When I was a teenager, I dreamt I would die this year…

(Image by Enrique Meseguer, via Pixabay)

I tested positive for Covid-19 on the morning of Christmas Day.

It is 1st January now, a new year and I’m still testing positive…ho hum.

I had a dream last night. I was in the front room of my house with an unknown woman, watching a feature film from the 1950s.

Through the window, I saw this man who looked like a 1940s/1950s ‘spiv’ coming to the front door.

I said to the woman I was with in the front room: “There’s a spiv coming to the door”.

She looked out the window but could not see him, so I went out of the living room into the hall, then into the front porch and he just pushed through the letter box some ordinary leaflets about something I was not interested in.

I went back to watching the feature film with the woman.

For some reason the TV set was now on the floor and the woman had become six inches high and had pink hair, as young children’s dolls do. She told me she wanted me to hold her hair as she coiffured it. That was the word she used. Coiffure.

“I want to coiffure it,” she said.

She moved a small, padded stool over to near the wall, but this entailed turning the television round. We could still see the screen, but the TV set itself had been turned round.

The woman sat so close to the wall, though, that I couldn’t both hold her hair while she coiffured it AND continue to watch the television. Also, she was six inches tall, which complicated things. So I got another small, padded stool and moved it to the middle of the room and told her: “I won’t be able to do your hair so close to the other wall.”

So I turned the TV set round again.

I had to lift it up then put it down in its new position.

It was sitting in a low, one-inch-high wooden frame.

At least, that was what I intended to do but, when I was about to start, some more people arrived at the front door.

They were trying to tell me my back garden was in a mess and that I should buy a top layer of grass from them.

“Turf. That’s the word,” one of them said to me.

“Life is turf,” I told him. That is what I told him.

There were about three of them. I knew they were con artists and told them: “I like my back garden to be in a mess.”

The first man started lifting up the turf with his foot. One of the other men was holding some 6ft high poles. There were about six of them. The poles. Six round poles, each one the girth of a small man’s waist.

I thought I would try to confuse the men at the door.

“I don’t need any more poles,” I said. “I already have some. I was thinking of painting them. One can be red, white and blue for Britain. One can be red, white and blue for France. And I can probably get the German flag in there somewhere. I think if I paint one black, it would be very effective.”

I said this because I thought it would confuse the hell out of the man holding the six tall poles. And the others.

Then the woman I had been in the front room with came out to see what was going on. She was her proper height again.

It was now dusk or just after dusk. It was quite dark, so the gardening people went away, duly confused. 

But now there was a man at the bottom of the front garden who was allowing people to come in and offer their services to all the people who owned local houses.

I thought: This is very strange.

He was supposed to supervise them, but he was just letting anyone in who wanted to take a photograph.

Well, nothing wrong with that, I thought.

And then I woke up.

That was last night.

That is true.

Well, OK, that is not true. 

That was a dream I had on the 30th August last year. But I thought I would share it now. I muttered it into my iPhone, half awake, just after it happened.

And the heading of this blog is not true. When I was a teenager I did not dream I would die this year.

I worked it out logically when I was awake.

Back then, in the mists of the time when I was younger, I looked at the average life expectancy for an ordinary person. And I worked out that this would be the year I would die. I figured, all things being equal, I would die sometime in the 2020s and, if I were dead-on average, then 2022 would be the year I died.

We shall see.

Well, obviously, maybe I won’t. See.

But – hey! – life is but a dream…

(Image by Reto Scheiwiller via Pixabay)

An impossible ball and a granny flat plus Steve Coogan as Reggie Kray

A man was asleep in a train in a London tube

Ah! The perils of long chats with people which I then have to transcribe before I can write a blog. Especially if I have to go out earlier than I thought today.

So I have to think of a shorter blog…

A few nights ago, in the middle of the night, asleep in bed, I heard a strange sound in the ceiling.

The sound of a solid ball running on wood across the floor of the loft above my head. It rolled from the front of my bedroom ceiling towards the back.

My loft does not have a flat floor. It has beams with gaps between. It is impossible for a hard, spherical object to roll across the floor because there is no floor. And the beams and gaps between have got fluffy soft fibrous insulation over six inches thick on top of them. Nothing can roll anywhere. And the sound I heard cannot have been something rolling across the tiles of my roof from front to back, because it would have had to roll uphill and against the overlapping of the tiles.

