Jo

When we got to Cumnock after the tour of the Knockroon estate, none of us really knew what to do with ourselves.  We gathered on some steps and tried to settle upon the most judicious course of action.  Naz was looking for a pub, while Shreya and someone else may or may not have gone into a clothes shop.  Most of us decided that the local Asda was the safest and most sensible option so we headed over in a great shoal of cultural diversity.  This place was curiously, intimidatingly sleepy.  I checked the day: Saturday afternoon.  Perhaps Scotland had different weekends.  Or the air raid siren had recently gone off by mistake.  The locals who were out were nonplussed by our presence, crossing the road not to be unfriendly, but rather to survey whether the scene was unusual enough to be put on Facebook.  A very well-represented cross section of planet earth had descended on Cumnock that afternoon, only to find that approximately 85% of its inhabitants were asleep.  

You joined us in Asda twenty or thirty minutes later and you told me of your trauma: you were sat on the steps to rest your back while everyone else was trying to formulate a plan.  Before you knew it, everyone you knew had gone and you were left on your own in a very strange place.  Then something happened that always tends to happen in a situation like this: the town drunk peeled himself out of some nearby woodwork and strolled over in a line reminiscent of the kind a four year-old would draw on an etch-a-sketch.  He might have wrongly assumed during his railing and wall-assisted approach that you had jumped at the chance at playing the role of damsel-in-distress in a two-person play that was written, directed and co-starred him, and was also wrong in thinking that you already knew all the lines.  So anyway, Fergus McWhatever walked over to you, all boozed up on fermented haggis or vodka and irn-bru or whatever it is they drink, and made heavily-accented, slurred remarks over the incongruity of your presence on those steps.  In an ideal world, it would have been at this point that you would have sent up a distress flare to all the men in the group and within ten seconds or less, a task force well-versed in the finer details of the Iranian embassy siege would have all abseiled down a particularly ugly concrete building close by and came to your rescue.  As it happened, most of us were buying apple juice, pancakes and other essential food items and would have been oblivious to your well-being until we were all assisting the police in combing nearby woodland the next morning.