They’d already murdered the brigadier and now it was my turn. They dragged me down the country track to the enormous sewage container tank. This was it then. I was going to die a very dirty death.
The main villain threw me in and they all laughed as I sank into the stinking vat of human waste.
It was hard to believe that my companion knew nothing of the court case. It had been all over the media for weeks. I pointed out the main characters from our vantage point in the public gallery and tried to fill him in on the story so far in a succession of low whispers.
“It’s fine”, he whispered back, “I don’t need to know every detail. Please just let me pick it up as we go along.”
“OK”, I replied, “But I have to tell you now that those aren’t really police officers giving evidence. All three are werewolves”.
I’d turned their spare bedroom into a teenage tip and now I’d managed to destroy the whole plumbing system by attempting to hand-wash a hanky. As I pulled the sitting room basin away from the wall, torrents of cold water came pouring through the ceiling. C ran upstairs to find the source of the flood, while A looked on in despair.
Eventually help arrived in the form of a bespectacled cub scout. I doubted that I would ever be invited back to Market Harborough.
This “executive briefing” was little more than a run-through of basic records management principles. The sharp-suited speaker was full of confidence when he declared that everything that you ever needed to know could be summarised in 35 minutes. He was wrong. What was more, pages numbers were missing from the entries in the neat reference list that he proudly displayed to the class at the end of his PowerPoint presentation.
Later when I checked in online for my flight home I was fooled into paying another £123 for my seat. My error was to tick the box for “yes” in response to the question “Would you like to sit next to a nice person on the plane?”
GMcM, who I hadn’t seen for over a decade, kindly asked me to his birthday party. Even better, he also invited a bunch of my girlfriends, all from different stages of my life. They included ECM from primary school, my colleague VAE from the 1990s, and my friend from work SC.
I was keen to have an opportunity to introduce all my friends to one another. However, it looked like ECM would steal all the limelight when she started fussing over a bruise on her bottom. We were saved this distraction when a physio wielded a data stick in her general direction and instantly cured the complaint.
I snuggled up to JM on the back seat as our chauffeur drove us to the venue. It was so wonderful to be in my friend’s company again.
When we finally reached the gig we found TPR and my two colleagues AC and BP. TPR was desperate for the punk band to take the stage. The others looked completely out of place, especially BP who had arrived straight from work and was wearing a suit.
I was very much surprised to see former colleague L with a baby. I was even more astounded by her explanation that she had got pregnant “on the Internet”.
TPR had been keeping a secret. I had no inkling of the pregnancy, but when I walked into the kitchen and found a new litter of tiny grey poodles I was overcome with joy.
Then I panicked. How could we afford to keep the whole doggy family? Two adult dogs was enough of a responsibility as it was. And what if they mated again?
TPR assured me that he would take care of finding good homes for all the puppies, and would take the dogs to be neutered just as soon as he retired.
TPR’s new hobby was butchery. I just wished he could find a more suitable place to practise chopping up the carcasses than indoors over a cream bedroom carpet.
What a great new job! I was a high level media industry spy working on my latest assignment.
By peering through the porthole I was able to spy the entire cast of the new James Bond film ‘marking out’ the opening scene. This was going to be a chaotic fight scene set in a gymnasium on board a cruise liner. How foolish the actors looked stepping around the pommel horse in slow motion. I took photographs on my spy camera.
