The secret sex lives of skeletons

Naomi was telling me about her days at University.  In Biology class, Naomi led a cabal of michief-makers who would routinely muck around with the full size human anatomical model skeletons, positioning them into rude or silly poses.  It was a waiting game to see how long it would take the lecturer to notice, possibly when they became very suspicious of all the sniggering.  As the term progressed, the skeleton poses would get more and more outlandish (props such as cigars, wigs, or vegetables might be introduced), and the sniggering would get louder and longer. The lecturers, of course, have over the long years learned to expect a certain amount of ribbing.  Education is a wonderful thing.

The September nights are getting much darker much earlier as we fade inevitably from summer to autumn, and high in the night sky a bright full moon was peeking through a swirling sea of thick grey cloud.

We talked about close-up magic, the economics and practicalities of running a guest house, my seething, envious rage at people more successful than me (i.e. everyone), the chlorine content of swimming pools, and neuro linguistic programming techniques.

At one point, a couple of hours into our writing session, something rather dramatic occurred.  The Llandoger Trow, the pub in which meet to write, has upstairs guestrooms.  A tall, lean young man in an expensive sports jacket, looking a bit like a maverick detective from a long-forgotten 90s BBC detective series about endemic police corruption, suddenly emerged from the door to the guestrooms, barged his way past the drinkers at the bar, and sprinted out of the pub. We watched him leg it to a silver hatchback mazda with improved G-vectoring control system (I'm guessing), pause, then sprint off in the opposite direction down King Street where he vanished into the night.  I wondered if he was a spook.

The conversation moved naturally onto ghosts.  The Llandoger Trow is supposedly haunted by a whole team of ghosts, though I've never seen any and I've been going there for years.

Watch ghost hunters do ghost hunting things in the llandoger Trow

There was this one time when I was scared out of my wits when the lovely Swedish (or German) bargirl told me how much cash I had to hand over for a round of drinks.  Naomi told me some genuinely creepy tales of hauntings close to home, and we fired up YouTube on my laptop to watch the opening title sequence to Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected.

We didn't get through as much of the script as usual - hardly a surprise with all that excitement, drama and discussion.  But we're working on the fiddly inbetween middle bits of the play, which are always a bit difficult to navigate.  We're doing very well overall, though, and we generated lots of ideas for next week's writing session. Though we're thinking of bringing in a ghost writer.