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!’
Finally the crammed bus set off for Stornoway via Perth – but before we’d even reached the outskirts of town, the driver was lost. We ended up in the cul-de-sac of a new housing estate still under construction. This tiny close was not the main road north.
The driver turned the vehicle round and retraced his route back into town. He pulled up at the bus station, then announced that he was leaving us for a few minutes while he checked the way out of town with his colleagues. I asked if there was time for me to use the station toilets and he confirmed that there was.
The bus driver was much quicker taking directions than I was using the facilities. An altercation with a bunch of lads – who thought it amusing to threaten to attack me while I was on the toilet – partly accounted with my late return to the bus’ parking spot. By this time, however, the vehicle had left. I had no hope of reaching Stornoway with the others that day.
The teachers stood patiently in a long line, creating a human snake that encircled the school hall. I joined them, keen to discover whether or not the attraction out of sight at the head of the queue was worth the wait.
They were all desperate to share at least a couple of words with an ancient, wrinkled, white-haired old lady – their former headmistress. Long retired, she still held herself like the woman-in-charge, and was obviously greatly loved and missed by her former colleagues.
I climbed high up the red brick wall that separated our back garden from the narrow yard next door. When I reached the top, I complained to myself about the mess of smashed clay plant pots and broken plastic containers strewn across the small platform.
Then I saw the sycamore seedlings. ‘Not here as well!’ I complained.
Dreamaticus 