We were always being told that we were bound to know a woman who was being abused and now we knew who it was in our case: the assistant in the corner shop.
She communicated that she needed our help. I asked her to email me the details. She indicated that it was impossible for her to copy down my email address in full view of her husband (and boss). The solution was for me to write it on the cheek of a young female customer instead.
We had to get off this doomed Canadian island. We’d already caused offence by taking over the sitting room of a family at prayer, and now the island itself was starting to sink. Our only hope was rescue by a canoe piloted by my cousins TT and GT.
I was helping AC prepare for his wedding. However, there was some doubt that we would make it the ceremony in one piece. My driving was terrible, both in town and on the motorway. There was sure to be a terrible accident before too long, and it was bound to be caused by me.
We’d been enjoying a fun weekend with IS in front of the television replaying videos of our previous visit in 2006 when the door burst open and work security staff arrested our host. When we looked around we saw that all his belongings had been confiscated, as had ours (including my brand new, small, blue shell suitcase).
There now seemed no point in hanging around so I walked over to a rack of knitwear and pondered taking one of the Shetland jumpers. In the end I settled on the black Norwegian one: it was mine, after all.
Granny T was very happily installed in the old people’s home.
In the upstairs residents’ lounge she had created herself a cosy corner with a desk, noticeboard, and view of the garden. She made this her base from which to spend the rest of her days surfing the Internet.
I spotted a young David Attenborough standing beside the escalator on the day that TPR caught a flight to Belgium and I went to work without my iPhone.
I sat all alone in the cinema. The film that I had been forced to watch was tedious all the way through until the last scene when – at last – it all made sense. All the main female characters confessed that they were engineers. The whole point of the film was to encourage women into engineering.
Afterwards I tried to leave the building, but it was very difficult. The staircase to the main reception was so steep that I risked falling and breaking my neck each time that I took a step.
The house floated across the flooded causeway, drifting from its usual base on Holy Island. I assured everyone that all would be fine. The tide would reach the doorway, but was certain to subside soon afterwards, and we were all safe.
JC remained unconvinced, and jumped at the chance of rescue when her husband G turned up in an open top car.
G drove us to Haddington. Here we walked through a graveyard full of tombs that marked the final resting place of members of the Foil family, and met a woman who grew red wild carnations along her driveway in the middle of winter.
We ended the day on a pub and party crawl with our school friend NB, and Edinburgh pals JM and AC.
Colin Firth dressed rather tattily for a banker. I told him so as I pulled off his worn striped shirt while he was trying to dress. He didn’t seem to mind – nor did his wife Julia, who dutily tidied up around us as we continued our affair.
Dreamaticus 