I didn’t believe JG when he said that he would give up smoking for our Caribbean holiday. A victim of peer pressure in Strasbourg (so it appeared to me, at least), he’d been addicted to the deadly habit since 1984.
“Won’t you be miserable without cigarettes?” I enquired.
“No, I’ll be fine”, he assured me.
“So why do you smoke at all?” I asked, mindful of the cost and health risks.
“Because smoking is cool” he replied.
The months of misery were over and my friend Pat Archer was finally smiling again. “It’s only been on the market for a week, and with the Christmas holiday coming up I knew it wouldn’t sell straightaway, but I’m optimistic for the New Year”, she enthused.
All it had taken to cheer her up was to put Bridge Farm up for sale. Pat and her husband Tony should have done this years ago.
My first problem was that I had to choose between three competing commitments all taking place on the same night. My second was that I had promised my boss that I would attend one of them. However, I now had no intention of spending the evening at the Scottish computing industry dinner – not since I’d heard the news that NY would soon be in town! Even TPR was left on his own to cope with his work visitors. They would just have to suffer the disappointment of discovering that I was suddenly unavailable to welcome them to our flat.
My top priority for the evening was to cook a series of mini lemon meringue pies for NY and serve them to him cold, straight from the fridge, just as soon as he reached Edinburgh. Meanwhile TPR’s solution to my lack of availability was to receive each of his colleagues, one at a time, in the bath.
So two of the commitments were actually covered. It was just a pity that my boss was going to kill me the next day for missing a unique opportunity to network with the elite of the Scottish computing industry.
Bread by Brendan MacNeill
Belle’s passenger was a small grey-haired man with multiple food allergies. At first I thought he might be a suitable boyfriend for her, but he really was far too shy and, in any case, he had long-term plans to leave the country.
At the brewery the aproned boy asked how much yeast we needed. I had no idea. How fortunate that I knew my regular bread recipe by heart! I recited the full list of ingredients to make a wholemeal loaf in a Kenwood BM256 breadmaker. He paused for a moment then suggested that a half-moon shaped section about the size of a broken digestive biscuit would do the job. I was suspicious that he was just fobbing me off when he popped what looked like a half-eaten rice cake into a paper bag and handed it over to me. Meanwhile Belle had lost all interest in leavening agents and was instead eyeing up a display of chocolate.
Then suddenly a phone buzzed in my pocket. This was not my phone: mine were both in my handbag. It was TPR’s mobile. He was at the airport and needed his phone back now. A business trip to the US without it was out of the question.
The airport was yet another taxi ride away. We’d already spent £60 just getting from one end of Edinburgh to the other. The quest for a lump of yeast – now complicated with a request for custom phone delivery – began to look like the first step along the one-way street to bankruptcy.
In the middle of a power cut, in which south east London was plunged into total darkness, I played chicken with the local girl gangs. No matter how many times I ran up to them and tweaked their noses, they would never find me!
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I travelled back 20 years and sat in a living room discussing the emergence of Blur and Oasis.
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Fed up of waiting for my extremely tall and thuggish ex to get ready to go out, I popped my head round the bathroom door. He was pouting into a mirror and wearing a micro white pleated cheerleader skirt. Nothing could have astonished me more.
Lost in the dark in Holyrood Park, I fell into a bog.
NB this Dreamaticus was related to TPR in the middle of the night by Rousse. Rousse herself has no recollection of it.
Lisbeth Salander was just one of the surprises at the guest house on the Isle of Lewis. Also packed in with the “regular” guests were my nephew PF and his sister AF, Mikael Blomkvist (on hand to help Lisbeth track down the criminal on the loose), and several black cats, all of which had their own assigned seats at the dinner table.
A further innovation was a nightly system whereby guests handed over their suitcases at 5pm every evening. Two porters would then sort the luggage on trolleys and deliver it to the appropriate bedrooms. My brown briefcase looked rather out of place next to the other cases on the pile of luggage. It appeared that the only way to travel these days was with your belongings packed into matching aluminium suitcases.
Lisbeth and Mikael were meant to be travelling incognito, but this was absolutely impossible. I knew from reading the Stieg Larsson novels that Lisbeth was slightly odd-looking, but I had no idea that she shared the facial characteristics of the (supposed) Roswell space aliens. Anyone who ever came across her could not ignore the blue pallor of her skin, and her peculiar expressionless eyes.
I stood on the quayside watching Benedict Cumberbatch, (as Sherlock) participate in the Fisherman Olympics.
Not only were competitors asked to compare their ‘bucket o’fish’ (squids scored double) but the rules required them to repeatedly sink to their knees and stand up straight again in front of their rivals without touching their hands to the floor. Members of the knowledgeable crowd admired Benedict’s kneeling skills, but as an outsider I couldn’t help but snigger at the sexual overtones of the action.
I had walked past the ‘mystery shop’ several times now and finally my curiosity got the better of my shyness. There was no clue whatsoever as to what this shop was – no sign above the door, no branding and definitely no customers. There were nine square wooden tables laid out in a formal pattern and behind a counter two trendy young men. Steeling myself, I walked towards the counter but as I approached hundreds of trendy young customers suddenly appeared. I was still unsure what I should ask for. Was this a wine bar, a nightclub or a trendy t-shirt shop?
Things were no better at work. The school students thought me a figure of fun, and my singing “who ate all the lemon meringue pie” in a very loud voice in the reception area seemed to diminish me even more in their eyes.
Dreamaticus 