AC was teaching a stranger to unicycle in our hall.
After the ‘class’ I invited the pair of them to stay for lunch, even though I knew that this would cost us a fortune.
The cycling student hesitated, then said that she would just pick up a sandwich on Edinburgh’s Broughton Street. However, and much to my annoyance, AC persuaded her to stay.
Sir Stephen Fry set a terrible example to the young men on the River Tees boat cruise. As well as gorging on takeaways and failing to clear up his mess afterwards, he persuaded a fit, young personal trainer to experiment with recreational drugs.
The only safe place to shelter from the naughty knight was the butcher shop run by the Docherty family on Stockton High Street.
The fiery sunset behind Edinburgh castle was all the more vibrant on a day when the city’s street lighting was out of order. TPR, BMcC, and I rushed out of the flat with our iPhones to photograph the display.
When TPR and BMcC returned indoors to check that evening’s boeuf bourguignon, I popped into our neighbourhood garden to inspect the ‘improvements’: a huge pond at the west end, washing lines strewn with bedlinen hanging our to dry, and a small shop complete with a butchery counter. Someone had even rigged up a wooden mechanical roof to crank over the garden in case of rain.
I had only intended to visit the garden for a couple of minutes, but soon fell into conversation with the neighbours, telling them about my recent skiing exploits in Courcheval. I was delighted when TPR’s cousin G joined us, although I felt sorry for him when he admitted that he had come into the garden to escape from the terrible atmosphere at home.
To cheer up G, I invited him home with me to say hello to his cousins. I think that he would have stayed for the beef too, had we had invited him to eat with us.
We were such good customers of Edinburgh’s Broughton Market that the staff were perfectly comfortable when we popped into the shop after-hours to pick up some pastries. JH, however, still disapproved of our ‘cheek’.
Provisions acquired, we set off for the show. The route took us through open countryside then straight up the side of a hill by way of a huge, wobbly rock face. We all travelled on sheep-back, with our legs securely wrapped around their bodies and our hands tightly clutching their horns.
We were a little late in reaching the theatre at the end of our journey, and the show already underway when we shuffled into our seats.
At first I thought that the opening act was a hologram. The others corrected me. The performer was a real-life, and very convincing, Bruce Forsyth impersonator.
I was both working at, and a customer of, a shoe shop in Millwall’s south London football stadium. My boss asked me if I’d graduated from the ‘Morley College of Violent Librarians’.
PB and I were enjoying our trip across India in our old school VW Beetle. At some point, however, I took an incorrect turn and we ended up on the white cliffs of Dover.
KJR and her Texan husband T gatecrashed my final year honours class.
The students waited patiently while I fielded KJR’s questions. This was a tricky task now that she spoke with a strange Americanised North East English accent.
Eventually one of the students piped up to remind me of my role so I started the class. The day’s exercise was to communicate occupations through drawings. The first student to attempt this task was Chinese, and completely misunderstood the instructions.
We skied into the underground car park.
It looks ages to find my poles afterwards. I’d flung them all the way to the far end of the car park when our skis hit the tarmac and brought us to a complete standstill.
We returned from holiday to find that our garden had been completely relandscaped. The pond was now ten times its original size and huge boulders took up most of the lawn.
When I told the foreman that the workers had done quite enough, he disagreed. They had barely started.
It was pouring in Edinburgh and very difficult for me to navigate the puddles on my way to my 9:15 exercise class on campus. There was a real risk that I would arrive late. Along the route I heard the cries of animals in distress. By the side of the wood, inside a wooden hutch, I found two cats and a clutch of kittens. On the outside of the structure were various screens that relayed scenes from the interior. These allowed the curious to observe the cats’ antics in real time. I wanted to photograph the kittens, but all my attempts were hopeless.
I was late on campus, as feared, and bound to miss my strength training class. I made matters worse by stopping EH in the corridor to enquire about her recent ski-ing holiday. She answered that this went reasonably well, but she hated carrying her skis from her accommodation to the slopes and back again each day. The two-hour trek along the motorway twice daily was excessive.
I struggled to find my office because I had forgotten that I’d agreed to move to the D corridor, and that all the rooms there had been renumbered. I eventually reached my room at the far end. My immediate neighbours were unfriendly engineers who thought nothing of using my room as a short cut to other parts of the building, wandering in and out of my space, even when I was changing into my gym kit.
I also despaired at the state of my room. It was so full of tables, shelving and books that it resembled a tatty public library. I wondered if moving me here and dumping all these items in my room was simply a plot to infuriate me sufficiently that I would resign my post? One of my external colleagues – an emeritus professor at the National Library of Scotland – thought so. She encouraged me to take up another such appointment at the music school instead.
Dreamaticus 