J and GC beamed with pride when they announced that they had bought a pied à terre in Edinburgh. ‘How exciting!’ I exclaimed.
When I entered the poky two-bedroomed ground floor flat on Broughton Road, I managed to hide my disappointment. The look on EF’s face, however, said everything.
My Uncle P, Auntie M, and cousins called in to check the arrangements for our family holiday in the far north. I was worried about the potential cost of lunch en route, especially if we broke the journey at the House of Bruar. Should I make sandwiches for us all?
P shook his head, telling me that we’d find a cheap café in a village off the A9. Tomintoul would be a good bet.
TPR and I set off 30 minutes later. Half an hour into the journey we realised that we were travelling without our bikes and I hadn’t packed any clothes for two weeks away from home.
I had dreaded the visit to my sister S’s house in Jesmond, convinced that I probably wouldn’t even make it past the front door. This was due to the quantity of junk that she stored from floor to ceiling in her tiny Tyneside flat.
However, when I arrived there I found a vast airy space laid out in a way reminiscent of the displays at IKEA. The only difference was that my sister had cleverly positioned interesting antiques and vintage furniture – rather than cheap Scandi flatpack – in neat little ‘scenes’ across the floor.
Two middle aged men called over to us from the other side of East Claremont Street, Edinburgh.
ECM and I didn’t immediately recognise them as ST and PN. However, as soon as we did, we were transported back to our teenage days when we used to follow these two boys around our childhood neighbourhood, desperate to convince PN that he should invite ECM on a date.
This time, PN seemed more interested in me. In my direction he shouted congratulations that appeared to be related to my career achievements.
When ECM and I crossed over the road to engage in conversation with the pair of them, they ran away. It really was as if we were teenagers all over again.
The kitchen was so crammed with people that my Granny H struggled to reach the hob to make herself a cup of tea.
In the chaos, our guest TF was trying to show us his collection of antique maps. Their details of Victorian railway construction fascinated him. He was also keen to persuade TPR to drive him to a concert in Thorpe Park.
Outside JS, RR and their children A and J were sitting on uncomfortable garden furniture under a downpour.
I was shocked when I thought that the small concrete block at the roadside was our new home. Relieved that it was not, I followed TPR further down the road to a turn-off on the left. A long, single track road that led further into the Lanarkshire countryside stretched out in front of us.
‘It’s up there’, said TPR. ‘I know that you are going to love it.’
The further we walked along the road, the more I doubted TPR’s words. It appeared that the hedges had not been trimmed for years, and in places fallen trees laid across the tarmac. This could not possibly be the main route to the house.
Eventually we reached our destination. It was not a house for one couple, as I had been led to believe. Rather, it was a kind of commune, the members of whom lived in chaos.
We were expected to live in very close proximity with a family of four. The mother was extremely bossy and the eldest son spent his days playing basketball in our shared sitting room. Worst of all, the others forced us to adopt their grocery shopping practice of home delivery from Asda.
I was desperate to the attend the sell-out concert at the drill hall. Without a ticket, I hatched a plan to gatecrash the event.
Just before the concert start time, I walked boldly into the reception area of the hall. I greeted the audience members waiting to go into the auditorium, then peered through the glass door to the right.
In the main hall, I could see that the AGM of the Choral Society was well underway. A smart-looking woman spotted me through the glass. She stood up and quietly left her seat in the hall. Once in the reception area, she greeted me in her capacity as a member of the concert organising committee.
I didn’t admit that I was looking for a free ticket to the concert. Instead, I told the woman that I was a reporter who would generate publicity for the event by blogging about it on my popular web site, provided that she would give me a free ticket.
My plot worked, and she told me to return at 18:30 for the hour of choral singing. She even made me a badge to wear, although she labelled me with my sister S’s name rather than my own. This was because she used the name on my borrowed ruck sack as her reference source.
I popped home for an hour before the start of the concert. Here I found my nephew in the kitchen frying prawns in an enormous wok. Meanwhile TPR was lying on the bedroom floor in his running gear with his mouth taped shut with white Elastoplast. He managed to communicate to me that this was his way of protesting against my family’s invasion of his living space.
When my sister-in-law S McC burst into tears, I thought that she must have overheard me criticise elements of the party as ‘rather common’.
In fact, when I had been waving my arms around to make my point, my long fingernails had scraped across her face. Blood was now gushing from a deep, three inch long, wound over her forehead.
This was bound to heal into a Harry Potter scar, for which I would be blamed forevermore.
I was being shown around Stonehenge by an expert and was introduced to ‘the Moss Team’. They were responsible for spray-painting moss onto the rocks.
Later, as I was about to go out to dinner, I spotted my friend RM-H lurking outside the house. He had, without any advance notice, brought Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr, to meet me.
At last, the love of my life had proposed marriage. In an off-handed fashion, he said “Well, we might as well do this, then” and thrust a dolphin-shaped silver ring into my hand. When I looked at it, I realised I already had an identical ring at home and wondered if he had simply taken it off my dressing table. I hoped not, because I immediately lost the ring he had given me by dropping it into the sea.
Dreamaticus 