Starting at the Ground Floor

It's been a few days, Dear Readers, since I have had a feeling that things are not as they were. Things Are Up.

I do not know how to describe this. Every time I go back to my room - the Treasurer's Room here in the Great House - it is all the same. The same old collection of train timetables. The same seven anoraks, in slightly different shades of blue. The same calculating machine.

The same railway set - I am recreating the Varsity line as it was when Husborne Crawley Station still existed! Can you imagine? Although I have to confess this rather restricts my ability to use a varied selection of rolling stock - or, indeed, to have the traditional circles of track, or many points. A 1:100 scale representation of an eighty-mile-long, straight track is most notable for needing a mile-long, four inches wide, piece of chipboard, and so I have had to economise and show some creativity - missing out many of the smaller villages, and bending the track round so that Oxford and Cambridge are, in my model, a mere three feet apart, separated by the door that leads from my study to the bedroom. To get into the room from the corridor, you have to bend down and crawl under Isham.

I have tried to build some nice local detail into the Oxford and Cambridge ends of the track, by making models of some of the colleges and university churches. But Brasenose keeps getting smashed. The Archdruid  destroys it every time she comes round to discuss some monetary matters, on the grounds that I have minor detailing wrong. One one occasion she complained the sundial in Old Quad was the wrong colour, on another that the Deer Park shouldn't have actual deer in it.

But mentioning Eileen reminds me what is on my mind. I am sure that Eileen used to be my next-door-neighbour. Yet the other day I woke up to discover that my neighbour was Marston Moretaine. That was strange enough - and could be explained by the admittedly unlikely hypothesis that Eileen had changed rooms with Marston. But it is more that - and I know you will bear with my wild flight of fantasy here - I am sure that I used to be upstairs. I remember clearly walking up to the second floor to go to bed. And yet here I am on the ground floor. I could walk out of the French Windows that I am sure I did not used to have, and straight onto the main lawn. If it were not for Bletchley station being in the way, of course.  Last time I walked out of the window in the night, I plummeted eighteen feet.

It is all a great mystery. One could suspect that, one night, Eileen carried out a devious manoeuvre to transport me down two stories, hoping I would not notice or bother to mention it. Thank goodness she's not that kind of a woman.