Top fashion designer turns her talents to academia (Rousse)

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Dreamaticus

Award-winning dress designer MSB swapped her sewing machine for a computer screen and started work as my assistant. Grant-making bodies and research councils would soon sit up and take notice of the work of our amazing proposal-generating dream team.

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A food-based rave and a sporting mix-up (Belle)

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Dreamaticus

I was amongst the crowd waiting for the ‘harissa party’ to start. We were milling at the sides of a Victorian music hall, while the dancefloor was being prepared. An elaborate two-colour paisley pattern was being created on the floor using squeezy sauce bottles full of harissa and chocolate sauce. The stairways were decorated with life size photographs of people who had enjoyed the inaugural party and I recognised some of my friends. They were smeared with sauce and looked pretty pleased with themselves. But as the crowd got more excited, I got less interested. The idea of a chocolate sauce mosh-pit was just too much and I left.

Outside in the summer sunshine I noticed a baby reaching into a fruitbowl on a windowsill and rang the bell to alert the family. The grateful parents invited me inside and we bonded over our love of the beautiful game. The husband invited me into the garden and asked me if I preferred to bowl or bat? I realised he had been talking about cricket. I had meant golf.

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Selling tickets at the Fringe, and shooting woodcock in the Borders (Rousse)

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Dreamaticus

Kev F Sutherland was our new boss. For our first task we set up a stall in the Pleasance Yard and prepared to sell as many tickets as we could for that night’s performance by the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. It was a pity that we got the orientation of the stall wrong: there were three entrances to the yard and we mistakenly positioned the display to face the one that was least popular. However, eventually a friendly stream of puppet fans found its way to us. I glowed with pride when I overheard one young man say to his girlfriend “Your Fringe experience is incomplete until you have seen the Socks”. Other than a bit of trouble with a teenage boy who told Dave that he was a parent in a bid to prove that he was over 16, our experience of working for the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre beat the tedium of our earlier careers.

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Admittedly it was the rainy season. However, PM’s decision to wear a fur coat on holiday in the Caribbean (with me, TPR and our school friend ST) was still most peculiar. Indeed, owning a fur coat at all was rather strange. What had prompted her buy one in the first place? PM’s explanation was that fur is the clothing of choice amongst the woodcock shooting community of the Scottish Borders, of which her husband S is the keenest of sportsmen. My disapproval intensified. The only positive thing I could find to say in response was that I liked PM’s brooch: a bright four inch long enamel red letter box topped with the Danish flag.

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JC and I were now such good friends that he invited me to visit the holiday home that he had bought with NI. I liked the open plan of the ground floor and the views over the hedge to the sea, but the walls needed a good lick of paint.

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CS changed her plan. Instead of flying from Canada to California she would drive, just so that she could stop off in Chicago and visit me on the way. So it was a terrible shame that we never managed to find one another in the complex campus building. I sincerely hoped that she would forgive me.

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Noël Coward’s sick sense of humour and fridges full of carcasses (Rousse)

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Dreamaticus

The faster runners soon pulled away from me and in a short time a significant gap developed between us. At least I was managing to keep everyone else in sight. Fortunately for them, the others reached Royal Terrace before the joker had the chance to scatter the ground with sharp shards of broken green bottles. I was not so lucky. RG and BM heard my screams and ran back to my rescue. It was also they who identified that Noël Coward was responsible for the pavement ambush. Later in the day we observed the famous entertainer in person at home watching super 8 films of unfortunate drivers falling off cliff edges into the sea. Noël Coward really did have a sick sense of humour.

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My new role was as super au pair for a wealthy family that lived in a detached house in a beautiful Georgian square in central London. The mother was delighted when I offered to plan the menu for the week and then sort out the supermarket shopping. I first made a check of existing food stocks. In the small kitchen I was appalled to find three domestic fridges stuffed to the brim with carcasses, including pigs still complete with their heads. What was needed here was not an au pair, but a qualified butcher.

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The row at work was over a small yellow tub for collecting compost. I’d been away and all I wanted to know was where the tub had disappeared. CS thought I was criticising him for failing to collect compost. I really didn’t care. I just wanted my cute yellow tub back.

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Exciting new printing facility in central Edinburgh and the death of Cousin Bunny (Rousse)

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Dreamaticus

Everyone enthused about the new printing facility on North Bridge next to the Scotsman Hotel so I thought I’d give it a go first thing in the morning. There were so few people around at this time that I didn’t bother to get dressed. Nobody would mind my nightie (and, in any case, it made a change from my purple fleece pyjamas). The technology in the shop was impressive: a bank of touch screens across the main wall, and £1 a time to print out an A4 sheet. Unfortunately each time I printed my two pages I discovered another typo in the text, so it ended up costing me £10. Added to this, by the time I was happy with my purchases it was midday and now the whole of Edinburgh would witness my wandering the streets in the flimsiest of nightwear.

