I’m quite sure that somewhere around the A66 turn-off to Newton Rigg I slipped through a wormhole into an parallel universe …  where all the conference attendees wore name badges with more than one name on them and there were carthorses in the car park.

This is what happens when the Romantic Novelists’ Association holds its annual conference at an agricultural college.

Betty Entwistle (see Note 1 below) writes as both Lucinda le Vaillant (see Note 2 below) and Amelia Flowerfairy (see Note 3 below), so she has all three names on her badge and looks like she could soundly box you on the ears if she gets any more of your lip young woman …

The unlikeliest person told me a filthy joke about the Jolly Green Giant and someone else gave me a handy hint on how to break into expensive cars … (Kate Lace, you have been named and shamed!).

Meanwhile, out in the almost-but-not-quite real world of the car park, the life of the agricultural college goes on, and two students are taking Dobbin out to pasture.

Had a bit of an agricultural moment myself this morning … I heard some basic Anglo-Saxon issuing forth from the back garden, and when I stuck my head out of the window, saw a cow in the garden, hotly pursued by a farmhand waving his arms and bellowing “F*cking ‘ell lass … get back in’t f*cking field!”

Sometimes, just sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to have a normal life.

Note 1:  I made this name up.
Note 2:  And this one.
Note 3:  And this one.

.

PS:  I had an absolutely WONDERFUL time at Penrith with the RNA … they’re a really friendly bunch of people who made me very welcome and looked after me like royalty (which made a nice change from the way I’m treated around here … pearls before swine it is most of the time … )  – but my naughty gene just gallops out of control sometimes.

PPS:  No-one threw things, so I think I did okay …