After jogging for longer than I had ever managed before, I came across a large funeral procession. The crowd lining both sides of the street were singing to the coffin. I jogged through the funeral parlour and bumped into SW who was admiring the napery. “When you see this,” she said, “you really understand the true meaning and purpose of tea towels.”
I agreed enthusiastically while making a mental note to myself to look up tea towels on Wikipedia as soon as possible.
We were travelling from the office to the seaside on board the company train. I was introduced to the new sales director who told me “I actually have a pretty great sense of humour.” I guffawed in his face.
“Simply by saying that you have proved you have NO sense of humour and are – in fact – a KNOB”.
I then stamped around the train carriage shouting “Knob, Knob, Knob” at the top of my voice.
JG didn’t care that his new dirty blue tattoo covered half his head.
When I pointed out that he risked never getting a job with such a monstrous appearance, he explained that he had already considered this. He would just grow his hair.
I was intensely jealous that TPR was courting our university friend HB, and worried that he would leave everything to her, rather than to me.
There was, however, a more tricky issue regarding the inheritance. I had bigamously ‘married’ TPR in the 1980s, so technically I was not his wife. He had absolutely no idea of all the complications that my long-held secret would cause.
Racing through Paris by car without a satnav, TPR’s erratic driving along this haphazard route was bound to end in disaster. We were meant to be heading into town – not out of it – and now I was pretty certain that we would soon hit the péripherique.
I was right. The huge roundabout ahead of us was not Place d’Italie. TPR, however, was undeterred. He said that he would simply zip round the roundabout and head back into central Paris by reversing the route. Such was his enthusiasm for this plan that he took the roundabout at immense speed, the car spun off it, and we came to an almighty halt upside down in a field of winter crops.
Miraculously neither of us was injured, nor was anyone in the family of pedestrians that was walking beside the field at the time. Phew!
However, my relief was short-lived when a teenage girl pointed out to us a corpse lying in the road. A young man had been flung out of his own vehicle when he crashed into another car as it made an emergency stop to avoid us.
I took TPR to one side. Would we be held responsible for this man’s death? Would the GPS data on my iPhone implicate us? Could it be deleted?
There was no avoiding the UK’s favourite TV programme. It featured a slightly chaotic young family, struggling financially but “making ends meet with love”. Everyone seemed to love them until they got pregnant with their third baby. For the first time, dissenting voices suggested they should “only have children they could afford” and newspaper reports said that fame had gone to their heads.
I decided to intervene and took the baby to the seaside to take the pressure off the family. It was only then that I discovered the baby had a red hairy back and was half fox.
TPR, OC and I had been in Finland so long that the snow had returned to the mountains across the bay. OC had travelled here initially in hope of joining the music industry as accountant for a major record label. WB was also with us at the table in the restaurant when two friendly Finnish women, away from home on a business trip, joined us.
Within minutes one of the women had created a Facebook group for our table. We had transformed ourselves from a small group of close friends enjoying a bowl of swede and carrot soup to a panel of six discussing the merits of haggis.
The most surprising revelation to emerge from the debate around the table was that WB used to work in a shoe shop.
Dreamaticus 