Reflections of the Archers love triangle in real life (Rousse)

“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.

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A visit to (the other) Cardiff Castle (Rousse)

I walked barefoot in my purple fleece pyjamas all the way to Cardiff. There I found the secret lane to the J family’s castle. The muddy track was littered with loose change that had been discarded by NJ’s teenage partying pals. Although from the outside the castle was a forbidding edifice in grey granite, inside it was just like any other large family house with its own private gym.

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Natural sanitary products in store at Gayfield Square (Rousse)

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.

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Your computer, your holiday companion (Rousse)

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.

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A supper of puffin pie (Rousse)

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.

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An unwelcome extra in a New York fruit salad (Rousse)

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.

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Cooking up some Christmas crackers (Rousse)

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”.

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The conference trap (Rousse)

I was trapped at yet another dreary conference for PhD students. By Day 2 most people had given up on the programme and headed back to their offices to get on with some “real” work. Unfortunately for me, I was obliged to sit through a series of technical papers on random topics in which I had no interest whatsoever. Of all my colleagues only RGJ remained in the auditorium, accompanied by her two pre-school children.

“Someone really needs to do something about the format of these events”, I thought, just as the session chair asked my opinion of training events for doctoral students in chemistry.

To make best use of the time I started writing a paper on the delivery of CPD training to Scottish librarians, then shared this with my former colleague JW, who was seated next to me. Another welcome distraction was to pass breakfast items along the row. For some reason these foodstuffs were highly relevant to the paper currently being delivered on stage.

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New aqua spa opens at John Lewis (Rousse)

I’d barely tripped back to work in my green snakeskin stiletto heels when I heard my boss shrieking. Poor OM was being told emphatically that what he had heard from CI was not true.

When my boss caught sight of me, she ushered me into her office to ask me what I thought was the strategy for managing our workloads. “We carry out the tasks as allocated”, I answered robotically, hoping that this was the answer that she hoped for. I then outlined my plans for 2013/14.

Afterwards I tried to find my room in John Lewis. EH – wearing vile boiler insulation jacket styled overcoat – attempted to help me. My office could not be found: it had been demolished to make way for the new John Lewis aqua spa.

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Rousse’s New York Rolls Royce ride

I was not normally impressed by cars, but when JG’s New York gangster father drew up in a yellow chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce I could not wait to leap inside and go for a ride with all his cronies.

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