A campus love affair rudely interrupted, and a seaside crime (Rousse)

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Dreamaticus

While most colleagues met for Friday night drinks in Bruntsfield, I discovered that the senior staff held a private reception on a secret campus. I set off to investigate. I spotted current and former colleagues through the windows of a beautiful conservatory. These included SC, as well as Professor PS. I hadn’t seen PS for years – not since he’d left Edinburgh for London about a decade ago. Another colleague joined me on my mission and we began to explore the entire secret campus. We ended up in a luxurious hall of residence room where we settled into the big double bed to watch the Simpsons and snooze. As we sneaked away we believed that we had got away with our illicit stay – not even our partners would know of our tryst – but then a bossy member of staff appeared out of nowhere and cornered us. As far as she was concerned, I was an out of control drunkard and we both deserved to be sacked on the spot.

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I was suffering from cabin fever. We’d all been crammed into the Islay hotel bedroom for about five days. By now my parents were so worn out with this version of holidaying that they were happy enough to sleep all day, regardless of the mess that was accumulating around them. I could tolerate it no longer and dragged my nephew PF and niece AF away from their books to take them to the beach. There we bumped into SC and TM with their daughter A, still a six month old baby. Periodically TM burst into song, recalling his rock star past. I do not know what crime my nephew committed on this outing, but when I later took my place at the meeting in the police station I was determined to use to academic status to fight his cause. Heaven help anyone who dared to underestimate me.

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Anti-French feeling and fossilised fruit (Rousse)

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Dreamaticus

We even surprised ourselves when we signed up for the mediterranean cruise. However, this was a cruise with a difference. The small wooden boat was so packed that we fought for sleeping space at night, and most of the other passengers resembled refugees rather than holiday makers. The purpose of their trip was a means to travel from A to B. It was certainly not for pleasure. Since few were interested in the visits to islands en route, TPR and I took full advantage of the expert guides who led us to the ancient sites. The highlight of our holiday was hunting for fossilised fruit deep underground beneath the remains of a lost civilisation. This prehistoric people had buried hundreds of apples, bananas, pears and plums as offerings to the gods. Centuries later we took enormous pleasure in pulling their solid forms back out of the rubble.

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I’d forgotten just how officious the French could be. I’d last experienced the lengthy queues, multi-page forms, barked instructions, and rude staff wielding rubber stamps as weapons of officialdom in 1984. It all came back to me as we waited in line until midnight just to collect documentary authorisation for a short visit to the country. My university friend KH (now KN) complained that they had exactly the same problems each year when recruiting French teaching assistants to her school. I added this to the list of reasons why I was grateful not to be a school teacher.

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Queen cuts down official duties (Rousse)

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Dreamaticus

The pensioner at the till was agog. Could it really be true that the Queen would put in an appearance later in the day? What on earth was she doing in a tea shop in St Ives? Yes, came the explanation, so long as the Queen was not feeling too tired, she would come downstairs and meet her subjects. The catch was that the tea shop staff were talking about the Pearly Queen, not HRH Queen Elizabeth II. They didn’t let on. Meanwhile LM, rewriting her conference paper at a table by herself, paid little attention to this conversation.

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My sister S and I tackled the fridge. Just how many forms could rice take? We threw out a rice ring preserved in aspic, a solidified rice pudding, and a wilted rice salad. The Thai chicken curry looked edible so we ate that cold. It was actually quite nice – until we reached the foil-wrapped scalpels at the bottom of our bowls.

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Many of the reading rooms in New York public library were closed due to the flooding. As I descended the stairs I passed a number of young men who defied gravity by travelling on snowboards in the opposite direction. As they whooshed past me I thought “I want to learn how to do that!”

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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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