Humpty Dumpties take up residence in run-down farm house (Rousse)

Posted on October 13, 2025 by Dreamaticus

I pushed open the back door of my cousins’ farm house and walked into the kitchen. There several members of my extended family were seated at the kitchen table, but only one greeted me: TB with a low groan. I slapped him in the face, then rushed up the stairs. I could hear TB behind me muttering ‘She acts as if she owns this place’. The problem – at least for him – was that I did.

The staircase was in a terrible state, covered in junk that belonged elsewhere. It was also falling apart. I could lift the handrail clean off the balusters. I reminded myself to arrange for my former colleague NU to come and fix it.

I was in dread when I opened the door of the bedroom that I shared with my sisters, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared. As expected, there were clothes strewn across the floor and beds unmade. The big surprise was that a family of Humpty Dumpties had taken up residence on one of the beds.

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Horse riding on a Berwickshire beach (Rousse)

Posted on October 8, 2025 by Dreamaticus

AW and I rode from Edinburgh to the Berwickshire coast. We risked our lives – and those of our horses – travelling along the busy A1.

At the end of our journey, AW struggled to persuade her mount to clamber up the sand dunes to reach the shore. I steered my own horse a short way along the road to a gap on the sand and soon joined everyone else on the packed beach.

I lost AW when she set off to paddle in the cold North Sea.

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A woolly drink and a woolly case of mistaken identity (Rousse)

Posted on October 8, 2025 by Dreamaticus

I made a ‘lovely’ hot drink for TPR. The ingredients comprised hot water, coffee granules, raw sugar, a twist of mustard embroidery silk, and two balls of rusty brown wool.

Later, I thought that I had found the lost green jumper that I had knitted for TPR in the mid-1980s: a former external work colleague was wearing this treasured garment at a meeting! The wearer willingly handed over the jumper for me to pass on to its rightful owner. However, when we saw the Marks and Spencer label stitched into its seam, we realised that this was a woolly case of mistaken identity.

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Protecting Prince Harry from tiny footprints and an assassination attempt (Rousse)

Posted on October 6, 2025 by Dreamaticus

Prince Harry was about to be presented to the public dressed in a suit covered in tiny silvery footprints up the right leg – and it was all my fault. I’d left his suit lying across my bed, then let a five year-old, who had been foot-painting, run across it. The only way to put this right was for me to hold Prince Harry still as I peeled the prints away from the cloth.

A little later, I noticed that our hosts had placed Prince Harry on the top tier of the small stadium. There he was, joking and taking selfies with my father-in-law – and a perfect target for snipers. I needed to relay a message as fast as possible to the organisers: that they needed to move our guest of honour down the stadium, or risk an assassination attempt.

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The crop crusher (Rousse)

Posted on October 5, 2025 by Dreamaticus

The main role in my new job was to drive a tractor through the fields and crush crops.

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Big changes at the University of Birmingham (Rousse)

Posted on October 4, 2025 by Dreamaticus

Childhood friends SB and KH met me in Birmingham to scope out venues for next year’s university reunion.

We were in for a shock when we reached the University of Birmingham campus. The French department was completely unrecognisable. The corridors were so narrow that they could only be accessed single file in one direction. The reception areas and lecture halls were so huge that they gave the impression of being in open air. We also noticed that most of the students were Chinese.

Most bizarre of all was access to the main teaching block. To reach this, you had to walk through a large, high-ceilinged, hall hung with a huge electronic banner that reached from the roof to the floor. As you approached the banner, it moved backwards, with the images that it displayed changing according to your positioning in the room. We had no idea of the banner’s function. It just seemed to be yet another annoying obstacle to navigating the building.

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University finance genius earns special treatment (Rousse)

Posted on October 3, 2025 by Dreamaticus

DM brought a sudden end to the lunch party, reminding her guests that some important afternoon commitments now required her attention.

As she shooed us out of the door, she checked that I had remembered to collect my raspberries and redcurrants. I had not done so, so I returned to the scullery to extract the fruit from the tin where they sat amongst DM’s potatoes and bay leaves.

At the back of the house I spotted BB at a desk, poring over a massive ledger covered in gigantic cursive script. Unlike the rest of us, BB was allowed to stay with DM for the rest of the day. This was because she considered him a genius when it came to university finances.

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Cargo bike crisis in Newcastle (Rousse)

Posted on October 3, 2025 by Dreamaticus

I travelled all the way to Newcastle by cargo bike. Almost at my journey’s end, at Haymarket another cyclist rode up to tell me that I had lost my cargo, and that I had a flat tyre.

I was grateful that my phone and purse were in the inside pocket of my bright yellow cycling jacket. One phone call later, ever-reliable TPR came to the rescue.

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Teased by a £50 note (Belle)

Posted on September 30, 2025 by Dreamaticus

I was walking down a tree-lined street and autumn leaves were falling around me. Admiring this spectacle, I noticed that one of the leaves was in fact a £50 note. As I tried to catch it, it was caught by the breeze and I began chasing it. It danced in front of my face and flew away again. I picked up speed and eventually I caught up with it at the end of the street. It simply fell into my outstretched hand and I thanked it for choosing me.

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Trapped at the death clinic (Rousse)

Posted on September 30, 2025 by Dreamaticus

TPR had previously campaigned vigorously against assisted dying, almost causing a riot outside when GG and his ex-wife J entered the clinic to seek its services.

It therefore came as a terrible shock to learn that TPR had switched sides. Worse still, he had booked an appointment for the pair of us, plus JH and KT, at a top-notch death facility. He tricked us into entering the dome by enthusing about all the data that had been collected about each of us over the course of our lives. I looked up and watched a series of infographics that whizzed by, able to make out that they displayed TPR’s impressive training statistics.

Then it struck me that all four of us really were all about to meet our maker. I tried to pull away from TPR, but his huge arm muscles trapped me against his body. I screamed as loud as I could ‘Let me out! I am far too young to die!’

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