What it is to be a woman (Rousse)

Posted on May 28, 2017 by Dreamaticus

TPR emerged from the booth with a grim look on his face.

‘I now understand what it is to be a woman’, he announced.

I couldn’t wait to climb into the booth myself and discover why to be a man was so much better.

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False leg foot flicking (Rousse)

Posted on May 28, 2017 by Dreamaticus

SF liked to show off his false leg. Fashioned from bone, it extended from his right knee. We all felt sick whenever he stood up on it, then flicked his foot to face the wrong direction.

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Belle at the ball

Posted on May 26, 2017 by Dreamaticus

Naturally I wanted to know the flavours of the vol-au-vents. I asked the waiter.

“Lavender avocado and Kit-Kat popcorn, Madam.”

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Loose change found in red telephone box is small fortune to lonely lochside walker (Rousse)

Posted on May 24, 2017 by Dreamaticus

I walked for miles and miles alone, without a single podcast, in shorts and sandals along the loch side. By the time I reached the village at around the mid-point of the 32-mile route, however, I was missing TPR’s company.

My access to resources amounted to £1.50 in my pocket, a red phone box, and a taxi cab. Since I couldn’t afford the taxi, I went to make a call to TPR.

In the phone box I found an abandoned pile of loose change. I reckoned that I might be able to afford a cab home after all.

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Pensioner’s new lease of life starts on the ski slopes (Rousse)

Posted on May 23, 2017 by Dreamaticus

My mother had a new lease of life.

She took up ski-ing at the end of the season. Then booked a holiday house in the Scottish Highlands for a weekend in January 2018 – at first for two, then for seventeen.

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Conkers: the latest in cyber security (Rousse)

Posted on May 23, 2017 by Dreamaticus

BP was asleep in bed with SC. In the middle of the night I awoke him to deliver the secret message encrypted inside a conker.

The next day I found BP in the front passenger seat of his family car watching Mrs Brown’s boys on DVD. He confirmed that he had managed to decode the highly sensitive information.

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Apprentice Russian oligarch drug dealer caught red-handed outside St Pancras hotel (Rousse)

Posted on May 22, 2017 by Dreamaticus

My big, burly boyfriend was a chip off the diamond that was his gangster father. I adored him because he was always there for me, keeping me safe from harm.

In the past he had appeared from nowhere to recover me when I got lost on the top of a remote a mountain range.

This time he rescued me from a claustrophobic university reunion in a crumby hotel. Afterwards, as we walked arm-in-arm along Euston Road, a man in a suit approached us and ushered us into the forecourt of the St Pancras Hotel. There the stranger transferred vials of liquid into various small plastic bottles into a handy bag that my boyfriend ‘just happened’ to have on him.

This was highly suspicious. I already had a feeling that my boyfriend was apprenticed to a Russian oligarch. Now I believed that I had the evidence to prove that his route to unlimited wealth was through drug dealing.

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Stockton-on-Tees local knows nothing about trains (Rousse)

Posted on May 21, 2017 by Dreamaticus

KA and I shared delivery of the lecture. Somehow I ended up with the ‘hard’ bit: explaining the difference between linear and complex computer programming.

My instructions said to use railway tracks as an analogy, and make reference to a bacon, egg and mayonnaise roll. This made no sense to me whatsoever.

I knew that one of the boys in the class was from Stockton-on-Tees. He was bound to know about trains, and could help me with the analogy. I could barely conceal my disappointment when it became obvious that Robbie had no idea of the part that his home town had played in the world history of the railway.

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Tsunami hits Manchester (Rousse)

Posted on May 21, 2017 by Dreamaticus

I hurried JA out of our shared bed in the big terraced house in Manchester.

‘Quick!’ I cried, ‘The water has reached the third floor. We need to get dressed and climb into the attic with everyone else, or risk drowning’.

I scrambled around, grabbed the nearest clothes, and pulled them on. Then I ran to the bathroom and – with difficulty – climbed up the tiled wall clinging to fixtures and fittings and bits of the cistern to reach the gap in the ceiling, and safety.

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Nicola Sturgeon to introduce friend tax (Rousse)

Posted on May 20, 2017 by Dreamaticus

4a Audrey Terrace, Edinburgh was a West End palace – and ours, all ours. We bought it for the ballroom and the prospect of the fabulous parties that we would host there. The immense front porch had plenty of space to hang everyone’s jackets and coats, and we could put in an extra bathroom in some dead space in the middle of the ground floor. The only drawback of our new flat was that it did not have a back door.

When HR called round to visit (her face shrouded in a long red and black veil) she mentioned that we should watch out for Nicola Sturgeon’s new ‘friend tax’.

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