Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson bounded down the narrow staircase.
Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad followed more quietly behind them.
Nobody had ever spotted the four members of ABBA on their regular visits to Northumberland. It was our family secret that they always spent their holidays with my sister and her husband at their cottage on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.
I lost my place in my notes, then found it again but couldn’t make sense of them. Added to my woes, the few students who had bothered to turn up to my last ever lecture clearly did not appreciate my pathetic jokes.
They only cheered up when I offered to type everything up in a Word document and email it to them later. My suggestion that we clear the desks for an end of term disco afterwards was also very popular.
Later I played in the on-campus leisure pool, taking it in turns with my Finnish friend GW to slide down the chute. Then, in the shallow end, I listened intently to a school friend as she poured her heart out over her recent cancer diagnosis.
As I was being introduced to a stranger, my friend stage-whispered:
“She participated in the International Catfish Hypnotism Championships last week”.
It had been my lifelong ambition to improve tulips. I had always felt that they could ‘do better’.
After many years, I demonstrated my invention – a velcro-fastened sheath that slipped over the flower and looked just like a tulip. As I saw my friend L trying not to laugh, I realised this initiative had been a complete waste of my time.
When our neighbours invited us to a performance in their basement theatre, it struck me that we could hire the three rooms at Christmas as an amazing venue for our annual party.
I also wondered what use we could make of the ground floor flats further along the crescent, currently used as garaging for brand new minis.
On my first visit to Paris in years, I helped AM and her sister C push an old sofa on its castors from Avenue des Gobelins to Place de la Concorde.
Now that all the members of my host family spoke excellent English, it didn’t matter one jot that my French was appalling
With builders in the house, we had no privacy. The tiger roaming the rooms added to the difficulty of finding a safe space for a snog.
We were excited to see that the AI had managed to label the photograph of our group.
Rather than actual names, however, under the image of each person were a couple of words to represent their character.
I thought it hysterical that one woman was described as ‘Pass the Varenne’.
I took advantage of the stately home’s in-house sewing team and handed over my enormous scarf with the request that it be cut down to a manageable size.
When I came to the end of the self-guided tour of the house, I realised that I had handed over not my red white and blue Union flag scarf as intended, but the red and yellow royal banner of the royal arms of Scotland. I needed to retrace my steps and fix my mistake.
I turned to the very beautiful, tall Chinese young man next to me with whom I had shared a few words earlier and asked if he would like to accompany me to the alterations department. He hesitated as if he wanted to say yes, but ultimately turned down the invitation because his helicopter was waiting on the lawn to take him home.
‘All our agents are currently busy and unavailable. If you would like to hold to speak to our emergency response team, please wait and we will connect you as soon as possible’.
This was not what I expected to hear when I dialled 999. I needed the police to attend to a burglary that was playing out in real time in front of my very eyes on Edinburgh’s Annandale Street.
The burglars had broken entry into a secure underground car park, forced their way into a locked white Morgan, then attempted to hotwire the car. A young witness to the crime-in-action also on the street with me, ran into the car park in the hope of chasing the criminals away. They responded by giving him a beating.
If the police didn’t answer soon, as well as the burglary, there would be a murder to report.
Dreamaticus 