Murder victim hidden in shallow grave between bedroom carpet and floorboards (Rousse)

I got up early and settled down to some work at my computer in the study. Soon afterwards TPR followed me into the room with my breakfast. This was not my usual 40g of museli, but a bowl of mixed vegetable soup, a plate of mixed vegetables, and a portion of chips. I remarked that this was hardly appetising. TPR defended his culinary choices by explaining that he had lots of spare vegetables to use up. I instructed him to take away my unwanted breakfast. I would transform it into soup later.

Our student lodgers CWFR and JM then came to join me in the study so that JM could use the PC to update his CV. I was grateful that they had not instead accidentally wandered into our bedroom and spotted the lumps under the carpet. It was already a risk that TPR would see them and try to straighten them out.

Would I then be forced to confess to the murder? My hope was that the body in the shallow grave between the carpet and the floorboards would decompose over the course of the coming years and – provided that we never moved house again – my secret would be safe, at least until after my own death.

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Pink go-cart girls avoid police arrest (Rousse)

‘You’re lucky that I am not going to arrest you’ said the police officer as she slammed the door of her patrol car.

‘Oh, what’s wrong with our pink go-cart?’ I enquired in a fashion as innocent as I could muster. I knew only too well that the makeshift vehicle on which DM and I had just sped downhill at top speed was extremely dangerous.

‘It needs a strap’, the police officer told us.

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Recording interviews by iPad (Rousse)

It was Online week and although I no longer attended the conference (it was not of interest to me any more) I returned to the venue each night so that the long-haired woman could record television interviews with me on her iPad.

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The antique charm of Australia (Rousse)

I loved my Uncle J’s house in Australia. Despite its tidiness, it still had the antique charm of my parents’ house back in the UK.

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How to get perfect biceps (Rousse)

I asked JL about his arm muscles. His perfect biceps were the result of 40 minutes of morning exercises every day.

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Dancing on a Sunday night (Rousse)

GR persuaded me to speak to his engineering students, but I lost him on the way to the lecture theatre.

LO’N retrieved me and invited me out dancing on Sunday night. This was a much better prospect than anything that GR had planned for me.

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A swim with dolphins in the Scottish islands (Rousse)

Despite her advancing age, JG had popped out two baby daughters in two years. She told me this on the day that I swam across Uig Bay with my camera, accompanied by dolphins.

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Early funeral arrangements (Rousse)

With very poor knowledge of the geography of the south of England I had hoped for more help from the red-uniformed staff on the newly-appointed Virgin East Coast service.

The overweight guard pulled out a section of an Ordnance Survey map from a polythene pocket in a ring binder and made an attempt to locate Suffolk. The man next to me pointed out that the town wouldn’t feature on this section of the map: it was too far north. Meanwhile I argued that we should be looking at the area around Lyme Regis in Dorset.

At this rate I was never going to reach the funeral in time. But then I remembered that it hadn’t yet been organised, not least because the person in question wasn’t dead – yet.

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Classic car investment (Rousse)

I despaired at my parents who proudly showed off their latest acquisition. This was a set of four wrecked ‘classic’ cars that they considered to be valuable vintage vehicles. There was a badly bashed grey Golf GTi, a Ford Cortina, a black Vauxhall, and another make that I did not recognise.

My father saw this as an investment. My own view was that this was yet more junk that I and my poor sisters would be obliged to sort out in a state of grief following my parents’ deaths.

Rather than more unnecessary spending on other people’s cast-offs, I argued that their time would be better spent caring for the belongings that actually meant something to us, such as the handkerchief embroidered by nuns that I found under the sofa. This featured our saints’ names, and would look lovely framed.

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Royston Vasey theme park tricks the tourists (Rousse)

Although we had supposedly travelled south for dozens of miles, the architecture of the towns through which we passed over the course of the whole journey was very similar to that of our starting point in Yorkshire. Even the countryside in the grey mist looked the same. We must have passed through Richmond dressed up in various guises at least five times.

When we reached our hotel I explained to the others that I knew that we had been tricked. We were not on our way to Bristol, but stuck inside a sophisticated theme park near the village of Royston Vasey.

Before we sat down to dinner I ordered a cup of tea and a teacake. I had to double check that my request for a teacake had not been misheard as ‘cheesecake’.

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