Homeless, I lived in my car.
When I was fortunate to find an empty flat, I would sneak in there to use the shower and prepare for job interviews.
One day a young woman asked about my prospects of employment. ‘Did you ever take any exams?’ she asked, assuming that I had led a life deprived of opportunity. I started my response by listing my 11 O levels.
On the spot I volunteered to give the address at the end of the University reunion dinner. What better subject than the sexual exploits of two girls from my hall of residence, now respectable grown women, and seated before me in the audience with their long-term partners?
First there was Susan, and what a slag was she! Indeed, her exploits were so varied it was difficult to present a coherent narrative of her undergraduate bedtime adventures. For JL it was much easier: she had a boyfriend at home and one on campus, and neither knew of the other’s existence.
By the end of my speech Susan was in tears. Her friends shouted ‘Shame!” in my face for ruining her evening.
I approached JL afterwards to check her reaction to my revelations. She did not seem to be bothered at all. Instead, she and her husband told me how they made their millions from the first mass market non-alcoholic ‘wine’ of their invention, and their recent purchase of the island of Lorne of the west coast of Scotland.
It took ages to find Hugh Grant (my husband) afterwards in the sprawling Sheraton Hotel. No longer A list, he had been allocated a poky room that looked out onto the car park at the back of the building. He had hoped that I would join him for supper, but I was so late returning from the reunion that he had resorted to a single person’s room service supper of stringy beef.
I wanted to give my husband my full attention that evening, but LF phoned in a panic about a lump in her upper arm that was ‘definitely not a muscle’. So almost as soon as I had reached Hugh, I headed off again to comfort my friend.
Our large group left the nightclub and wandered down the strange high street, only to see an old-school Routemaster bus coming over the hill. We ran excitedly to board our night-bus.
I knew we needed to change to another bus, but when I turned around to ask everyone for further details, I was the only person on board. It was that strange time of day. Some people were coming home from a night out, some were starting a new day. But none of them could tell me where to catch the bus. Eventually, I walked into an old building to ask the concierge, only to find her deep in conversation Mark Kermode. My heart leapt with excitement. Too shy to even say hello, I hid in the shadows until he left, pulling his suitcase behind him.
Eventually, I found Parson’s Green tube station, which was built into a mountain, and I was on my way home.
Although we shared the same living space, our marriage was over, and TPR couldn’t care less if I went home with a strange man after the dance.
My ‘man’ wasn’t that strange, although it had to be said that his dancing style was rather ‘jumpy’. Neal was one of my former students, and I happily took his hand at the end of the evening for the walk back to his place (or so I thought).
It was quite trek up the up to the loch, and I was grateful for my hill training on Edinburgh’s Dublin Street. However, things turned nasty when we came face to face with a fat green and red devil, who chased us all the way back down to the town again in the dark.
As well as the occasional whale, it was now possible to watch polar bear families resident on mini icebergs, just off the East Lothian coast (Scotland).
TPR and I brought a live souvenir home from our holiday: a pet fox.
It was so tame that it would roll on to its back to invite us to tickle his tummy, just like a wee ginger dog.
I waited with a couple who had travelled all the way from the most southerly tip of Ireland to join the wildlife photography course. It was good to have their company, but where was our coach?
When we heard that there would be a further delay to the transport, we left our belongings at the bus stop and wandered up the hills for a short walk. Within minutes I was panicking about my expensive camera at the side of the road.
‘Everyone is so wealthy here that nobody will steal it’, said the woman. ‘It will be fine’.
‘But what if I see something that I would like to photograph?’ I protested.
At that point I caught in my peripheral vision the brush of a long heavy tail in the undergrowth at the side of the road. A trio of otters was out to play! They were so close that I was able to whip out my iPhone and take the most astonishing shots of otters in the wild.
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.
