Strangers helped me pack my bike for the journey to the farthest reaches of the Isle of Skye. It was a long way, and I had probably left setting off too late in the day for any hope of arriving in daylight. However, I had faith that the power of the north westerly wind would push me up the island, and that I would reach my important appointment on time.
Clan chief Hugh MacLeod of MacLeod had summoned me to Dunvegan Castle, and I was keen to hear what he had to say.
It was a bit of a squash, but nine of us were now sleeping on mattresses on the floor of my office on campus every night.
One school party took over the upper deck of the bus. The other settled in below. Rumours spread that the rival schools would go into combat as soon as the first human sacrifice was made.
“OK,” I said to TPR, “We’d better get started.”
“But who will be the victim?” he asked.
“I don’t really care – so long as it’s not you”.
Musselburgh boasts the highest number of bike repair shops in Britain. This is due to its large resident population of retired cyclists.
It was the 1990s all over again. Scott McNealy took to the tiny blue stage to promote his new company. The charisma for which McNealy was famed in the heady days of dot.com boom at Sun Microsystems soon had the audience members eating out of the palm of his hand.
PT interrupted F’s PhD supervision with a question.
“Are these pens yours?” he asked me. “Did you leave them behind when you moved offices?”
There were three pens in total: a beautiful dark blue-marbled fountain pen; the striped wooden roller ball that OC had given me as a present in the late 1980s; and a boring biro. I could tell that PT was hoping that I’d say that the first two weren’t mine.
“You can keep the biro if you like” I replied. The look on his face revealed his deep disappointment in my answer.
A couple seated a few tables away from us across the hotel dining room appeared to be sharing exciting news. I couldn’t resist interrupting my meal to run over to them and find out what was going on.
“Look out the window”, they instructed me. “We’re suffering a seal invasion. Nobody dare set foot on the beach”.
I pushed back the dining room curtains to see what all the fuss was about. Not an inch of sand could be seen under the writhing bodies of hundreds of overweight shiny black seals making their way up the beach from the shoreline. The bay was brimming with others coming into land. It was a truly spectacular – and frightening – sight.
The first act of War Horse was tedious beyond belief. Why had we forked out fifty quid each to watch such a load of rubbish?
I knew all about the murder, so when the police came to investigate it someone “kindly” shut me up by knocking me out with a stun gun. This silenced me for a while. However, it still didn’t deal with the fact that I knew (a) that the victim was killed in his bed, and (b) that Coronation Street’s Helen Worth was about dispose of the last scrap of evidence by sending the bed frame to the dump.
Dreamaticus 