A spot of early morning gardening (Rousse)

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Dreamaticus

It was only 06:00 in the morning, yet all the back gardens were buzzing with activity. When I opened the shutters I saw B next door mowing the grass, and two hunky gardeners digging up our lawn.

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Old university perks (Rousse)

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Dreamaticus

Now I understood why my colleagues at Edinburgh University were more productive than me. When my friend took up her new chair there, not only was she provided with a PA, but her department also paid for her parents to move house to Edinburgh to help with all the domestic aspects of her life. I did wonder, however, how accommodating they would be when they discovered that she was pregnant with her third child and would soon put in a request for a year’s worth of maternity leave.

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Toddler emergency essentials (Rousse)

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Dreamaticus

Three days after explaining to MSB why we were childless, I gave birth to a fully-formed toddler. While we wondered how we would break this news to our families (TPR’s mother would be delighted, our nephews and nieces probably less so) we made an emergency shopping list: a car seat, an enormous playpen, and an extension to the tandem.

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Sorting sleeping arrangements for house guests (Rousse)

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Dreamaticus

My parents had only been in the house for 12 months and already it was looking shabby. I almost tripped over the split lino as I ran upstairs to check who was sleeping where.

If we weren’t careful, we would soon have an accommodation crisis. In the first bedroom I found HJ and her three daughters squeezed into two single beds. Next door were EH’s friends Mark and Lucy in one double bed, and a single girl in another next to theirs. The latter agreed to move to a single bed in the attic so that the double could be allocated to a couple.

There would now be space for my university pal DM (now DE), if only she would come along. I’d seen her in passing earlier in the day, but she had chosen to ignore me.

Meanwhile I hoped that TPR was coping with buying all the alcohol for the party later in the evening.

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Parrot spotted in Edinburgh New Town garden (Rousse)

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Dreamaticus

There was a parrot up a tree in the garden. A parrot? In central Edinburgh? Yes, a parrot was perched on a branch of the tree against the back wall!

I rushed into the house to grab my camera, but by the time I had returned my quarry had fled.

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Widower fooled by wife imposter (Rousse)

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Dreamaticus

We’d been chatting happily for a few minutes before it dawned on me that this was an impossibility. My friend had died almost a year ago so how come she had picked up the phone?

As I started to drop more challenging questions into the conversation, the woman on the other end of the line revealed herself to be a fraud. The big question now was “Had my widowed friend been taken in by this wife imposter?”

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Life as a limbless torso (Rousse)

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Dreamaticus

I couldn’t believe that anyone could be so cheerful after having all her limbs chopped off. My friend peered up at me from the grubby stretcher and said that she was just grateful that they had removed the cancer. I pitied her future life as a head atop a torso.

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Advantages of going to college close to home (Rousse)

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Dreamaticus

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.

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Clarrie Grundy falls victim to loan shark (Rousse)

Posted on June 1, 2013 by Dreamaticus

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)

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Two kitchens and an injection of gold (Rousse)

Posted on June 1, 2013 by Dreamaticus

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.

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