As I opened the front door to leave home, three women were standing on the doorstep, blocking my exit. Holding clipboards and briefcases they marched past me and went into my office, firing questions about my filing and invoicing processes.
The women were humourless and intimidating and even the sight of my dog walking on his back legs into the office holding a tray of tea and custard creams failed to make them smile. I was in big trouble.
It was Harry Potter’s fault that I almost missed the 08:30 service from Edinburgh Waverley to London Kings Cross. We hadn’t appreciated just how long it would take to organise refunds on the 40 cinema tickets for Harry Potter and the deathly hallows part 2 for the children who now could not make it. Nor had we realised that our purchase of so many tickets in the first place would be so fascinating for the box office staff.
Although I hadn’t realised I was being interviewed for the position, I discovered I been the best candidate and I was now Lennie Henry’s new girlfriend. In what I had thought was nothing more than a casual conversation in a lift, it seemed my answer to ‘what do you like to eat?’ had won him over.
(Lancashire hotpot and lamb cobbler).
I watched the sequence of events very carefully. To the right of the stone wall a brand new white Sunseeker was being launched into the sea. My attention, however, focused to the left. Here a busy crowd gathered around a swimming pool. A man pushed through a gate at the top and placed a 50p piece on the wall. Someone else picked the coin up and popped it into a stone post about 10 feet away. A banner dropped and announced the winner of the £117 million pound lottery jackpot. I watched the sequence again and prepared to enter the fray. I was on a mission for millions!
The crush of the crowd was much worse than I anticipated and I became very uncomfortable waiting for the man to come through the gate. I was just about to give up when the creak of the hinges signalled the start of the sequence. The man walked over to the wall, just as I had observed. Before anyone else had the chance, I negotiated my way through the mass of bodies to the wall to collect my quarry. It turned out not to be a coin, but a key. I grabbed it then crossed back again to the post where it fitted the slot perfectly. The banner came down and I was a multi-millionaire. I spent the rest of the afternoon in the pool.
It was only when I watched everything back later on the black and white CCTV images that I started to feel immense shame at cheating the system with my privileged access to time travel.
Newly-wed SL (was SJ) sang the praises of my husband to an audience that included her mother and me. I budged uncomfortably in my seat, taking care not to ram it into the table behind me. I’d already been told off for accidentally doing this a couple of times. Everyone believed that TPR and I enjoyed a perfect relationship, but they missed all the complaints of my errant behaviour and taunts over my lack of fitness.
Only that morning in the park an incident had the potential to lead to more trouble. First I joined a game of rounders in deep field where, it has to be admitted, I was hopeless.
I then got caught up with a neo-Nazi team of overweight Sunday morning footballers. As the players actively ignored a Jewish man’s request to participate in the match, in the grass I found a clutch of rusting 1980s music badges, including one for the Smiths.
Their owner turned out to be a tall, skinny, red-haired myopic lad in his mid-twenties. When I told him that I’d seen Morrissey recently he gathered me into his arms and danced me round the playing fields.
After a polite goodbye I headed back to SL’s house. Doubtless I had just recruited yet another Facebook stalker.
Without full details of how to submit to the Research Excellence Framework, UK university staff had two broad options: (1) to guess the requirements and work towards them; (2) or to ignore the whole exercise until the actual criteria were published. Nobody could account for the enthusiasm for a third approach that was spreading fast across academia: male colleagues raiding the contents of female professors’ soap bags. One day, while I was out hunting for wedding dresses, a secret mission from the University of Sheffield was apprehended in my office rifling through some of my most personal belongings.
I was back at University looking for the bathrooms. After exploring the entire ground floor at last I found one but was stopped from entering by the sign on the door. This bathroom was NOT for use by single people.
It was all so wrong, and I almost did it, but thankfully I pulled out at the last minute and didn’t marry NM. His last marriage floundered when wife number two had started hinting about babies. This was not part of the bargain as far as NM was concerned: his two children from his first marriage were quite enough. I wasn’t bothered about kids myself (although I did love NM’s sweet 11-year old son). On the morning of the wedding itself I eventually recognised marriage to NM as a recipe for disaster. The big clue was how much attention was focused on the choice of New Romantic-style shirt for the groom. My bridal dress was barely mentioned.
Half way throuugh the school trip to Italy, we girls began to realise that while the boys were staying in penthouse suites, we were sleeping in cupboards. When we raised the issue at the evening meeting the (female) teachers mocked us by snogging on stage. The boys roared their approval while I gave a speech informing them of my intention to ‘lodge a formal complaint’. I was the school firebrand.
Dreamaticus 