Murray watched the Easter Special first, and saw that one of the teenage girls in the family had been played by a beautiful then fifteen year old girl whose name on the credits was Trudi Northumberland. She played the role with a sense of mischief and typical teenage teasing, sticking her tongue out at her character’s boyfriend in one scene. Murray could see that she was very pretty, but by watching the program only a few months away from turning 27 himself, he didn’t feel romantically inclined towards the teenage footage of Trudi.
Hoping that she was in the recent Reunion movie, he decided to binge watch that one straight after the Easter Special ended. Trudi Northumberland’s character didn’t have many scenes in the movie, which seemed to focus mainly on other characters. However, from what he could see of her, she looked stunningly beautiful as a 35 year old woman appearing in a movie made when Murray had been 25.
Keen to know more, he looked her up on the internet and found a brief biography. She had married in her late teens, divorced two years later, presumably a result of having married at an age too young to choose the right person to be a lifelong partner. This had been in the middle of the “Mountains Family” original decade long run. She had played the last four seasons as a young married woman in her character, but as a divorcee in real life. After the show had ended, she had moved from Ireland to America in an attempt to further her career with the larger television and movie market for relatively young stars. She had only revisited Ireland to feature in the Reunion movie, before returning to America once it was completed.
The rest of the series had not been released on video. So he had seen all he could of Trudi Northumberland.
Murray decided to get more exercise, now that he wasn’t riding his pushbike between villages to get to and from work each day. He had exhausted the appeal of the area immediately surrounding his own village. So he began taking walks in the forest above the meadow, and the forest behind Norman’s village. One day he was on one of those walks, when he caught up to a woman who seemed to have started out ahead of him on one of the walking tracks. She was five foot five, and being four inches taller than Murray, she would have had shorter legs. So it was natural that he would have caught up to her and run into her at one point.
He decided to overtake her and push on ahead, so that he could continue thinking up new strategies to find another job, without being distracted by the sound of someone else’s footsteps and the awareness that she was not far behind him. He had always made a point of using this approach when on the footpaths in the village, as his mind was not good at focussing on two things at once.