I put on my 1940s red and white gingham tea dress before setting off by train for Swindon.
My outfit impressed the one member of research council staff who was interested in fashion. As she complimented me on my style, I admired her choice of a turquoise robe topped with a wraparound turban.
The Girl Guides had set up camp in my street and I found it enchanting and irritating in equal measure. I decided to take my rubbish out to the bins so I could spy on them.
As I walked towards the bin-shed, it became pitch black. Yet I could still make out the figure of a mugger riding towards me on a bicycle. We got into a tangled fight which I was losing until I started to beat the man hard around the head with half a rotten cabbage. “Don’t mess with me!”, I screamed.
We were trying to watch a film in an open space in the motel/conference centre but were interrupted by the foul-mouthed language of two lads pushing prams down the corridor.
Sensing trouble I followed them and (spying through their keyhole) witnessed an incident of domestic violence. I called reception and asked them to contact the police. Then I remembered that David Tennant was actually a police detective and I simply had to knock on his door and ask for help.
We got on our tricycle and set off to the scene of the crime until David noticed several kittens gamboling around the walled garden. He jumped off the tricycle and ran off, determined to “coochy coo” with them.
PM collected JC (but not me) in the new Bentley that her husband had mentioned the last time that we had met. The car was long, sleek and green. It’s most distinctive feature, however, was a most unusual personalised number plate that included the @ symbol.
With a call of ‘See you on Tuesday when we are all meeting at your house to cook Huku!’ P took to the road with her favoured passenger. I couldn’t remember ever issuing this invitation. What on earth was Huku anyway?
With nothing to do, I trudged around town, looking for JC’s house. Although I recognised some of the shops, I was soon lost.
After several attempts, I finally reached my destination. I let myself into the lower flat with JC’s keys, and walked straight into the cat litter tray, just as JC had predicted. The cat itself was not happy to see me. Ginger and extremely bad-tempered, it made several attempts to jump up and bite me.
Just as I was wondering how I would get through the locked door at the back of this lower flat and make my way into the larger section of the house on the floor above, a young girl with a a fading purple bruise on her temple appeared with a key. Now I had a run of the whole place.
Later I met JC in the stands at the anti-gravity stadium. There we watched the anti-gravity enthusiasts who had paid the steep entrance fee to learn all sorts of fun tricks while dressed in Superman outfits. Some simply floated in mid-air, while others took pleasure in dropping from small aircraft into the stadium, secure in the knowledge that their fragile bodies would never fall to the ground.
I was a terrible hostess. I forced my overnight guests to sleep on spin cycles, then made them wait for hours for the cold porridge that I served at breakfast.
How would I admit to TPR that I had lost both of my fully-packed cycle panniers, one of which included our soap bag? I had no idea where I had left them along my solo route in the Scottish borders. I would just keep this misdemeanour a secret for as long as possible.
TPR was delighted to be reunited with me on Edinburgh’s Princes Street. This made it all the more difficult to come clean. However, eventually I bravely made my admission – which was inevitably followed by TPR’s fury.
My next cycle trip was also solo. I travelled to Japan to photograph the mountains. A further purpose of my journey was to study the practices around the upkeep of domestic water tanks. I learnt that on coming of age, every young Japanese man is assigned his own water tank, and then has a lifetime responsibility to keep it free of rust.
Even though he obviously was not her father, TPR was the primary carer for our tiny new African baby. She was so beautiful that even I found it hard to believe that she was my very own daughter.
We were extremely low-key parents. Rather than pay for a crib, we made a nest on the floor for our newborn. Here she slept under a section of lobster-pot.
When she was a little older, and began to show a resemblance to her cousin AMF, we let her play in the garden. We decided to fill in the pond as a safety precaution.
Meanwhile life carried on as usual with conference calls about my mother’s precarious financial situation, and arguments with K and T over the paintings at my mother’s house. I was particularly concerned when they took it upon themselves to clean the pictures with window cleaners’ mops.
We had already sold and moved out of our Edinburgh flat a couple of times – and always ended up buying it back again. There was something about the sensible dimensions of the rooms, as well as the flat’s convenient position in the neighbourhood. We simply could not find anything we preferred elsewhere.
Now, with the possibility that my mother might come and live with us, we really needed somewhere with a little extra space. Was it really sensible to sell again?
Then we remembered the suite of unused rooms in our sub-basement. It was the time to check their state and redecorate. If we put in a stair-lift, my mother would have her own space downstairs, yet still be able to pop up to see us whenever she wanted.
The main issue was access to the basement through the hall of our next door neighbours’ house. Even though it was breakfast time, we felt that we should act immediately. So we walked through the small ‘human flap’ in our neighbours’ front door, then made our way to the internal stairs that led to the sub-basement.
SO, still in her nightdress, stopped us in our tracks. She was not happy to hear our plans, largely because she was currently (illegally) renting out the space downstairs to several students. She also disputed its ownership.
On the basis of our initial enquiries, it looked like we would need to call in our lawyers to confirm that the additional accommodation was indeed ours, and to evict the squatters.
My sister-in-law S and her husband A had a reputation for buying ridiculous properties. Their most recent purchase was a cottage in the woods. Our first impression was of isolation and inaccessibility along a rough track through hazel trees. However, beyond the house was a scruffy trailer park, so it was not as isolated as we first thought.
On our approach we stopped to pick some hazel nuts. They were absolutely enormous – the size of potatoes.
After our visit, TPR made my mother cry when he told her that he thought her homemade pickles were revolting.
RB was worried that she had left her children in the hands of an unreliable babysitter for the evening. Due to her work commitments, there was absolutely nothing that she could do about this now.
I offered to help out. If EH could give me a lift in her car on her way home, I would walk the around the corner to RB’s house and check that all was well with the children.
EH, however, could not take me. This was because there was no space for me in her car: it was already fully laden with stockpiled butter.
Dreamaticus 