One spherical object seen at one relative point in some time

It was a real sound I heard. Some spherical object rolling on wood.

But it must have been a dream.

I normally do not remember my dreams at all, which is a pity.

But I have been remembering them a tiny bit more recently.

Last night, this might have been a result of me waking up because my already damaged left shoulder is still sore from tripping over a kerb in darkness during Arthur Smith’s midnight tour of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh in August and falling awkwardly on the cobbles.

Or because I keep getting cramp in my legs at night.

Or because the sole of my right foot is in pain.

Or because last night I only had five hours sleep.

Two men were at the May Fair Hotel yesterday

In any case, I woke up this morning thinking I must remember to blog about the two comedians who are standing for political elections – one in Britain and one abroad. Then I remembered I had been dreaming. Then I thought maybe I was only dreaming I was dreaming and in fact it was true. Then I realised it actually really was a dream but wondered why I had dreamt of that. Then I remembered comedian Eddie Izzard has talked about running for Mayor of London and that the late Malcolm Hardee had run for Parliament 1978.

Malcolm’s manifesto commitments included a cable car for pensioners to the top of Greenwich Hill… Bringing proper fog back to London for old times’ sake… Re-launching the Cutty Sark… And concreting-over the River Thames so people could travel about more easily.

He got more votes than the Communist Party and the National Front.

Since then, a cable car has been built across the Thames.

So it can only be a matter of time before the concrete mixers arrive.

On the train home late last night, I remember two people were talking.

Micky (left) with Reggie Kray and Reggie’s wife Frances

They were talking about performing as a pantomime horse over the Christmas period and arguing over whether it was better to be the front half or the rear end.

Yesterday, I also had tea with Micky Fawcett, a former associate of gangsters The Kray Twins, at the May Fair Hotel. Micky said he thought Steve Coogan would make a very good Reggie Kray in a movie.

Over the Christmas period, Italian comedian Luca Cupani told me he had been looking for a new flat. He had seen one advertised but had decided not to make contact. I thought he should. The ad read:

AFFORDABLE ACCOMMODATION CLAPHAM COMMON
CLAPHAM, WEST LONDON

A flat was offered for rental in London with no internet access

Shared bedroom small flat with limited space for a flatmate M/F.

NO TV, landline, internet, just radios. Has suited ambitious but impecunious students/workers prepared to share partitioned bedroom with a granny.

Nearest tube Clapham Common / bus 35/37/137/345

Everything above was real.

I think.

Who can tell?

Not me.

Life is but a dream of Nazis, Russians, the Ukraine and my father’s fatal cancer

A map of the Rhineland in 1905 looks to me rather oddly like part of a human brain – but, then, I am only very barely awake…

On the rare occasion when I remember a dream, I feel obliged to write about it.

This morning’s blog had been going to be about my father’s cancer in 2001, but I woke up at 6.22am and remembered I had been dreaming about some presumably purely fictional Rhine mine line deaths in the Second World War. The rhyming phrase Rhine mine line was what kept swirling round in my mind. It was something about large numbers of people being taken or thrown down a mine in the Rhineland by the Nazis and a railway line that led to the mine.

Just a dream.

I guess it had something to do with me half-seeing an anti-Ukrainian documentary last night on the RT (formerly Russia Today) TV channel. The purpose of the documentary was to link in viewers’ minds the wartime Nazis and western Ukraine which, admittedly, did have a fair number of Nazi sympathisers. Is it my imagination or is Russian propaganda getting more sophisticated?

The whole Russia-Ukraine thing is so complicated and swirling dreamlike with facts intertwined with the past and political spin that it is rather unsettling because it echoes the build-up to the Second World War.

There are lots of Russian-origined people in Eastern Ukraine. When I was in Kiev in 2012 and 2013, there was talk of the slightly more than vague possibility of the country splitting in two even then.

There were lots of Germans in the Sudetenland in 1938.

The Crimea’s links to Russia and it being part of the Ukraine are complicated, For all the entirely justified Western words about how Russia’s invasion and take-over is beyond acceptability – and it is – the Crimea situation was/is very complicated.

