My school friend KC and her husband D excitedly showed us a brochure for a French antique shop. Amongst the photographs of ancient furniture I spotted the proprietors P and SG.
KC couldn’t believe the coincidence. I admitted that this happened to me all the time.
AH confessed that he almost proposed to me in the late 1980s. This was with the encouragement of my mother, keen to recruit him as a son-in-law.
This was nothing to do with love for me. Rather, AH and my mother had a shared interest in GTi-branded cars. She drove a silver Golf, and he a black Peugeot 205.
While scrambling across the Victorian rooftops alongside the train line into London Bridge, Jason Isaacs and I began to exchange witticisms in a very strong Birmingham accent. Strangely we both found the experience romantic – and erotic. Days later, we were farm labourers in Birmingham.
On a complete whim we bought a modern ‘executive home’ on a main road in a northern suburb of Birmingham. Since we couldn’t afford to run two houses in two different countries, we cut our ties with the beautiful city of Edinburgh and all our friends there.
The only real attraction of our new base was the wild countryside immediately behind the house. However, this was never going to make up for living right next to a busy main road that was permanently jammed.
A new pair of shoes, a sharp suit, contact lenses, and a mooted move back to Birmingham? What was TPR up to?
It was only when I found myself semi-naked on George Street, Edinburgh – wearing just a pair of knickers and a short navy blue jacket – that I understood that TPR was having an office affair.
When I confronted him a dark shadow of guilt fell across his face.
London was one huge rubbish tip. When TPR and I stepped off the train the only way out of the station was up a mountain of landfill.
The next day we heard that a train had exploded on arrival at the same station. We stepped out onto the balcony of our highrise apartment to check for evidence of the explosion. At that very moment another train exploded before our eyes, sending debris and random body parts everywhere.
Surviving passengers climbed up the landfill as we had done the day before. It was all such a crush that some even ended up on the balcony right next to us.
Back on campus, the C corridor was swarming with builders – again.
All my belongings had been moved into a massive room at the far end of the corridor while my ‘old’ room and two others were being knocked into one to create a specialist lab.
I complained that I would never get any work done on campus now that I was placed with multimedia specialists who refused to wear headphones at their desks.
Just out of the sight of TPR, AC was getting a little too amorous with me under the tarpaulin. My excuse to leave him there on his own was rather weak:
‘I need to get some labels from my office so that I can sort out my bags of foreign coins’.
How could I hit the slopes in DayGlo green and purple ski-wear?
This was all TPR’s fault. I should never have allowed him to pack our cases for our last minute ski holiday.
Thanks to the new Orthographic Rules the North Yorkshire market town of Settle (home to 2,564) was now twinned with Seattle (the biggest city in Washington State with a population of 686,800).
Apart from six letters in their names, these two places had nothing in common.
Dreamaticus 