TPR and I were the only audience members at this bizarre performance. Apparently it had been playing to a packed house every night, and the only reason that it was so quiet today was that we had chosen to come to a weekday matinee.
As I watched the strange plot unfold, I wondered how the casting director had managed to source so many miniscule, muscular, olive-skinned actors.
Some of my colleagues were lovely. Unfortunately the rest were vile.
One of the latter set had just made a formal complaint about me: that I’d used more than my fair share of soap when taking a bath. I took solace in the arms of another who I loved immensely.
Very few of our colleagues knew that this adorable computing lecturer led a double life, and that his secret identity was writer Alan Hollinghurst.
HH opened the massive cardboard box that she’d brought on her visit. “Just a few presents” she announced as I spied the beautiful hand-knitted string jumpers in a dazzling array of metallic colours.
I grabbed a golden one and pulled it over my head: it was far too tight. Meanwhile my sister S had the opposite problem with an electric blue creation. It hung far too loosely off her skinny frame.
HH then packed up her box and joined her friend (and my niece) AF for an afternoon in front of the television. They watched an Ealing comedy first, then moved on to James Bond in Casino Royale.
I ran across the road, narrowly avoiding oncoming traffic from the right, to reach the bus stop before the arrival of the number 11. Although it was a Sunday, the bus was packed. Most of the passengers were on the bus for the same reason, and it was nothing to do with travel: they needed to use the on-board photocopiers.
I later mentioned to my sister and brother-in-law that there would be great commercial opportunity in establishing a chain of Sunday opening only copy shops in university towns across the UK. They both agreed.
I had to travel from Birmingham to London to check out the venue for the following day’s conference. While the others piled into cars and minibuses, I wandered around the car park regretting that I had not arranged a lift. Now I felt like an unwanted hitchhiker, hopelessly trying to identify someone who had room for me in a vehicle heading south. I really would have liked to have joined AC and her friends in the open top MG7 but everyone, including Belle, pretended that they didn’t know me.
When I eventually realised that I wouldn’t make it to London that afternoon I decided to make the most of the extra time available to finish a couple of reports and a PowerPoint presentation for work. To get me through this I needed chocolate, so I hunted down the campus sweet shop.
On my way there I was distracted by the committee of the Edinburgh Folk Club. Apparently I was a highly sought-after potential member. Then – even better – along the street came the World Cup winning England football team. I whipped out my iPhone to photograph our national heroes as they marched past.
M and AP were looking very pleased with themselves – and no wonder: they’d just won £50,000 on the National Lottery.
TPR made the gruesome discovery when we lifted the bed across to the other side of the room. Gently swinging from from the bedstead was the stiff little corpse of a fully dressed toddler. From the state of the decomposing body it was obvious that the child’s tiny hands had held their grip over the the sleigh bed’s bevelled edge for quite some time.
“We must inform the police immediately” said TPR. I agreed.
I didn’t let on that I was pretty sure that this child was the last of the brood of one of my sister’s friends, deliberately abandoned at our house three weeks earlier. Whatever would TPR think if he found out that I’d been aware of the body in the bedroom for all this time, but had done absolutely nothing about it?
The organisers had made a terrible mistake in bringing together this bunch of rude, disobedient ego-maniacs. They had been locked up for a week at this luxury hotel to work collaboratively on developing innovative research proposals, but since their arrival all they had done was misbehave, and this was all at the tax payers’ expense.
The climax came when a short young man from IBM took to the stage. Admittedly his presentation was extremely cliched and dull – he worked his way through the history of computing with ancient lumps of hardware as props – but he didn’t deserve the booing, hissing and an eventual walk-out of almost everybody in the room. It was his comment that all university records could easily be accommodated on a single server that seemed to annoy the delegates the most. “Even the library catalogue?!”, “What about admissions?” shouted out members of this dubious audience.
I was one of the few who stayed to watch the rest of the dreary performance. I sat with my school friend CC who had been following me around all week like a faithful pet, and a sandy-haired man who had brought his young son to the event, even though it was against the rules and the poor lad was desperately homesick for his mother.
I crossed the bridge over the Thames to track down a café. A friendly man nearby introduced himself to me as Ed and joined me in my quest for lunch. When nothing suitable could be found on the north bank of the river I followed Ed into his car and we set off to drive the full length of the Outer Hebrides.
“My granny used to live in Luskentyre, so I know this area well”, I boasted proudly to my new friend. The poor man had no way of knowing that I was lying.
The students were busy discussing their options for next term. Three over-confident boys declared that they would choose my class because it would be a “cinch”. The most arrogant of the three boasted proudly that he was already was familiar “everything there is to know” about knowledge management.
I recruited two German students taking the module this term to explain to these deluded individuals that the knowledge management syllabus was both interesting and challenging. Then I outlined how the journal literature is used in class.
Meanwhile a vile girl joined the group and started pulling silly faces behind my back. As soon as I realised what was going on I turned round, grabbed her, and threatened to march her off to the highest authority: JB.
