It was 11:45 when I remembered that I was booked into a yoga class at 12:00.
I ran all the way to the gym in the vain hope of reaching the studio in time. Alas, I was too late to join the class.
Instead I watched a huge group of people enjoying ‘dance fitness’ in a session run by Radio 1. This looked a lot more fun than boring old yoga.
My in-laws held back the early morning visitors to their stately home while their staff vacuumed the Persian rugs.
Meanwhile Dawn French, dressed in all her Vicar of Dibley garb, was busy setting up the private chapel for a wedding in the afternoon.
Two marching bands were on their way to the wedding venue. The one from Northern Ireland represented the bride. That from Spain represented the groom.
My mother-in-law pulled the sodden scrap of paper out of the stream, glanced at it, and quietly passed it to her husband.
‘That explains a lot. Now, at last, we know for certain what X has been up to!’ he exclaimed.
At first they refused to share this information with me. Eventually agreed to do so, but only after establishing that I did not know the parties involved.
In neat blue biro I read a man’s name, a phone number, an address, and train times to London. This all added up to evidence that X was embroiled in a secret love affair.
‘Would Your Majesty like to dismount here, or would you prefer to be dropped off closer to the entrance?’ I asked Queen Elizabeth II.
Her dirty look was all it took for me to realise that my question was completely inappropriate.
First, I should have addressed the monarch in the third person: ‘Would Her Majesty…’ Second, why did I think that a frail woman in her nineties would elect to walk from the middle of a car park to a building’s entrance when there was the option of being driven to the door?
With her bald head, RJ looked like a cancer patient. I said that I hoped that her family and friends knew that she had shorn off her hair to raise money for charity. Otherwise, they would be very worried about her.
Then I hinted that I would love to come and speak to her colleagues at the museum about my latest project about public engagement and digitised historical artefacts. RJ looked at me blankly. Had she really forgotten our long conversation about this research? We’d discussed it intensively while cycling over the hills a couple of years ago.
Later, I needed to pick up a towel so that I could go for a swim in the small hotel pool with my niece and my sister. I got so lost hunting for one that I ended up at the airport in a queue to board a flight to Denmark.
The nippy waitress was appalled at our amorous antics in the restaurant. She told us to get dressed while she reported our behaviour to the restaurant owner.
‘Report whatever you want’, I replied, ‘I doubt that Mrs McPherson will care.’
I could do no wrong in restaurant owner Mrs McPherson’s eyes. She would be forever grateful that I successfully tutored her daughter F to a 2.1 degree in the 1990s.
The old man cradled the six-inch shrunken body of Queen Victoria, then offered to lend me his hire car. This was perfect. Now I would be able to reach the river and take a lovely walk.
I conveniently forgot that driving a car hired out to someone else was illegal. Regardless, I set off. I parked the car near the bridge, as instructed. Then I trekked a couple of miles along the river bank. Before long, I was lost.
TPR was furious when he was forced to come out and rescue me, especially when he discovered that I had also parked illegally at the ‘wrong’ bridge.
It was early December and I was back at London Olympia for the first time in years.
Even with my injured hand encased in a large, padded (and bloodied) glove, I was going to enjoy myself immensely.
Unfortunately, however, I arrived a day too late and the only exhibitor with anything to offer was an AI services provider serving luminous lime green drinks in clear plastic beakers.
While scrolling madly through incoming text and images on their mobile phones, the crush of teenage girls in the tube carriage shouted over the heads of all the other passengers. What vile behaviour, I thought.
I realised that I should have left my top-of-the-range iPhone securely zipped in the inside pocket of my jacket when one of the girls nudged another, then swiped it out of my hand. I tried to grab my phone back, but it had already been passed around several members of the gang and I had no way of knowing which teenager now held it.
I decided that my best strategy here was to impersonate an undercover police officer and demand the return of my iPhone. Remarkably this worked, and one of the gang slipped the phone into my hand at the next station. Although Gow was not my stop, I left the train here, keen to escape the packed carriage.
I caught the next train from the same platform at Gow station, forgetting to check its destination. Two hours later I ended up in Kent. Worse still, the phone returned to me turned out not to be my own, but a wide red flip phone from the 1990s.
I was desperate to call TPR and ask him to come and rescue me, but I didn’t know his number, nor that of KA who was in central London with him. I hoped that some men in a pub would help me out, but they had no sympathy for me. I should have memorised TPR’s number rather than relied on storing it in my iPhone contacts list.
Dreamaticus 