Belle cooks Rousse’s bacon and applauds Princess Diana

I had been a guest at Rousse’s. While she was out, I decided to pay my way by performing domestic tasks. The obvious first step was to grill all the bacon on the eye-level grill. I then cleaned up after the vomiting cat and wandered off to have a nap. On returning to the kitchen, I bumped into the cleaner, who wasn’t too pleased that I was dressed in her pinnie. The bacon was still under the grill, half cooked. I wrapped it in foil and put it in the fridge.

Rousse was NOT impressed with my labour saving pre-cooked bacon. Frightened by her temper, I decided to leave the house, and ended up on the deck of an enomous grey destroyer, wearing a wet suit and being encouraged to participate in dangerous sports. This was not my cup of tea, so I wandered off to see Princess Diana. To get there I walked through a quaint, medieval estate that seemed to have been taken over by the English Defence League or some such. I put my head down and refused to take a leaflet from them. Eventually, I reached the corner of the street where a delighted Princess Diana was walking in a procession, celebrating her second wedding. She was wearing a bright pink sari and had dyed her hair to match. The crowd was thrilled and we all cheered. The whole event was so joyful, I walked round the block and travelled back in time so I could see it all over again.

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Snowy conditions and dodgy map cause travel chaos near Cambridge (Rousse)

Our journey south was severely hampered by the weather conditions and resulting traffic chaos. As we attempted to join the A12 in the snow just outside Cambridge, others were reversing up the hard shoulder of the slip road in an attempt to escape the gridlock. TPR hesitated at the roundabout, turned the car around again, and declared that we would have to find an alternative route ourselves.

A consequence of this was that I was appointed to my least favourite role: navigator. I reached for the road atlas on the back seat and hunted for the right page. The map was useless. Down the west of England it showed only one thin road that followed the route of the M6, but none of the major towns such as Liverpool and Manchester featured on the pages at all. I concluded that the map was simply out of date, charted before the Industrial Revolution. However, there were further problems with the information as presented on the pages in front of me. Since when had Andover and Axminster been relocated to Peterborough?

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How RG could practise law in Scotland from a base in England did not concern him, nor BM. When we visited them in their new London flat they seemed to be very pleased with their move south.

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A one-legged soldier wins Belle’s heart

I was living in a new house-share, overlooking Greenwich Park. Every time I came home, yet another long-haired cat had moved in. Where were they all coming from? One of my new flatmates was a handsome one-legged soldier, who had made an Oscar-winning documentary about his regiment. What a heart-throb! Everytime he walked into the room my knees buckled. Embarrassingly, after naming one of the cats ‘Clint’, I realised that this was the soldier’s name too. My crush was revealed.

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Alex McLeish relishes driving role while Rousse prepares for her test

I felt very honoured that Birmingham City manager Alex McLeish was my driver. From my position on the back seat I leant forward to chat to my former student JM. He was excited about the trip because he had plans to visit MB, now living in a village at the far north of the Isle of Lewis. I tried to fathom out how JM could possibly know MB. The former graduated in the early 2000s from one university, the latter much earlier (1993?) from another institution. Were all my former charges ganging up together?

Lewis had changed in the time that I had been away. Most striking was how the beaches had been transformed into bright yellow sandpit playgrounds packed with tourists. I had hoped to show off the remote beauty of the Outer Hebrides to my friend NY, but this was now impossible.

A date was organised for my driving test: next Thursday. Everyone thought I was mad to agree to be examined so soon. They didn’t realise that although I rarely took the wheel, I had held a licence for 20 years, so I’d be absolutely fine.

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Vernon Kay, Tess Daly and a mouse (Belle)

On a beautiful sunny afternoon, I went to a tower block on the Pepys Estate to visit Vernon Kay. He surprised me by giving me quite a passionate kiss and I had no idea we knew each other like that. I felt desperately guilty and a little bit cross with Vernon when Tess came home. Vernon gave Tess a present – a tin tray – and she was thrilled. As the evening drew on, more of my friends turned up and Tess and Vernon started cooking and opened up their pop-up restaurant.

I ate everything until I uncovered a whole mouse. Astonished, I carried my plate into the kitchen. I said I hadn’t told anyone about the mouse, but had decided to go home to be ill. I wasn’t going back there again in a hurry!

