I should have followed my instincts and refused to allow my colleague to bring his puppy to our meeting, but I didn’t. So now everyone – myself included – was focused on the cute little dog instead of our business.
It was just my luck that when it was my turn to pet her, the puppy chose this moment to demonstrate that she was not yet toilet trained.
Thankfully Catherine, Princess of Wales was seated just far enough away to avoid a soaking.
The melt-in-the-mouth smoked salmon was of the best quality.
What else would you expect from top caterer, the British Library?
‘Cat food! You need to do more investigations into cat food!’ screeched the scruffy man as the smart black Citizens Advice limo drove past him.
‘And bitcoin too’, muttered my friend JT as she sat down next to me. She looked so glamorous these days with her glossy dark bob. The shedding of a couple of stone also contributed much to her refined new look.
Just as we began our catch-up over coffee, another elegant woman walked over to our table. It soon became obvious that she was also a friend of JT so I introduced myself, and began to explain that JT were childhood friends who grew up together Stockton-on-Tees.
JT interrupted me with a sharp nudge. I quickly understood that she did not want her shameful up-bringing in the deprived North East of the 1970s to become common knowledge amongst her posh new southern friends.
BMR arranged the display in the corridor, then set up the kitchen for the Scottish Annual General Meeting. I greeted the great and good of the association with enthusiasm as I welcomed them at the front door.
I also dealt with guests sleeping in the study. These included my former student, now Minister, PG. He was traumatised by the discovery that I consorted with atheists.
Others were keen to meet the godless. Most desperate was the librarian from the National Library of Scotland, hoping for an introduction to JM. While she was telling me of her heart’s desire, a man approached us.
He was selling professional photographs of my garden: would I like to buy some? The only problem was that he was mistaken. His photos were of the garden next door, and not mine.
My sister J had joked that she had been eating cardboard in an attempt to lose weight. Now that I saw her again in the flesh, she admitted that her new slim form was thanks to a recipe for offal made in a special French food processor.
‘You just whiz up the liver and kidneys in the machine, which also cooks the meat. Then you have it all for breakfast. It’s so filling that you don’t need to eat again for the rest of the day’.
I wasn’t that desperate to drop a few pounds.
It might appear cruel, but I insisted that the students sit their exams at desks lined up outside on the main road in the pouring rain.
If they got soaked, I had a supply of grey school skirts in a railway carriage accessible when my train reached Swindon.
Much later than usual, in January we finally hosted our annual Christmas party.
There were two RJHs in the lift: one, a miniature, was a little shorter than me; the other a six-footer (at least). Both were built to scale of their normal counterpart. The fourth person in the lift was a stranger. Like us, he was also working on the movie.
Our main task was to find our location for the next day. We drove up and down all the terraced streets hunting for a house with our code name. On every gate and street-facing windows there were poster-sized labels, but none matched the code that had been assigned to us.
Perhaps I was destined never to star as Thursday Next in the movie adaptations of Jasper Fforde’s fabulous book series?
Dreamaticus 