Our maid Norah split TPR’s mug of coffee all over our white bed linen. She didn’t flinch.
“Don’t you realise that you could have scalded me?” I shouted from under the covers. From the look on her face, it appeared that this was no concern of hers at all.
I later told TPR that we would have to get rid of her and all the others. We couldn’t run our busy household with such incompetent staff.
The dancing started accidentally. I just lifted the needle on to the track of the LP that happened to be on the turntable and everyone took to the floor. I thought it would all be over in three minutes, but then came calls for more. Perhaps there was an old Abba album in the pile of vinyl by the record player? There was, but none of the songs listed on the cover were familiar to me.
By now a crowd of male friends had gathered around the ancient equipment. I wondered if we could connect up the iPhone and work our way through the party playlist. “Impossible” said TPR as he shook his head. The dancing was over.
This was a great disappointment to JS, who arrived late and missed all the fun.
I had been primed to ask the interview candidate about three publications that he used when teaching the Information Delivery module. One of these was co-authored by me, with the candidate himself.
This was just one of the strange things about the whole interview experience. It also included a movie clip build-up, a full audience seated in a lecture theatre with the candidate amongst its members, and an interview panel of over a dozen staff, the majority of whom chosen to ensure that its composition met strict diversity and equality requirements.
I waited patiently for JK, as interview chair, to pass the questioning over to me so that I could play my role on the panel. He confused the audience by instead giving me a white EpiPen, in full view of everyone.
“Good grief, they’re all now going to assume I’m a drug addict” I muttered to him under my breath. “I hope that you will announce that this is a hayfever treatment and nothing more sinister”.
“Glenn Close, of course” started the speaker. I was relieved that the programme was underway, even though I had no idea what Glenn Close had to do with knowledge management.
“Have you any idea what time it is?” my sister snarled at me under her breath, tugging at my sleeve to drag me back to the hall’s entrance.
The hands on my watch had not moved since they last time I looked about an hour earlier, so I knew that it couldn’t possibly be 19:05. A quick glance round the hall told me that much of the food and drink had already been consumed, and the woman on stage was not the first of the evening. I guessed it must be about 21:00. When JMH announced it was 20:20, I was actually quite relieved: I was only an hour and twenty late. Of course she didn’t see it that way. She and my mother had come to the event as my supposed guests, but ended up running the show because my time management was so poor.
Time management was not the issue. Rather it was time per se. I had had so many commitments that day from lending gym gear to a deprived immigrant student to a meeting at the office of The Economist. When you were in as much demand as me, something was bound to give.
I was calculating how much work to pack. The train journey to Aberdeen took three hours, and the return trip the same. If we sat together, I would probably spend much of the time chatting with CI and ET. However, we didn’t have seats booked, so we could end up far apart, even in completely different carriages. In that case, I would need plenty to entertain me, and certainly more material that I had already stored in my rucksack.
I told CI to wait for me while I dashed back up to the library to collect the book that I had put on reserve. She assured the others that I would easily be back in time to catch the train.
However, I was waylaid on my way to the library by a slim, dark-haired sportswoman called Rachel. She persuaded me to act as her target while she practised shooting spears and catapults. I would certainly die for the cause, but Rachel was generous enough to let me choose the coloured cards that would be sent out to announce my departure from this world.
Fed up with enduring my moans about the inadequacies of iPhone 3, ET popped out and bought me a replacement. It was small, sleek and slim, and cost only £28. However, it was not an iPhone, and I could not accept it.
Following extensive research, CI and I discovered in St Andrews a lump of stone that was as important to Scottish history as the Stone of Scone.
I was finding it hard work entertaining our dinner guests when TPR kept disappearing from the table for long periods of time. He would have enjoyed the company of my school friend MG, if only they had been there simultaneously.
Towards the end of the meal, when I asked TPR what was going on (and whether he was avoiding MG), he confessed that MG had not been with us. Rather, TPR had been conducting an experiment: whenever we thought MG was at the table, it was actually TPR in disguise. I had to admit that my husband’s act had been very convincing.
Why didn’t anyone tell AA and his fellow engineers that a switch of career from academia to retail at their stage of life was an idiotic idea?
I left them to it, found TPR, and spent the rest of the afternoon in the bedroom of a dull suburban house of a woman I barely knew. I didn’t like her taste in 1970s brown-striped easy chairs and sofas.
Dreamaticus 