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Extortionate eatery and exhibitor costs (Rousse)

While JW explained the set-up of the book display and encouraged us to invite potential customers to her sale the next day, I set to work grilling sausages and bacon for the hungry EdCM friends eagerly awaiting breakfast in our kitchen. I would have liked to have invited school librarians to JW’s event, but its timing between Christmas and New Year was not ideal. DT couldn’t make it to the flat for sausages and bacon so JW and I joined her later in a café on Leith Street for (our) breakfast number 2. JW and DT ordered fruit salad. They were each presented with three tiny scraps: a section of tangerine, a single grape and a slice of apple. My bowl of muesli was more substantial, but so was the price: £9.98! All I could think of were the uneaten sausages back at the flat.

As I walked across the hall at Olympia to the main conference I spotted a familiar group. All eight people were the same person, my fellow programme committee member GS. It was not until I reached her/them that I discovered my mistake. There was only one GS, and she was accompanied by seven members of an Indian/Japanese delegation. I returned to my spot at the exhibition to set out my wares. The exhibitor costs were so high this year that everyone had made prior arrangements to share stands. My partner was Chris, a representative of a professional body special interest group. Our tiny display table was only just a little bigger than an economy airline tray. This would be a tight squeeze. Even so, I insisted that my red lava lamp took a prominent position on the table.

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Assessment extensions and the draw of the Ring of Brodgar (Rousse)

I was so terribly ill that I couldn’t possibly take the Knowledge Management exam. My tutor, Professor BC, was extremely sympathetic (and – most bizarrely – looked super-cool dressed in distressed denim jeans). He granted permission for me to take the resit paper as a first diet in July. Added to this, he suggested a summer extension for my Honours project. This came as a great relief since I was yet to type up a single word of my dissertation.

We held the meeting in the open on the Isle of Lewis. A row broke out over the text of the leaflet. It became obvious that there were actually two versions in circulation, and it was the section on public library provision in Northern Ireland sourced by LH that was incorrect. In the break I introduced my sister S to Belle, who looked fabulously slim in a pink floaty dress. Decked out head-to-toe in the brown of the THS school uniform, we looked very drab standing next to her. Belle and I tried to persuade S to sit with us to eat our sandwiches, but she insisted on taking the optional lunch-time tour to the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney.

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Mark Kermode, spy school, beetroot salad (Belle)

The kids at the spy school won the MI5 raffle and a fraud was suspected. Inspectors were sent along and an investigation launched. I was watching all this unravel from a whole food stall across the street. The beetroot salad looked tasty. The good looking spy-kids were comparing their noses using a protractor and they all had the same, perfect, angle. I’d never get the job.

Mark Kermode picked me up in his bottle green Morris Minor Traveller. It was much more spacious inside than it should have been. We set off to the airport, although we were actually planning to travel via the EuroTunnel. I smiled indulgently while he made his speech. I could just sit back and relax and let him get on with it.

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From Molière to Indiana Jones: the dramas of Rousse continue

Illness had struck and I was forced to relinquish my role in the production of Molière. Two understudies – my work colleague KT and friend SJ – kindly agreed to take the stage in my place. I worried that their French would not be up to the required standard, but there was no other option.

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My teenage cousin TA and I entered the team challenge. There were three stages: (1) race across the beach; (2) swim to the cliff-face; (3) climb to the top of the cliff. We managed the first stage without any trouble. However, swimming in rough water 30 feet deep proved very difficult and TA soon drifted out of sight. If it wasn’t for the furled umbrella that provided a clue to her whereabouts, and later served as a float, I would never have managed the rescue. Behind the cliff-face we were very excited to discover Indiana Jones and some companions. Together we negotiated a dusty, ramshackle, spiral staircase. What a disappointment that it led to a boring old NCP car park.

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Just who is Daniel Wesserstrom? (Belle)

I watched the development of a young artist, who performed in a beautiful rotunda shaped room at Goldsmiths College. His art was in the performance/improvisation style, yet there was no doubt in my mind that he would be as big as Banksy soon. His show worked up to the unscripted exclamation ‘And no-one is the enemy of Daniel Wesserstrom’.

I was now of an age to be a mentor to young artists, but would never be a successful one in my own right. I was even slightly jealous of the seven year old red-headed girl spinning around in the room for the sheer joy of it. As I watched, she became a photo in the prospectus with the caption ‘a young student enjoys her fortnightly class’.

Joining the young artist after the performance, we agreed that we would now have to write an essay to prove that, indeed, Daniel Wesserstrom was universally loved. I wasn’t sure I even knew who Daniel Wesserstrom was but wasn’t about to admit it.

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