that accused them of being ‘Tory bastards’ who ignored parking restrictions on the high streets of Britain.
Fed up with the rest of my family, TPR announced that he was leaving me. Worst still, he already had another woman lined up to take my place: silly super-skinny curly blonde JR.
I was now on track to be a lonely and pitied abandoned wife, and he would be the laughing stock of all my girlfriends.
I couldn’t reach the department at the University of Sheffield because they had made no provision for anyone who suffered from claustrophobia when designing the entrance to the building. I told PC that I was far too frightened to squeeze myself through the tiny stone opening.
One of the librarians came to my rescue. She explained that I had not ventured far enough into the lobby. Once there, I could see a perfectly ordinary door frame and door. It was no bother at all to enter the department.
AM, looking well and smartly dressed in a pink wool coat, ambushed me the moment I put my foot over the threshold. It was a great, though unexpected, surprise to see her in Sheffield.
After the gun battle I followed the secret service guy down the central aisle of the tube train. I was determined to get in on the action. By the time we reached the front carriage we were actually passengers in a Volkswagen Beetle driving down a leafy suburban road. Despite noticing our speed, a selfish resident started to reverse out of his driveway. Everyone in the car shouted “Get him!”, and our driver accelerated and smashed right through him. We all cheered heartily.
Coronation Street, the soap opera, got 0% in the national biology exam. It was front-page news in the tabloids and the broadsheets and sparked a national debate about how stupid TV was.
Dreamaticus 