Panto season (Belle)

I was sitting next to J near the front of the theatre for the closing scene of the pantomime and the entire cast was jumping around in shaving foam. I was particularly enjoying the rhyming scheme and chuckled at how the line ‘a man is getting excited by the icing on the gateau’ was being rhymed with a line ending ‘chateau’. Had J written all these lines herself or were they taken from a west end production?

Earlier, my unusual injuries had meant that I had to stop at the firestation in Ladywell to call an ambulance. I was better before they came to collect me.

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This charming man (Belle)

What a charming man Peter Cushing was! He knew the designer of every item of clothing I was wearing (although as I kept confiding to the girls around me, I had only paid £1 in a charity shop for most of them, and the rest were from clothes swap). He kissed my hand and he and his lovely wife walked away over Waterloo Bridge.

Elsewhere I felt very important in a service station carpark when my friend P arrived on a big motorbike. I was a girl gang biker!

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Disappointing Caribbean climate (Rousse)

Poor weather in the tropics by Brendan MacNeill

Poor weather in the tropics by Brendan MacNeill

It looked like a last minute decision to take my heavy brown coat to Antigua was sensible. Our flight from Glasgow at 14:00 was delayed several hours, and the Caribbean weather forecast was for a fortnight of wind and rain. I read this information out to TPR at the bus station as it came through as a telex print-out from my wristwatch.

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Rousse misses out on the miracle of childbirth

Mother-of-four SY took charge of the six women seated in silence around the long wooden table. She instructed me to wash my hands and help when necessary. If I doubted SY’s qualifications in midwifery, my own experience of childbirth was non-existent (unless you counted delivering puppies or kittens). SY also had a PhD thesis to write up. How did she have time to tend to these women as well? In the whole period that I was there (and not in the shops next door looking for a sandwich) the most action I experienced were a few moans from the Chinese lady. I wondered if anyone was pregnant at all.

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I lay on the back seat of the car, peeking out of the window occasionally to check the progress of the journey. This time I remembered just how long is the Isle of Skye. TPR drove quickly past the dangerous cliff face from which children were falling to their deaths. I blamed their teachers for letting them play there.

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Belle lives at the shops

Ever since C had bought the new bike, she had always turned up on time. I was astonished to see her freewheeling to meet me outside St Chad’s Church near where I was born at exactly the time we had arranged. She was wearing a long linen dress with pretty flowers on it and I coveted it. I reminded myself that later I was going to meet up with Bart Simpson. He was bringing his go-cart.

But first, C and I were off to view my new bedroom and to choose paint colours, although I already knew what I wanted (purple) and was only humouring her. When we got there, my room was an extraordinary bric-a-brac shop in Deptford High Street. Piled near a sofa were six or seven finger paintings that looked like impressionist jigsaws and I looked at all them. Was it acceptable to ‘like’ them if I did so ironically? C found a back room more tidily laid out. Crockery and cranberry glass everywhere. She said to me “You cannot live in this room. It’s a shop” and I was astonished I hadn’t noticed before.

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Rousse abandoned at breakfast, and a new business idea

I’d never heard of “costering” until I lost TPR to a guest house owner on the Isle of Lewis. The islanders had adopted this process of shearing seed from long grass stalks as their favourite outdoor hobby. My husband was keen to try it out, even if it meant missing breakfast with me. He had sloped off early without a word from our rented house to follow RG to the fields.

It was the crotcheting house keeper who confessed that they had disappeared for the day. Furious, I set out to catch them. The fastest way out of the house was to break through the sealed front door, burrow through the underground tunnel, and come up into the light through the manhole cover in the Stornoway car park opposite the shops.

My sudden appearance shocked the council worker, who clung to his witch’s hat for comfort. However, we soon made friends over a discussion of charity shop stock. Apparently here on Lewis there were plenty of vintage clothing options for 6 foot plus transvestite men partial to red sequins.

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As I festooned the kitchen with yet another Christmas decoration I spoke of my ambition to sell handmade decorative goods online. “You don’t have time” argued TPR. In response I countered “There’s a new service called Razzle or Dazzle, Razzle-Dazzle or similar. It’s really simple, much easier to set up than eBay or Etsy. If my graduates CH and CW can do it at the same time as running families with three small children, then so can I.” All my knowledge came from Facebook.

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Belle’s new cleaning job

I was working for the Marquis of Bath, even though I felt queazy every time I heard him use the word ‘wifelet’. I needed to get rid of all the broken glass in the cinema and impressed a group of strangers with my efficient gathering up of all Henry the Hoover’s attachments. But when I got to the cinema, the movie had started. ‘Born Free’ again, I thought. All the school children in the cinema were being played by 20-year old actors, as if we were all in a 1970s sitcom. Unable to hoover I sat down and picked up a blue tablet somone had left for me.

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Dr Who rescues Rousse

Life as the assistant (and wife) of a time lord was exhausting. In our latest adventure Dr Who (my husband) and I hid from the “evil one” behind filing cabinets stored in an attic barn by the seaside. It felt reasonably safe until we noticed that the cabinets were growing larger. They rapidly multiplied and started to work together to kill us in a metallic crush. Then out of the corner of his eye the Doctor spotted a trap door and we escaped just in time.

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My friends had six children in two sets of triplets. I was impressed with their efficiency at reproduction, and how they used the medium of song to order the children through dinner and off to bed every night.

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I travelled all the way to London to spend the day with colleagues at my hot desk in Bloomsbury. Unfortunately I chose “No computer” day. So while everyone got on with other jobs such as filing, my time banned from the keyboard was completely wasted.

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Belle’s busy night

My thesis was on the improvement of the ‘lot’ of the working classes over the lifetime of Charles Dickens. I needed lots of statistical data and went to the newly-built sink estate in which all the records were kept. However, it seemed young families were also living there and matters were further complicated by the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing.

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A teenage girl had been an internet sensation with her animated Henry VIII lessons and was now a ‘celebrity’ guest on The Dog Whisperer. It can be imagined how jealous I was.

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The fashion show had a ‘by the beach’ theme. The designer was quite frightening and she became very angry indeed when the accompanying PowerPoint presentation was displayed back to front. The owner of the venue was terrified of her and waved his memory stick defensively.

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I was in a desolate place in a middle eastern desert with a family that wasn’t mine. I opened the Gertrude Stein novel I had started over 20 years ago and a postcard of the very place I was looking at fell out. Astonished by the coincidence I went to look around what seemed to be an ancient Roman temple. I gave away my last money to two teenage girls sitting on pebbles. I was then unable to find the two euros it cost to visit the temple.

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Belle the politician

We politicians were meeting in a large barn-like building debating Christmas decorations. I knew I had evidence to prove that the man sitting behind me was a master-criminal and couldn’t understand why no-one else was interested. He was peddling his confession in the form of a best-selling paperback. Meanwhile, my sister had moved upstairs and I admired her lovely new bookcases. When things needed tidying up, she simply pushed them through gaps in the ceiling.

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