I’d undergone all the engineering training so now they expected me to enter the mineshaft in a battered old white Renault four with unreliable gears, then work my way underground by foot back to base, inspecting the tunnels along the way.
What an idiot I was. I had forgotten to tell them that I was claustrophobic.
Brad Pitt sat at the end of my bed at the Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh. In such close proximity to the famous movie star, I could see that his face was covered in tiny freckles. These comprised a mixture of miniscule orange pinpricks and airforce blue flecks. Just below Brad’s hairline I noticed that the freckles appeared to be in clumps. I moved closer and saw that these were not freckles at all, but the names of Brad and Angelina’s children and their dates of birth etched into his skin in orange tattoo ink.
“Shall we call Angelina on Skype?” asked Brad, clearly in an attempt to distract me from examining his strange tattoos any further.
“Sure”, I replied, pulling my iPhone out from under the sheets.
We happily chatted to Angelina for about twenty minutes, the best of friends. Then Brad said that he had to leave.
“Before you go, please could we have a photo?” I asked. Brad hesitated. “Actually, I’m here in Edinburgh on unofficial business, so I’ll only agree to a picture on the condition that you don’t post it to Facebook.” I consented (albeit reluctantly). After some fumbling around with an old compact film camera, we eventually found my small Canon digital, and a photograph was captured.
It was only in the hotel toilets later that day that it crossed my mind that the call to Angelina in California would show up on my bill, and could run into thousands of pounds. Whatever would TPR say?
“I shouldn’t worry about that” said a smartly dressed blonde woman when I expressed my anxieties out loud in my cubicle. You didn’t have Brad on your bed, nor Angelina on the phone. You were just dreaming.”
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At one of the most bizarre professional events that I had ever attended, my PhD supervisor stood at the microphone and introduced the first act to come on stage. One of my external examiners, dressed like a Victorian music hall performer complete with wig, was going to sing.
I pulled my iPad mini out of my handbag. This really would be worth tweeting.
TPR thought that he was making everything quite clear to me. He explained that although we were no longer a couple, he was perfectly happy for us to spend time together. I got the impression that he thought that he was being honest, kind and practical, but all this did was confuse me further. I just wanted to be his wife again.
The arrangement that TPR proposed would make it very difficult for me to establish any new relationship. It was true that I had been seeing an older man. However, I knew that I could never love him: he simply wasn’t up the level of fitness that I had become used to in a life partner. Besides, my parents would never approve of anyone else other than my darling TPR. Was there any chance that I could save my marriage?
I left my office mate to deal with the final year student who imagined that it would be possible to write up an honours project based on (a) a love poem to his girlfriend and (b) options for the purchase of a new hi-fi system.
So much for being rescued: the “kind man” who had “taken me in his arms” now held a gun to my head. He marched me out of the building, across the road, through the main door of a glass skyscraper, then into an unlit lift.
In complete darkness we travelled downwards. The lift came to a halt and the doors opened out into a hallway. Here half a dozen very elegantly dressed, and unfeasibly, beautiful gang members faced us, their guns lined up for action.
I really had no idea what was going on, nor where I was. The only clue was the corporate logo on the hall carpet. It would appear that I was a “guest” of the Reed Corporation.
As my father cycled at full pelt up the hill he explained that two very astute business women had bought up most of the residential property in the pretty Northumbrian village of Corbridge. The first was my mother. The second was rumoured to be a wealthy Texan. We later discovered that the latter was none other than DT’s mother CT.
Dreamaticus 