A famous dramatist was staying at the guest house on the Isle of Lewis and – it was rumoured – he was about to cast the lead role for his latest play: a princess with long golden hair.
Around my neck I strung the pearl necklace that I retrieved from the back of the sofa, then a ran a comb through my tresses, and waited for the call.
Several of my former colleagues flocked to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to attend AT’s pre-death giveaway. The ceremony was rather like the reading of a will, except that AT was still alive and you took away your booty on the spot.
I travelled there in a red foot-powered child’s toy car. Meanwhile JH gave KB, her husband IB, and their daughter HB, a lift in BT’s old Lomax. I was proud that I could keep up with them on the narrow coastal road.
Along the way I met a woman who was taking a two centre holiday in Scotland and the north of England. She had just arrived at Holy Island after a week in Dumfries and Galloway. I told her all about our fun holiday there a couple of years ago, with fond memories of castles and bird watching. I also issued advice on a career in publishing for the benefit of her son.
EH offered me a lift home from work: on her fold-up four-seater bicycle.
She really was a beautiful baby, with a beaming smile and a few tufts of blond hair. I thought, however, that the cat whiskers were rather out of place on her sweet face – until someone explained to me that her father was a gorilla.
Whatever her parentage, I agreed to babysit her on a boat for a couple of hours. This would be no trouble at all, I claimed.
I was wrong. The baby mysteriously turned into a long blue balloon, then a gust of wind took her from my arms and swept her out to sea. How would explain this to her loving parents?
Three tigers lived in the posh dress shop on Easter Road. Despite the glamorous proprietor’s assurances that the tigress and her two cubs were ‘perfectly harmless’, there was no chance that I would ever tempted to enter and browse the clothes rails while they were in residence.
Back in Birmingham again, TPR, my father, and my little sister were picking through the contents that we had left three decades earlier in our old house in Northfield. Much of it was junk. This included a narrow skateboard with a moulded plastic single foot insert – an invention that (unsurprisingly) never gained widespread popularity.
While my sister identified a crammed bookcase that took her fancy, I gathered up all the blue cushions. Then I discovered a beautiful three quarter size mahogany secrétaire hidden behind a very ordinary set of shelves.
‘It’s OK. I don’t want a davenport for Christmas after all’ I called to TPR, who was laying paving slabs in the back garden. I told him that the desk met all my requirements. Now we just needed to book a van to to transport it home with all the items that we had salvaged from our old house.
Just days before his great revelation, TPR and I had been smugly working our way through albums of old photographs, congratulating ourselves on our long and happy marriage. Now we had returned to our old house in Birmingham (the rooms bigger than we remembered) to meet his family, and for him to confess that he was leaving me.
While I sorted out old bits of string into a neat skein, he was preparing the wording of his announcement. His new girlfriend (blonde, in her 30s) and her three kids were also milling around. ‘That woman might take my husband’, I thought but ‘No way on this earth will I allow her to force me out of my Edinburgh flat’.
Since the BBC opened up its building to everyone it had the feel of a public library on a busy Saturday afternoon. Some offices were off-limits but – just as my mother and I had done – you could plonk yourself just about anywhere to watch the workings of the huge public sector broadcast corporation.
My mother embarrassed me somewhat in make-up when Melanie Sykes (very overweight) and Kylie Minogue sat down next us. ‘Hi Kyle!’ she greeted the Australian pop star. ‘She could have at least used her correct name’, I muttered under my breath.
We headed back to Edinburgh by taxi with GB. This was a huge mistake. The taxi driver was a violent criminal out to get my poor octogenarian mother. He made his move just as we crossed the city bypass, lifting her into the footwell at the front of the vehicle. His swift action was like a hawk reaching for its prey.
Dreamaticus 