Dreaming Spires

Outside the King’s Arms, with glasses of refreshing lemony lemonade, Leonie asks if I’ve seen who I’m sitting next to. Now who? In Bath the other week I found myself squashed under an umbrella with Fabio Capello. I bet there’s not as many folk seeking his autograph these days as there was then. I look round as casually as I can and there at the other end of the bench is Alan Bennett. He is speaking in French about free wifi connection in Paris. Next thing you know, it’ll be Robert de Niro talking Italian in Lidl. Am I to be continually stalked by the rich and famous?
I study Alan Bennett. He seems thinner and younger and is not wearing the trademark blue shirt, green tie and v-necked pullover. This means little as Capello was not dressed in his M & S suit and was, therefore, in disguise. However, the bottoms of Alan’s trousers are grubby which leads me to believe that he is a masquerading doppelganger.

It’s not him I whisper. Leonie is undeterred. As Alan Bennett gets up to leave, she asks:
Are you Alan Bennett?
Who? asks Alan Bennett.
Alan Bennett replies Leonie
No says Alan Bennett, but thank-you for asking.

In the Botanical Gardens, we are hunting the Snark. As you do. Ten actors from the ‘renowned’ Shiplake College in Henley are doing a raucous turn with a Bandersnatch made from ripped-up bin bags. And very amusing it is too. We trail after them in the city’s heat and, after it’s all over, small out-of-control-screaming children chase the actors in and out of the bushes. We sit on the brown remains of the lawn and eat melted ice-cream in tubs. Mine is honey and stem-ginger flavoured. A straw would be useful at this point.

When I arrived earlier, it took me three attempts to work out how to get into the Westgate car-park. Round and round and round we go and where we end up nobody knows. Eventually, I pulled into the ground floor and found a space. Whilst I was busy texting Leonie to inform her of my location, she pulled into the space next to me.
Couldn’t have done that if we’d arranged to she notes.

Much later, after the grand day out and the evening’s open-air performance of Romeo and Juliet, we are walking back to the Westgate behind a man with a bottle. When he starts shouting at nobody and throwing things in the road, we both become wordlessly syncronised: slowing down and retrieving our car keys from the depths of our bags ready to stab him in the eye. This is a strategy I taught my daughters when we lived in Boscombe. Arriving safely at the Westgate, we discover that the cost of retrieving our cars is greater than the price of a return train ticket to Oxford would have been.

NB. There have been some offline comments relating to the previous blog. Name and shame I say.