I signed up for (yet another) degree. This time I would be studying at the Hexham campus of Northumbria University.
As I started planning how to arrange my belongings in my tiny hall of residence room, I congratulated myself on choosing a course at a university located so close to my parents’ house. With minimum effort I was pretty sure that I would be able to persuade my mother to take in my washing on a weekly basis.
Clarrie Grundy could hide the truth no more. She had fallen victim to a loan shark and soon Ambridge would be ablaze with gossip about this dreadful news.
See also the appearance of Clarrie’s son Ed in Amorous Archers intentions (Belle)
TPR and I moved to northern Norway where we lived in a rather run down house with two kitchens. I was determined to bring some order to our living arrangements so started moving jars of flour from one kitchen to the other so that we would end up with one as a venue for cooking and the other as living space.
All this activity was both exhausting and stressful, but my colleague CC was on hand to administer my injection. As the gold liquid made its way down the syringe to the needle poised next to my left arm, I prepared to scream. In the event I felt no pain whatsoever.
“Hey, have you heard the latest about Paul Morgan?” leered my colleague P. He was clearly intrigued by Matt Crawford’s mission to warn his love-rival off his long-term partner Lillian Bellamy.
Professional as ever, I was not going to join in this gossip. Then it struck me that we were talking about fictional characters, so this was hardly an issue.
However, the irony was that P’s own wife was actually involved in an affair of her own. P knew precisely nothing of this. Across the room I noticed how she was shifting uncomfortably in her chair, the pained expression on her face desperately pleading with me to change the subject – fast.
As I stood at the pedestrian crossing on Leith Walk I noticed that a PhD student was also waiting to cross the road.
“Have you been to the craft shop in Gayfield Square” she asked me.
When I replied that I had not, she urged me to take a look. Apparently there I would find an amazing array of natural sanitary products.
The big news was that BB was taking his wife on holiday. My question was whether or not he was also taking a computer. I advised that he should not.
Munching on a raspberry tart, he declared that wherever he went, the computer came too.
The chef grinned widely as I complimented her on the delicious pie. “What was in it?” I asked. “Puffin” she proudly replied.
Just in case you were wondering, there are real puffin recipes.
JG brought me a delicious-looking fruit salad all the way from New York. When I took a mouthful I bit straight into something brittle. There was a shard of glass amongst the fruit!
We needed to hold this as evidence for a formal complaint. I ran upstairs to my bedroom in the White House where I hunted for an old jewellery box to carry the offending item home to the United States.
My sisters and I were cooking gallons of soup, alongside hundreds of breakfast items, on the Aga at my parents’ house. The heat from the oven was almost unbearable: my Crocs offered little protection and I really needed to find a heavy apron.
I asked my sister S what she was up to when she started cutting out rectangles of silver paper and arranging them next to empty toilet roll insides. “I’m making Christmas crackers” she replied. “I’m going to fill them with the bacon and eggs”.
Dreamaticus 