How to save money when dining out in Kendal (Rousse)

TPR and I moved to Kendal. At first we thought it would only be a short stay, but we took the decision to retire to the town, largely because its hilly streets would keep us fit.

To save money we worked a clever scam. We would turn up at someone’s house and request a recipe. Then we would steal all the pens and paper in the house so that there was no means of writing the recipe down for us. Now the easiest thing for our victims to do was to demonstrate the procedure for cooking the food in question, and then serve it to us.

This worked particularly well at the house of a couple who we interrupted playing a board game that looked like a cross between Scrabble and Subbuteo, complete with wooden players.

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Seventeenth century speech in the modern era (Rousse)

Although fun to begin with, it eventually became rather tedious to keep up conversation in seventeenth century speak, especially for anachronistic tasks such as booking rail tickets.

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My wife Claire (Rousse)

I needed a wife for a conference in the US. I took a young woman with blond hair called Claire.

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Happy times at the Manor House (Rousse)

TPR and I lived in two modest suites at the University’s of Birmingham’s Manor House. In the summer months we had the run of the building, but when term started in September we were more restricted. For example, it was dangerous to use the narrow back stairs when there were so many people about. However, we enjoyed greeting the new students at the beginning of the new academic year and wished them all the best for as happy a time that we enjoyed as first years 32 years earlier.

Christmas time was also special at Manor. This year we hosted a dinner party to which we invited JK, RG and DT. While TPR prepared the meal and I opened presents to see whether anyone had given us any condiments that would go with the meal. The hundreds of tiny jars of jam were probably not suitable for this purpose.

After the meal we lounged in the sitting room and watched the cattle in the snow on the beach. DT got all teary when she saw her cattle-herder cousins in the valley, but cheered up considerably after a quick phone call with them.

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Stegosaurus and ghost live side-by-side in Edinburgh basement (Rousse)

ECM and I called into L and T’s house on the way to work. Down in their basement they showed us their stegosaurus and another small unidentified dinosaur. Next to the two creatures was a manikin onto which was pinned a white cloth hood and cloak. I wondered out loud what this could be.

“Don’t mention this to L” whispered T, “but it’s the ghost of her mother.”

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How to decline a wedding invitation (Rousse)

CR, who I barely knew, invited me to her wedding. There was no way that I was prepared to trail all the way to the north of Scotland in the middle of winter just to please a stranger. How could I get out of this?

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Office move clues (Rousse)

I returned to work to discover that my new office was next to AS in a corridor with staff of another department. Was this a coded message?

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Nantes crocodiles, Chinese tourists, and taxi services (Rousse)

When we walked out of Nantes railway station it all came back to me – especially the crocodiles that I used to pet in secret in the middle of the night when I sneaked into the zoo after hours.

My father gathered all our luggage at the roadside and instructed me to call a taxi to take us to the poshest restaurant in town. I objected on the basis that my mother and boyfriend were shattered after our long journey. However, my father insisted that I fight with Chinese women queuing at the kerb and hail the first cab to come around the corner. This was not as easy a job as he predicted.

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Hot university students (Rousse)

I begged EH to remove two lines from the minutes of the meeting. She refused, not least because I had already approved them and they were already a public record of university business. I would just have to live with the two entries, both of which read along the lines of “This student is very good-looking”.

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