When I first spotted the blue flash on my heel I thought it was a trick of the light. Then someone pointed out that it was a tattoo called the “Hashtag of the Devil”.
It was well known that this symbol was inked into the skin of anyone with a public declared hatred of body art, entirely without their knowledge. I was just the latest victim of many.
Now that he was ‘all grown up’, T the dog announced it was time for him to leave home. He intended to move to California.
Somehow things didn’t go according to plan. I later discovered that he was cohabiting with a tiger and that their only source of income was their YouTube channel which featured home movies of T dressed in foolish outfits and riding around on the tiger’s back .
MS made us sit through a multimedia training video that covered topics such as the disappointing award of non-English (specifically not “non-British”) degrees to Chinese students, plagiarism, bribery, and the spending of departmental funds on whisky. JK played all the lead roles.
On the bus home afterwards I tried to contact S by text on an ancient mobile phone to suggest we go for a drink. When I couldn’t get through to him I decided this was probably a good thing. His wife would not be pleased if she heard I’d be out with him while she was away.
J drove us home from the restaurant. M sat in the front passenger seat, my father behind him, and my mother took the middle of the back seat.
From my position behind J it soon became obvious that she was not the best choice of driver. She sped through small rural towns at top speed, ignoring my pleas to slow down. It was inevitable that there would soon be an accident. First she clipped a blue Capri, but refused to stop to inspect the damage. When she took out a white minibus she had no option but to pull into the verge and call the police.
“I’m a slut” she announced down the phone. It was only then that I realised that she was drunk.
“I only had a quarter of a glass of white wine” she claimed.
“More like half a bottle” my father muttered.
I wondered how she would cope with her rural lifestyle when her licence was confiscated.
I planned X’s murder to coincide with his holiday. That way nobody would miss him when he didn’t turn up to work. While I deliberated over where to dump his body parts, I kept them in a small round red biscuit tin hidden under the dresser. I considered throwing them into the sea at Granton, but worried that they would wash up on the shore. An alternative plot was to bury the tin in a remote spot in the Scottish highlands. The disadvantage of this was that the choice of location and previous ownership of the tin could easily be traced back to me if the remains were ever discovered.
So on the day that Y and Z came round for lunch they sat at the dining table just feet away from the butchered body parts of our dead colleague, neatly packed away in the airtight tin. (Fortunately there was no smell.)
To add to the entertainment I was coming to terms with the recent news that Y was taking a six month sabbatical to visit her ex-wife and children in Australia. When I had earlier questioned the term “ex-wife” Y pointed to a black and white photograph pinned to her noticeboard. There, in a big safari hat and flares, was a young man who bore a striking resemblance to Y. “That’s me in the early 1970s” she explained, “before I underwent gender realignment surgery”.
It was all very well for so-called consultants and other well-wishers to advise me to share out the work, but everyone else was just so busy – and I couldn’t trust them to do the job properly anyway. Everything was in such a mess. A measure of this was that I had not managed to check the minutes from one meeting to the next.
However, we did have some good ideas. A newly appointed Canadian colleague suggested a more gung ho approach. Another said that we should not sneer at the involvement of Simon Cowell, but embrace his interest in our work on women in science.
The awful wailing sound coming from the direction of the stage was TM on bagpipes. “He should stick to the guitar”, I muttered.
Then CI took the stage. Her tunes were much better.
Then someone said it was TPR’s turn. I wasn’t convinced that the world was yet ready for his musical début – and nor was he.
TPR and I lived in a tiny, but gorgeous, penthouse suite perched on a cliff with beautiful views of the blue sea crashing onto the rocks 100 feet below. We liked to leap from the cliff edge into the water, and encouraged all our visitors to do the same, fully dressed. This was very dangerous so we usually wore our cycling helmets for such activity. GW also took the precaution of using climbing ropes.
One day my jump was so wide that I resurfaced in a railway station in Glasgow, with my cycling helmet in tatters.
How would I get home? I certainly couldn’t swim to the shore from here. It was my intention to buy a train ticket to Edinburgh. Sadly I was somehow conned into staying in Glasgow, where I signed a rental agreement for a pokey city centre bedsit strewn with litter.
Dreamaticus 