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A cock-up that led to a fun day

After a poor beginning my yesterday tuned out to be both fruitful and enjoyable. As arranged, at 10.00am my pal Patrick pitched up to collect and take me to a business meeting an hour later.

We duly presented ourselves at the office reception and, after a wait until at least ten minutes beyond our scheduled meeting start, the party concerned emerged from another meeting. It was not over-running, she explained. In fact, our meeting was scheduled for 2.00pm, not 11.00am.

Working back and with considerable effort I reacquainted myself with the facts of the matter – I had made an error. This was an 11.00am meeting postponed from Wednesday and I had somehow got it into my head that yesterday’s version was also set for 11.00am when de facto it wasn’t.

As we walked away, with another two and a half hours to kill before returning for our 2.00pm meeting, I apologised profusely to Patrick who was surprisingly laid back about it all.

“Don’t worry …” he said, “When we see her this afternoon we’ll just explain that it was all down to dementia on our part”.

Sitting in the car park we discussed what to do. Suddenly he said “Hey, why don’t we nip down to [our old school], have a look around and see if we can find anyone we can recognise?”

Why not, indeed?

So that’s exactly what we did. I hadn’t visited for about five years and it seemed that things have been evolving quite fast since then. As we approached we rang one of the school staff and – quite by chance – he was delighted to hear from us and arranged to take us for lunch in the school canteen.

We got to chatting about the school was being run these days – much more like a proper business that when I was there as a boy (I’d departed aged 18, some forty-six years ago).

The staffer gave us a financial ‘heads up’: “Well, when your annual fees are £36,000 per annum, at a school this size your income is not far short of £50 million per annum …”

Phew! That sounded pretty impressive.

As was the brand new Real Tennis court that had just been built at the school and was being opened for play for the first time ever that very afternoon. We duly popped down to take a look.

See here for more information on the topic generally, courtesy of Wikipedia – REAL TENNIS

All too swiftly it was time to go back up the motorway in order to have the meeting for which we’d turned up that morning some three hours too early.

That lasted about an hour. When I got back home about 3.30pm – strangely exhausted – I was obliged to go and have an immediate hour-long nap on my bed before getting up again in order to watch some Friday evening mindless television.

 

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About J S Bird

A retired academic, Jeremy will contribute article on subjects that attract his interest. More Posts