When I returned home I found an unknown middle-aged male relation with ginger hair at the kitchen table. He was on the phone checking the funeral arrangements for Cousin Bunny. “That’s strange” I thought, “We don’t have a Cousin Bunny…”

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From Joan Armatrading discussions in Windermere to abandoned babies (Rousse)

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Dreamaticus

Funny fragments:

  • Travelling in the back of the car along the shores of Lake Windermere listening to the two butch women in the front arguing about Joan Armatrading, and working out how to persuade them to get back onto the M6 and northbound to Edinburgh.
  • Urging my father to hurry, otherwise my sister J and I, both ready to set off in our brown and blue Teesside High School uniforms, would miss the school bus from Hartburn to Eaglescliffe.
  • Learning that GT had given away one baby and begged her mother to adopt the other.
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Kevin McCloud advises Rousse on housing law

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Dreamaticus

Kevin McCloud wandered into my Edinburgh flat just at the right moment. His knowledge of housing law would deal with the squatting Spaniards. I had never heard of this strange ancient tradition that, they claimed, gave them the right to take up residence in my bedroom. Nor would Kevin – or so I hoped.

My Spanish visitors had barged into my life earlier in the week with babies, children and bags of belongings, convinced that my home was theirs on the grounds that one of them had caught a wasp in his teeth just outside the front door. As TPR squashed yet another small rodent under his foot in the kitchen, he remarked that the Spanish would be more welcome if they were able to exterminate our growing mouse population. Wasps, in contrast, didn’t really bother us.

So, as Kevin demonstrated to a client a piece of modern furniture that neatly transformed at the touch of a button from leather sofa to dining room table, I made my enquiry. I think that I annoyed him with the over-familiarity of my opening gambit “Kevin, my friend”, but he did agree to look into my problem. In the meantime I returned to my over-populated bedroom where I was confronted by a mass of outstretched hands holding out forms for my signature. These crazy people genuinely thought that I would authorise their illegal stay in my flat.

Afterwards I wandered the streets with Kevin. By now I knew that this was all a dream so I was enjoying my little game of inspecting the authenticity of the imaginary location. The shop window displays in the main street indicated that we were in a seaside town on the Dorset coast. Their execution was much better than the streets further from the town centre. These had the two-dimensional feel of Second Life, and I was pretty sure that the large number of pedestrians comprised, in reality, a few drawn characters who took it in turns to follow us around.

When I remembered that I had a lunch party to organise in real life I panicked. My dream was about to take me to a Manor reunion at the University of Birmingham, but I had a chicken to cook. I tried to will myself awake, but it was impossible. I made attempts to scream and flail my arms to draw TPR’s attention in the bed next to me, yet nothing happened. Then I hunted for pen and paper so that I could scribble a rescue note. My failure to wake up was such that I wondered if I had fallen victim to the same fate as Sam Tyler in Life on Mars, comatose in some NHS hospital. Even worse, perhaps I was already dead?

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Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet history lesson (Rousse)

Posted on March 12, 2011 by Dreamaticus

I could hardly contain my excitement when I heard that Kev F Sutherland was in town! I rushed to the venue where I pulled off my hat, scarf, coat and cardigan in order to reserve the best seats in the front row of the 60-seater theatre. The puppet stage was already set and I could not wait for the performance to start. Imagine my disappointment, however, when Kev walked up to the podium and announced that tonight’s show was a one-hour lecture on classical history, with not a single Sock in sight.

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Family likenesses (Rousse)

Posted on March 12, 2011 by Dreamaticus

I looked up and saw that two jolly pensioners had joined me at the bench. They introduced themselves as Mr and Mrs A, giving the impression that I should already know this. When Cousin S appeared, and then Cousin N and wife J with their six children, I understood why this couple in their sixties was so friendly. Cousin N, in particular, looked very like his paternal grandparents.

My sister J was still confused so Cousin S made formal introductions. He labelled us his “brainy cousins”, making reference to our “Professor” and “Dr” titles. Then we learnt the names of the children, both of us in awe of N’s wife J, the slimmest and most glamorous veteran of six pregnancies. We discovered that the second youngest girl had changed her name to Mark, and that one of the boys was so dark because J drank gallons of coffee during her pregnancy.

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It was my birthday. Inside the carrier bag from my parents I found chocolates, bubble bath and white silk underwear. My sister J came into my bedroom to examine my presents, but was distracted by the tidiness. “This is nothing, wait until you see the bathroom”, I said. Something very dramatic had turned our parents’ cluttered house into a show home. When I asked J when we would see her children P and A she explained that it would be later in the day after their afternoon of woodwork lessons with Mr Cob.

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FM exclaimed how alike were the two eldest sisters, commenting in particular on our voices and accents. The only word that my sister J had uttered so far was “Hello” – hardly an adequate data set on which to make such a judgement.

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Access to Edinburgh airport, cinema-style (Rousse)

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Dreamaticus

JW was very proud that she was the one who had encouraged ND to book the circle of the cinema for her party. ND certainly looked very happy, cosying up to TPR in one of the VIP seats. My short trip down to the stalls confirmed that ours was a better class of event. DT shouted over the rowdy music at this less sophisticated party that there were also private rooms available downstairs, and I was most impressed that one door offered handy access to the departure lounge of Edinburgh Airport.

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It was a near-death experience. TPR and I were cycling happily along in the sunshine when two huge lorries came hurtling along the single-track road in opposite directions. Only by turning sharply onto the grassy verge did we narrowly escaped the messy fate of cycle sandwich.

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