A woman struck up a conversation with me as I tried to fix a water bottle to my bike. I asked her if she lived in the nearby crescent. ‘If only’, she replied ‘I would love to be able to afford to live there. What about you?’
I couldn’t bring myself to admit that we had once owned a flat a few doors away, then stupidly sold up to move elsewhere.
The renovations of the main building on the Corstorphine campus of Queen Margaret College rendered it almost unrecognisable. Gone, for example, was the old refectory, replaced with small takeaway outlets scattered around the campus.
I wondered what had become of the second set of steps down the main hallway when I heard from behind the words ‘Bitch, bitch, bitch’. I knew that voice, and it didn’t belong here. For too long I had tolerated this idiot’s insults. This had to end.
I told him to sit down and demanded he stop this childish behaviour when – out of the blue – my undergraduate colleagues SH and DS showed up. I was impressed that they had tracked me down, but concerned that they had interrupted me mid-speech. I took them aside to explain the extent to which I loathed this man, and the importance of his removal from my life – forever.
They were all there – family members dead and alive at my maternal grandmother’s house:
We all enjoyed a jolly meal of leftover turkey and ham. Goodness how long this food had lingered in the pantry though – Christmas was months ago.
Sir Paul McCartney was confused. ‘I don’t recognise the pale yellow album cover’, he said, ‘But since we’re all photographed on the front and I’m definitely the lead singer on that track, I suppose that this must be a Beatles record?’
‘OK, I’ll put that down as our answer’, I replied, regretting that I had ever invited McCartney to join my pub quiz team.
LM and her husband C won £5 million on the UK lottery. However, there was no way that anyone you would ever have known this. They lived very modestly in their small house, and continued to go to work as if nothing had happened.
I ran down the stairs from the top bedroom to make C a cup of tea and spotted two dark figures looming outside the glass front door. When I opened the door two police officers, drenched from the rain, angrily announced “At last” and burst into the house.
Officer One told me they were there because of a tip-off from C’s girlfriend. This is how I discovered C was cheating on me. More and more people kept arriving, most of them insinuating I had invited them or that they actually lived in my house. I spent time making endless pots of tea, only to discover that Officer Two had broken the milk jug. Fuming, I looked out of the front window and spotted my old friend Oo, who should have been in South America. “Come in, join the party”, I said loudly, only to whisper in her ear “The rozzers are here”.
By now the house was full. I was placed at the head of a long, long table. The man sitting at the other end started to make a speech but the table was so long, I couldn’t hear a word – although I knew what he was saying was really important. I had to shout at two posh lawyers who were chatting loudly near me to “Shut the heck up” and they sniggered.
Eventually, a senior officer arrived and I attempted to complain to her about the heartache of the broken milk jug and the revelation that my boyfriend had a girlfriend. She agreed with me and started to tell me about her divorce.
My entire immediate family crowded into the garden shed for my brother-in-law to pass judgement on the tiny defect in the wood above the door frame.
‘Bad news, I’m afraid’, he said. ‘This is frost damage. Your shed is falling apart’.
I’d never met such a friendly cow before. She was a brown and white Jersey with enormous long-lashed eyes, sporting the softest strokeable cattle coat.
Her willingness to be petted was quite extraordinary – as was the her third eye, nested in her neck.
I needed to reach Liverpool by 13:15 for a meeting. At 12:30 I jumped on the first train that I saw at Edinburgh’s Waverley Station, assuming that it was a London service that called at Leeds.
I was right in respect of my first assumption. However, the first stop for this service was much further south in a rural station that offered no connecting services. When I should have been with everyone else in Liverpool, I was stuck in the middle of nowhere.
When I eventually found my way back to Edinburgh, I witnessed MB pull a suicidal Chinese student out of the path of a speeding train.
We’d driven several long uncomfortable miles to the huge (but somewhat crowded) beach, so it was a relief to finally end our journey.
However, my mother-in-law was not happy. There appeared to be something wrong with her towel. It took some time to understand that she was really trying to communicate that the trip had taken its toll.
Meanwhile I was annoyed that my father-in-law chose curry for dinner that evening. This came after curry for breakfast and curry for lunch.
Dreamaticus 