I had my suspicions that TPR’s recent boat trip provided a perfect a cover for conducting an affair. He set out to prove that I was wrong by showing me his living quarters below deck.
He couldn’t get up to much in a shared room on a top bunk bed under a sky blue single duvet – or could he?
At the end of the meal, I found an appropriate moment to stand up to deliver my hilarious news to the entire table.
Awful AD had acquired a girlfriend! What is more, when he introduced me to Wendy, I realised that I already knew her. She had always come across as to me a lovely, normal person, yet it really did seem that she had fallen for AD.
But how long would it take for her to discover that AD was a narcissistic psychopath, we all wondered?
Not as long as it took for me to see that AD was still in the room and had just heard every word of my announcement.
I was not pleased when the driver switched seats with SPL and allowed her to drive along the narrow roads of rural Aberdeenshire. Although she held a driver’s licence, SPL rarely took the wheel of a car, and it showed. She broke the speed limit, overtook on bends, and almost flattened a cyclist. I cowered in the back seat, praying that we would reach our destination with both vehicle and passengers intact.
On arrival at the chapel I found LM weeping in the aisles. Nobody was taking seriously her carefully crafted church treasure hunt. I feared that the 25 clues were probably too many and too difficult. Furthermore, to remove each clue from view as soon as the first team had solved it, seemed a rather odd strategy – especially if you wished to hold the players’ interest in the competition.
I let the precious loose-leaf atlas of Middle Earth drop from my hands at just the wrong moment. The fragile leather binder that held Tolkein’s hand-drawn maps fell to the floor of the railway carriage. It slid along the parquet and slipped through a hole onto the track.
TPR was furious that I had not taken better care of this relic of international lireary significance. At great personal danger, he disembarked at the next station to walk along the tracks to try and retrieve it.
I was flattered when the young man offered me change so that I would have the correct bus fare.
‘It’s OK’, I said, thanking him, ‘I no longer need bus fare now that I qualify for an old person’s bus pass’.
‘In that case’, he answered, ‘Please could you buy me a pound’s worth of ecstasy with the cash?’
This was going to look very fishy in court, especially since a witness overheard my instructions to TPR:
‘He was begging. You thought he was going to attack you, so you struck first. It’s not your fault that his head came clean off and he bled to death in the gutter – nor that it took us 10 minutes to call an ambulance’.
SY and I were more adventurous than the others during our holiday. While NY, AH, CS and TPR stayed indoors at the cottage, SY and I drove all the way along the coast and then inland as far as Exeter.
Here we discovered a pub that offered the attraction of a ‘drop’. The idea was that you threw yourself down a small opening down a 100 foot shaft, for fun. There was supposedly no chance of ever injuring yourself because there was a mattress at the very bottom ready to catch your landing.
SY was braver than me and (literally) jumped at the chance of such a thrill. I resisted the temptation, mainly because the launch pad, shaft, and mattress were not properly lined up. I was not prepared to risk serious injury for a few seconds of exhilaration.
Later TPR and AH drove up to Exeter to find us and take us back to the cottage. (I could no longer drive because I had been drinking.) They were both rather annoyed with us for breaking up the party. As ‘punishment’, the other four had set up a consulting firm, but excluded us from it. I couldn’t care less. ‘ECADOC’ was such a silly name for their new company.
The house and garden were a complete mess:
I met the young red-haired doctor around the time of TPR’s final illness. It was convenient (to me) that he had lost his wife to cancer a year earlier.
Amongst our courtship activities we marked (appalling) Masters dissertations, walked through the lounge of a care home where the residents were watching a ballet on television at full volume, witnessed a bull tumble off a cliff into the sea and drown, and mistook donkeys on the hillside for deer.
I eventually found the emergency phone number on the LNER web site.
‘Please come quickly!’ I urged. ‘The passenger seated behind me in Coach E on the 6pm Glasgow to London service is trying to set fire to herself!’
Dreamaticus 