CMcD was very familiar with the walking route up the River Tyne to my sister’s house in Newcastle. We set off after the tide had receded, doing our best to avoid the mud flats and the sinking sands.
CMcD was far more skilled than I at this, and before long I had slid up to my waist in mud. After my third rescue CMcD decided that it best if we abandoned the journey.
TPR interfered with my cooking arrangements so now all the plans for the dinner party had gone awry. He even let a plastic spatula melt in a saucepan.
Meanwhile JLW wasn’t doing much better at setting the table for 16 (or was it 17, 18 or 19?)
Then my thoughts were interrupted by an Indian student who was seeking advice on a dissertation ‘on behalf of a friend’.
‘I cannot comment on the degree programmes delivered by others’ I said in my attempt to dismiss him and get back to preparing the meal.
JC was my passenger as we drove along a formerly familiar route that now included a purple helter skelter ramp covered all over in graffiti. I was amazed that the car was supple enough to work its way round the bends.
Back at the house JC’s sister was live from Australia on a Skype call that was permanently left open. There were also small children running about the place. They all begged me to perform my party trick for them.
Then it was time to find TPR so we took my car again (along with the recycling) in favour of J’s blue one. We also left her mother behind at the house.
I was sleeping with AB, but we were not yet ‘out’ as boyfriend and girlfriend. In fact most people mistakenly assumed that AB’s classmate DMcA and I were partners.
Then a tall, dark stranger walked into my life and all previous arrangements were forgotten.
Poor SC. We all turned up at her house for our monthly meeting, but none of us had bothered to read the prescribed text. I was rather puzzled because I recognised the book title and its jacket, yet I had no recollection of ever having borrowed it from the library, nor of returning it without reading it.
The other strange thing was the presence of a woman in a grey woollen outfit (apparently the season’s best seller from Next). She seemed perfectly at home amongst the book group members even though none of us had an inkling of her identity.
It took a while, but eventually I managed to make a distinction between my colleague TF and student AA. This achieved, I climbed into TF’s car for our trip.
Our first destination was Bristol. Here TF showed me the house that he was in the process of building.
Then we arrived in Edinburgh. We toured the Old Town first, then stumbled into a new development of skyscrapers.
Suddenly TF admitted that he was lost. I forced him to stop at a filling station so that I could buy a map.
At 5:00am on a beautiful spring day in April I leapt out of bed, ran naked into the garden, and bathed my body in the golden glow of the sun.
(I covered my modesty with a fig leave – not that anyone else was awake to witness my nudity.)
When we sent off for the offer we understood that we would receive a large Friends poster in which each of us would take the position of Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe, and Joey. Instead, we received six almost-identical prints on which all six stars of the show were depicted. The photo that we had supplied was inexpertly grafted on to the end of the shot. We had been conned.
The accommodation that the six of us had booked was also not as advertised. We were boxed up in a single bedroom with no access to a bathroom.
I eventually escaped (on my own) into a huge shopping mall. Here I found the reception area for the conference.
Just as I was about to register for the event a small truck pulled up beside me. Trapped in a cage at the back, and dressed from head to toe in pink, was a grown woman with blond pigtails. When her captor let her out she forced her way through an iron gate and scampered up the drive of a stately home. I could not tell whether she was ‘for real’, or simply acting out a fantasy as a fairytale princess.
‘If the practice moves to Leeds where will the pets of Teesside be treated?’ I asked.
The two young vets glanced guiltily at each other, and then their lawyer. The three of them were sitting the green sofa at my (now dead) grandmother’s Hexham bungalow. The rest of us – my grandmother, my parents, my sisters, and TPR – were all at the other side of the room. A black-headed, golden-bodied labrador stood in the no man’s land between the two sides.
The men who now ran my father’s practice were unconcerned that there would be no veterinary services provision in Teesside. They passed over the paperwork and I completed the details in the missing address box: LS1.
The only way that we would have any further influence over the practice would be if one of us joined the board. I decided to put myself forward for this role, regardless of the opinion of my father.
Dreamaticus 