TPR was setting up a new home office. At the same time – and in the same room – I was preparing a nursery for a visiting toddler. These two activities were clearly incompatible.
Everything came to a head when TPR angrily tore down the green patterned wallpaper that I had ‘pasted’ to the wall with water.
It was meant to be a two-hour morning meeting to discuss the requirements of the advertised posts and the candidates to be interviewed in the afternoon. About 45 minutes in one of my colleagues started an irrelevant rant about Brexit.
Fifteen minutes later he was speaking to an empty room. We had all made the excuse of ‘another meeting at 10:00am’ to escape him.
I was changing clothes on the Wedding Express train when I read the headline:
“Toby the splint-boy dead”
Although I couldn’t remember who Toby the splint-boy was, I realised the whole nation would mourn.
Only a week earlier I’d been saying that I loved my Edinburgh flat so much that I would never leave. So why was I now moving into a bungalow in Wolverhampton?
Its only ‘advantage’ over my former home was the very light sitting room.
Chris Packham took great care to hide from his fans whenever he went about his everyday business. I, however, could see through his devious disguise of a toy dark blue policeman’s helmet and fake beer belly.
I chased him along the walkway of the London Tube station to ask my favour. I was desperate for his autograph to present to his biggest fan of all: Belle.
TPR forced me to cross all six lanes of the M6 as heavy traffic curved its way through the mountains of the Lake District.
At the other side we encountered DJ and FB, also on foot, returning from a race. To save his modesty, I looked away as DJ changed out of his red shorts and into his jeans.
‘We must stop meeting like this’, said TPR, as if it were perfectly normal to bump into old friends on the hard shoulder of the motorway.
The River Tyne was in full spate, and the water lovely and warm.
We swam all the way to the harbour. Here JS and AT also joined us for a dip.
We were trying to persuade my mother to rent out the static caravan in her garden as an AirBnB. We took her on a bus ride to show her how this could be done: the bus itself had been converted for similar purposes.
When TPR, my mother and I all misunderstood one another over the stop at which we would disembark, I didn’t think that this would matter – until I realised that neither of them was carrying a mobile phone.
A small, yet overweight, black dog came flying through the air and knocked me to the ground.
The dog’s owner looked up briefly in concern. However, of more interest to her was her silver Volvo. The car had just collapsed to the ground behind her, resting on four flat tyres.
Two boys on screen could be seen leaving the grounds of a public school. One was small, blond and modest-looking. The much larger one seemed to be very much in charge, leading their conversation. This was confirmed by the narrator of the documentary when he announced:
‘Of these two boys filmed several years ago, at the time you would be just as surprised as the smaller one to learn that one day he would be monarch of the United Kingdom.’
He was alluding to my nephew PMF, who had recently ousted Prince William in the line of succession. After Prince Charles, PMF would be king!
This raised some sensitive issues, including how to deal with the ‘other side’ of our family and their non-aristocratic habits. Our very loud young cousin H was a particular concern. Similarly, I was at a loss over what to do about my long-dead paternal grandmother and an aunt, not least because the pair of them had recently taken up sleeping in my bed.
Dreamaticus 