Hello,

I once had a friend called Teresa. She was a normal student of chemistry in a London college where I was a fellow student.

She went to Portsmouth for a second year and I followed later, we met up in the final year because she had failed in between.

We worked together and dated, but suddenly she vanished, we were engaged.

I understand she arranged a wedding without consulting me and I received my bridegroom invitation I wondered what it was. I'm brought up to a different tradition in the USSR and was already married to an Uzbek and later to a Norwegian girl, neither of which involved any ceremony before living together.

I did not go as the journey was too far and it really must have mucked things up but one tradition I do not understand is weddings, where I come from we just go to bed and agree and that's marriage no one else is concerned, like the stone age girl I married in her stone age family home in the forest in Siberia where they have been for 20,000 years unchanged.

After all if your girl is out collecting berries and she failed to return and when you look she is not there she must have been taken by a bear or attacked by the wolf pack. So you just find another and carry on if you can. Life is cheap in some places, like in a war zone, your talking to your friend and suddenly he is dead (now where did that bullet come from?) but we never really forget. Now they have all gone. Gone to dust.

Well she turned up again and told of some party where she took some sleeping pill and woke up pregnant, oooh!

Well I worked with her so I asked her where she lived and she said St James the psychiatric prison, one day she did not turn up so I wondered over and asked to see her. The lady nurse said she was naked, I said that was ok and went to her ward where she was standing naked outside her cell heavily pregnant, just staring into space blankly. Ohh I said what's wrong with her? Oh we cut off her frontal lobe. oh! I said I wonder why. I never did find out the reason.

I asked to take the remains of my naked friend away and so they said yes and I got her dressed and pulled her gently along to my car and took her to where she lived.

I had to stop on the way and it was very embarrassing, I just said "brain damage". I found her sister and she asked in a horrified way "why does my sister just sit naked on the bed and not do anything?"

I won't tell you the rest of the horrifying story but suffice to say she got married and wrote me a chatty latter about her marriage. So her brain healed up too.

She worked in her husbands shop and re-took her pharmacy degree and 30 years later I found she had gone to Cambridge University but now she has vanished. Probably dead as all of us do.

The horror story is that an alien doctor friend of mine took Teresa up to his flying saucer and put a brain prosthesis in, I could never tell Teresa that she was an android as indeed I am. (Me a robot? Aah!)

Chris.