The directory structure on the shared drive was in a terrible mess. Thankfully I eventually found the file that I was looking for.
The proposal read well, but I was somewhat surprised that my colleagues thought it appropriate to present the text in a file with a background watermark of the snowy Scottish highlands. “How could this be removed?” I asked myself.
In London. Saw Belle. Happy.
NP had taken up a new sport. It didn’t have a name, but involved standing on mountain ledges and batting random items into the air.
I nearly fell off the mountain the day that SF, TPR and I joined in NP’s fun. Fortunately TPR was able to save me by hauling me back up from the dodgy cliff face on to which I had fallen.
TPR made the mistake of petting the two red foxes. This encouraged them to follow us on our walk down the country lane.
When we came across another party, the danger to the three golden labradors was obvious. The foxes chased the dogs over a wall and to their deaths on the rocks below.
It was as if we were in the middle of a script of a Richard Curtis film, where all the female characters were in love with the same man. I belted one of the other girls with my handbag when I realised that she was my love rival.
The main focus of the plot, however, was my best undergraduate student. He had survived a crushing at a London football match (the medical bill would have been £14 million) but occasionally took a fit. This time he fell ill on a train journey just as we came into King’s Cross station.
We all sprung into action as soon as the train came to a halt. We carried my student’s arching body down to the tube and on to the hospital at Bedford Square as fast as possible.
I drove the family Land Rover through town in a most haphazard way, skidding in the snow and almost mowing down several pedestrians – but somehow I got away with it.
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.
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.
I needed a wife for a conference in the US. I took a young woman with blond hair called Claire.
John Peel accompanied me through the door and down the steps to the canal.
I couldn’t understand why the famous dead DJ had chosen to come with me. The BBC’s attempts at public engagement were certainly to be admired if it was going as far as raising star staff from the dead just to please the likes of me.
Dreamaticus 