The horse stood patiently on the red deck that was tethered to the end of the pier. Meanwhile, the horse’s owner struck up a conversation with us.
Then came a gust of wind and the deck’s mooring broke loose. Within a couple of seconds the horse was sailing out to the open sea with the tether trailing in the water behind him.
The owner first looked on in horror. He then recruited me, TPR and our nephew PMcC to haul the ropes, and the poor creature, back to base.
I was the toast of our HR department. WT congratulated me on having persuaded a hopeless colleague to give up a role for which he was clearly unsuited.
It now looked like I was going to be asked to complete another couple of challenges. However, I was slightly nervous when I noticed the name of a former flatmates (SB) in the hand-written notes carried by one of WT’s colleagues.
Now going by the name ‘Mandy’, LM drew me aside me to discuss an exam paper. We were just about to consider the questions when my school friend AR (was AH) approached us. She was clearly primed for a good gossip.
This was not the time and place for such a conversation, so I should have shooed AR away. However, she was in a wheelchair, and curiosity got the better of me.
The response to my question about AR’s mobility was disappointing. She had no idea why she was now a wheelchair user.
When I returned to my cabin mid-morning I found two members of staff still there, tidying up the bedroom and cleaning the bathroom. They hurried away, indicating in broken English that they would come back later. It was only when they had left that I noticed the delivery on the chest of drawers.
Nandos had sent me a whole, hot, cooked chicken and several packets of nachos. Was this an attempt at encouraging me to eat in this restaurant (which I had never visited before)? I also faced a practical problem: I was due to catch a train to Newcastle in the next half hour. Should I eat the chicken before I set off, or carry it with me down the East Coast line?
IF CW moved out of the bedroom at the back into the study at the front, then JM could have her bedroom.
But then JM said that he was moving in with his parents and his sister, so where would they go? The only solution would be for the parents to have the bedroom, and JM and his sister would have to sleep in the corridor.
This was a disaster – at least as far as I was concerned. Our two-bedroomed flat was never meant to accommodate seven adults. Meanwhile JM took it all in his stride, casually stirring a huge pot of porridge on the stove in the kitchen.
Our new house was not ready when we first moved to Luton so we wild-camped by the river for a couple of nights, with only a sleeping bag and dirty white sheet for cover. We were perfectly safe there, but our belongings were not. On the first night some cash was stolen, and on the second day we caught a teenager red-handed as he made a move to lift our camera. TPR commented that the inhabitants of Bedfordshire were less trustworthy than those of Scotland.
We had not even seen a sales schedule for new abode, so when the day came to visit it for the first time we were pleasantly surprised to find that it was a tall detached Victorian villa in a neat row of red-brick houses. Our pleasure turned to pain, however, when we pushed open the front door and saw the devastation that laid behind it.
The previous owners had wrecked the house by painting lurid murals over every wall, installing an excess of ovens in the kitchen, building staircases that led nowhere, and generally paying little attention to the building’s upkeep.
Just as we realised the folly of our purchase the house was invaded by about thirty people. These were our new neighbours, relieved that the house had finally been sold and hopeful that we would pay for its restoration. Some even offered their services as plumbers, electricians, carpenters and the like. It pained us to admit that we had stupidly used up all our savings in this act of purchasing madness so we had no cash to pay anyone to help make the house habitable again.
Why had we ever thought it a good idea to leave our beautiful Georgian garden flat in Edinburgh to spend the rest of our lives in a dump in Luton?
I was chatting to JS when I noticed a small lump on the knuckle of the index finger of my left hand.
I bit into it, then peeled back the skin all the way to my wrist. On display were florets of pink and blue flesh that resembled coral formations – but no blood whatsoever.
My mother had parked her car in Newcastle, but accidentally purchased train tickets that took us further south to York.
‘It’s OK’, we assured to her, ‘We just get off at Newcastle. Nobody will care if we leave our seats at the earlier station’. Unfortunately my mother cared, and was prepared to pay for a stack of single tickets from York to return us all to Newcastle.
The one advantage of this plan was that the conductor, who knew that I was a huge fan of the train, offered to take me on a private tour of the National Railway Museum in York. I boasted that I already knew where I would be in September 2025 for the 200th anniversary of the Stockton to Darlington railway.
My young charge and I ran a cosmetics counter in a department store. Customers were few so we enjoyed a lot of free time to get to know each other and – eventually – fall in love, despite our 36 year age gap.
I was determined that he not waste his life as a shop assistant so when AB came to visit (slim, in her black and white spotted conference dress), I invited her to sit on the bed with us and discuss university entry requirements. I knew that her son was about the same age as my young man so she would know all about the processes of making an application for higher education.
When AB told us that her son scored all A*s in his A levels, my young man looked despondent. It became evident that there was good reason for his choice of employment as a shop assistant.
Dreamaticus 