I was relieved to learn that the messy holiday cottage in Lanarkshire was not, in fact, ours. My parents had bought it with my middle sister and her husband – and then filled it to the brim with junk.
I saw that there were at least two Le Creuset measuring spoon sets hanging from hooks in the kitchen. Nobody would mind if I took one, would they? The mini-pans were so cute, especially in volcanic and yellow.
I was reasonably comfortable cocooned in my high-tog duvet in the photocopying room. Sleeping in the office was not such a hardship, and it did make my working life a lot more efficient.
Provided that I could keep my sleeping arrangements secret from my colleagues, I would continue to bed down between the two photocopiers for the foreseeable future.
My over-enthusiasm with the tweezers meant that my right eyebrow had all but disappeared.
ECM placed a small grey suede pouch in my hand. I pulled open the drawstring and found inside beautiful carved bone petals and punched snowflakes, and dozens of items of jewellery crafted in silver, including rings, ear-rings, necklaces, brooches and bracelets.
‘I made them for my degree show’ ECM told me.
From the far side of my bedroom, I saw a black form bound across the patio to the flower bed in front of the window. A black Labrador was set to dig up my plants!
On closer inspection, however, I saw that the dog had followed two strangers. Who were these men, and what were they doing scrubbing about in the soil?
I rushed into the kitchen to grab my iphone to photograph the pair of them as evidence of trespass. Here was another surprise: the kitchen table had been stripped off all its tech – principally laptops and phones – and my handbag was missing. In their place were scattered Catan pieces.
It seemed that the burglars had already done over the house, and had moved on to hunting for buried treasure outside.
PMF worked in comms for an upmarket fish restaurant, so I was surprised to find him smartly dressed in an all-white waiter’s unform and serving seated customers one day when I visited him in the office. ‘They must be rather short-staffed’ I concluded.
It turned out that I was right. As well as PMF, the restaurant had taken on several of his relations as staff, as well as my own mother-in-law. It was even rumoured that my geriatric online friend GG was next in line to be approached with a job offer.
Set in the 1970s, the plot of the television play centred on strike action in a university.
‘Isn’t that a young Alan Rickman?’ I asked RJH, who was sitting next to me.
RJH agreed – and then we both realised that it must have been Rickman who played both Tony Webster (great!) and David Harris-Jones (super!) in The fall and rise of Reginald Perrin.
Suddenly the boat tipped.
TPR’s top of the range Mac laptop slipped out of the blue rucksack, then over the side of the open vessel, and plopped into the sea. Nothing could be done to save it.
I watched in dismay as my top of the range iPhone slid out of my jacket pocket and dropped to the ground, sped down the sheep-mown grass bank all the way to the cliff end, slipped over the edge, and sunk to the bottom of the sea bed.
Not long afterwards I was trapped up a high stone ledge with no way of moving left, right, up or down without the aid of a helicopter.
This holiday was turning out to be a complete failure.
Dreamaticus 