Surprise bedfellows

I shared this story with a couple of friends last weekend. They were in stitches over it, so I thought perhaps you’d enjoy reading it too.

A long, long time ago … last century in fact, I went to visit my brother Steve in Scotland for Hogmanay. He had old college friends living on one of the northern islands of Scotland, so we hired a car and took a day to drive up there, and took an extremely choppy ferry across to the island with just two other cars.

Steve’s friends lived in a gorgeous, rambling old farmhouse by the sea. On a December afternoon the sky was iron-grey and blustery, and it was very cold.

I’d heard that Scottish islanders drank quite a bit, but I wasn’t prepared for the reality! We had cocktails before dinner. We had wine with dinner. We had even more cocktails after dinner and into the evening with much merriment. I wasn’t used to it at all, and most of the evening remains a blur.

Much later, off went Steve’s friends to bed, and I was to sleep in the downstairs guest bedroom while Steve had to make do with the sofa in the living room. I discovered a water bed in the guest room, and in my current inebriated state, there’s no way I could stomach the gentle lapping of the water! Steve was fine with it, so he took the guest room, and I headed for the sofa in the living room.

There was a glorious open fire burning, but the sofa was way back against a wall where the heat from the fire didn’t reach as well. I spotted three very large oval-shaped cushions on the floor, so I grabbed the pillow and blankets from the sofa and happily dragged the cushions to make a bed out of them in front of the fireplace. I snuggled down under the thick blankets and promptly fell asleep.

Early the next morning, I woke to find a Great Dane curled around my head, another stretched out beside me on the cushions, and a third curled around my feet. Apparently I’d taken those poor dogs’ beds!

And how generous they were to share them with me. 😊

(Not one of the actual dogs, but very similar!)