When the Nazi army marched into The Rhineland in 1936 and took over the Sudetenland (which was part of Czechoslovakia) in 1938, there was some similar understanding in the West of the arguments the Nazis put forward for taking them over, just as there was when the Nazis took over Austria in the Anschluss in 1938.

Apparently Hitler had said things like “German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland” and “People of the same blood should be in the same Reich.”

Now the Russians are rattling on about ‘protecting their own people’ in eastern Ukraine and there is a clear threat they might invade especially as they claim the recent changeover in power in Ukraine was a ‘neo-Nazi coup’ – thus all the fact-based documentaries on RT and homeland Russian TV about Ukrainian Nazis in the Second World War.

It all swirls round like a dream muddling the past with the present. And I am writing this after waking up ungodly early at 6.22am.

If the Russians were to unacceptably invade and take over eastern Ukraine, there would be a lot of shouting by Western politicians but the Russian propaganda machine could spin the reasons.

Hitler in 1939 believed he could take over the rest of Czechoslovakia without starting a war; he was wrong. If Russia took over western Ukraine, political life would get complicated.

A Google Streetview image of Dreams somewhere in London

What all this has to do with my dream of fictional Rhine mine line deaths is another matter.

A couple of days ago, I wrote a blog about my father being in hospital in 2001. He died a couple of months later. Several people asked me what happened next. So I was going to write about that today, but I was sidelined by this Rhine mine line thing.

It was all thirteen years ago anyway and, at that remove, it all becomes a dream. I would not remember any details if I had not written bits down. Just bits. The rest has drifted off, dreamlike, in time.

Never be afraid to write a pretentious sentence is what I say.

Thirteen years ago today – 23rd April – I had an Instant Message exchange with a friend. I pasted it into an electronic diary I kept at the time. My father was due to have a meeting with the consultant/surgeon on May 16th, when he would decide what to do about my father’s remaining cancer.

The Instant Message exchange starts with what my friend wrote…

---

Monday 23rd April 2001

---

My father in 1976.

Your father sounds like he is doing better than everyone expects.

Well, I think the consultant thinks he is recovering fine. He is still very weak, hasn’t been given any food and gets about half an inch of water per hour to drink. He is on drips from bags of clear liquid (glucose and saline) suspended above the bed. It seems like he has 101 tubes stuck in his hands’ and arms’ veins, has his urine piped to a bag under the bed, has some odd bag of green liquid behind his shoulder and has a couple of tubes taped up his nose under the oxygen mask.

That might mean his resistance and willpower is higher than he’s been given credit for by the surgeon. And that counts so much in something like this.

Well, every time I mention the word ‘liver’ to anyone who knows anything about cancers, they wince.

If your father asks you about life expectancy, which isn’t impossible, then you will have to decide on the spur of the moment how to answer.

I would lie to him and say I don’t know. Hopefully the seriousness will slowly dawn on him and the 16th May should solidify it. As I understand it, chemotherapy is used on the whole body and is horrendous; radiotherapy is used on a specific area and isn’t quite so bad. Presumably the consultant (who is a bowel and nether regions man not a cancer man) is going to… um… consult a cancer specialist before the 16th May. He told me he was going to discuss the case and the possibilities with “colleagues” to decide what to do.

Depending on his and your mum’s mental state, I would tend to think honesty is always the best option. 

So do I, which is why I am none too happy about it, but I think they (particularly my father) should be allowed to try to recover from the operation first. May 16th is proverbially another day. At the moment, my father is incapable of having any type of treatment because he has not recovered from the operation, so time is not of the essence before the 16th May.

---

If I had not written all that down at the time, I would barely have remembered the details of it.

On YouTube, there is a rather dreary audio recording of a song called Life Is But a Dream by a group called The Harptones.

I have never heard of The Harptones. Apparently they were formed in Manhattan, New York, in 1953, recorded the track in 1955 and it was featured in Martin Scorsese’s over-rated 1990 film Goodfellas.

According to Wikipedia, The Harptones “are still considered one of the most influential doo-wop groups” partly because of (says Wikipedia) their lead singer Willie Winfield. Wikipedia has no entry on Willie Winfield. He may be dead. Or not.

So it goes. Or not.

I think I may go back to sleep and post this blog later. Dreams are strange things.