Ineffective Italian lessons (Rousse)

JC and I sat at the dinner table desperate to join in the conversation across the room. An Italian mother was making a hopeless attempt to teach her native language to her English-speaking children.

Both JC and I could do a much better job of this.

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Monster tuna fish washed up in massive Hebridean tidal wave (Rousse)

My sister JMH and I shared a small double bed in a tiny hotel room positioned high above an Outer Hebridean bay. Others, including my old school friend HP, used our room as a thoroughfare.

One morning when we looked out of the window we saw a high tidal wave flood the bay. Carried along in the surge of water were seals and dolphins – and tuna fish the size of whales.

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Back to black and white (Rousse)

Curiously Darlington Road was in monochrome. Even the yob outside the wine shop who tried to accost me was a figure in black and white.

“This neighbourhood has definitely gone downhill since we all left”, I concluded.

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Fine in Houston, Texas (Rousse)

I was fined by a hotel in Houston for missing my check-out time. This was because I’d spent the morning travelling 200 miles by train to San Antonio to visit a potential conference venue.

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Novelist’s life work loss blamed on clumsy husband (Rousse)

I’d been complaining of TPR’s clumsiness for some time. Now he had managed to let a desktop PC, all the back-up disks for my novel-in-progress, and an old fashioned brick mobile telephone, fall from a third floor window and through a shop frontage across the road.

When he went to inspect the damage all TPR could find were the phone (intact) and a few shards of plastic. It looked like looters had already taken anything worth stealing.

When I suggested that he asked the shop for its CCTV footage TPR said that he couldn’t be bothered. He did not appreciate that my life’s work had been lost, and he bore all responsibility.

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Rousse in a red-fringed wig

When I put on the long red fringed wig I looked just like my niece AF. If only I could snap a picture of myself to show everyone. Why had the IT guys taken the selfie feature off my iPhone?

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Dangerous Borders river walk (Rousse)

I could have visited the M family when I was at the conference in Paris, but instead I decided to go out for a walk with some of the other delegates. These included two retired nurses, one of whom know about the value of Blipfoto therapy.

It was good to escape the confines of the conference hotel, especially the blue sparkled lift which barely had room for two people. I would be terrified if I ever ended up stuck in that tiny amount of space.

In the event we took our walk in the Borders following a river not far from Peebles. The members of our party were TPR, B, my school friend JC, and my Canadian friend WR. It was such a beautiful day that B and I discarded our shoes and walked barefoot along a dried mud path. At a large bridge we came across a beautiful line-up of sunflowers and swans. I wanted to photograph these, and asked B for the camera. Meanwhile the others continued along the river bank.

B and I climbed as far as we could up the hedgerow to get a good position for our photo. However, B was devastated when he pulled the camera out of the rucksack and it tumbled into the water. I tried to comfort him by saying that we were going to replace the camera anyway. When I reached over to hug him we both slipped into a bed of nettles, then B fell further on to a hard concrete surface just above the water.

It was no longer possible to continue our walk. I needed to contact TPR by phone fast – to tell him that all the photos that we had taken recently were lost, and to seek medical help for B.

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Baby survives a squashing outside Nando’s (Rousse)

I watched in horror as the huge lorry rolled backwards on the pavement outside Nando’s on Lothian Road, Edinburgh. That poor baby, who a couple of minutes ago was playing on the ground just out of the line of sight of its mother, would be squashed to a bloody pancake beneath the heavy wheels.

Miraculously the child survived! In celebration the mother and her friends performed a happy dance along the street.

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New photographic technique and sparrow biting (Rousse)

TPR was applying a special technique to a photo of our nephew P and nieces B and F. The heat of his fingers changed the colours in the shot.

Meanwhile a sparrow landed on my face. I chased it away by biting it on the leg.

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The best conference breakfast in town (Rousse)

TPR and I lived in a cheap hotel with FMcL. Normally the breakfast was very basic. However, when a conference came to town the breakfast room transformed from a hall of residence style canteen to a 5 star restaurant.

I ran back to our dormitory to tell FMcL. I conveyed the important message to sit with the conference delegates (rather than the foreign tourists) as she climbed into the shower.

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