Dream On

          The week hasn’t been overly eventful – for me, at least – though I am quite pleased with my latest purchase, a pair of woollen socks. I got them at the nearby military surplus store, Bogey Knights, suppliers of military miscellany and outfitters to discerning but brand-averse, gents. The socks are no-nonsense NATO spec “extreme cold weather” (undyed). Weapons-grade footwear but destined, in this instance, to be worn for lounging around the flat on winter evenings. Well, NATO apparently has no use for them.

          So little has happened, in fact, that I can honestly say there has been more action in my dreams. Sometime during Tuesday night’s slumber, for instance, I got a call from a famous rock band wanting a drummer for their upcoming USA tour and convinced them, with the briefest of drumrolls, that I was the man for the job. Unfortunately, I woke up before the fame and adulation. Or would that be fortunately, before they discovered my lack of ability? Whatever, it’s inconvenient to wake in the middle of the night, especially part-way through a story. I think there must be some in-built brain function that puts a premature end to dreams, since few, if any, ever come to a satisfactory conclusion. This can be quite frustrating if, say, you are about to make a life-changing discovery, be introduced to one of your heroes or fulfil some long-desired erotic fantasy. However, on the flip side, the mechanism works well in the case of nightmares, reassuring you that they are illusory and that your real life is not like that – mostly. And, lately, I have been pleased and relieved to have woken up part-way through dreams that are not nasty or disagreeable but simply boring. After what seems like hours of being subjected to a witless plotline, lifeless characters and dull dialogue, I long to change the channel but can’t find the remote. It’s a relief to wake and breathe an actual sigh of relief, before turning over to try a new story.

          When not asleep, I have been active only vicariously. For example, I left it to others to demonstrate on Dartmoor against the courts’ decision to end the right of hikers to wild-camp at will. (From now on, permits must be obtained from ‘landowners’ who receive public subsidies to maintain those of ‘their’ acres that sit within the designated National Park.) It’s not that I don’t feel strongly about the issue, it’s more that I wouldn’t have started from the assumption of land as private property. I will never forgive the Normans who, when they appropriated England, divided it up amongst themselves and, to a large extent, still have it. Their descendants adhere to the principle that ownership is nine tenths of the law and, while selling or renting small parcels of land to us plebs, continue to believe the rest is theirs. Protesting against the law that forbids wild camping is a mere pinprick in the flanks of the Establishment. The issue is bigger and wider. And there is an element of pique in my not joining the thousands protesting on Dartmoor. Where were they last summer when far fewer people, marching as Extinction Rebellion (Southwest), were on the streets highlighting the overarching matter of the destruction of the planet? Will they mass again to address the fundamental issues of the erosion of civil liberties, electoral suppression and cultural erosion that our present government is so keen to implement by means both of legislation and appointment of its cronies as heads of public realm institutions?

          It would be nice to have the occasional triumphal dream that ended with the masses rising up to dispatch autocratic rulers, or to force landowners to give us back our land so that nature and all its species may be restored. Last night, however, the Russians won the war because NATO ran out of socks.

Walkies

          On reading Ian McEwan’s novel, Lessons, I was taken aback, initially, by how much I have in common with its protagonist, Roland. We were born in the same year and, at the age of thirteen, because of our fathers’ itinerant military careers, sent to old-fashioned boarding schools. As a birthday present, we were both given a ‘Perdio’ transistor radio – the short-lived, British-made answer to the ultimately unstoppable flood of post-war Japanese electronic imports. By chapter two, however, our experiences began to diverge radically. At the age of fourteen, Roland was seduced by his young, attractive, female piano tutor, while I was developing a defensive wariness of the sexually repressed, celibate Irish Christian Brothers to whom my education had been entrusted.

          I haven’t quite finished the book, but Roland is now my age and I’m feeling smug that he’s not in as good a physical condition as I am. Perhaps he should have kept up his youthful enthusiasm for hiking, a habit I acquired around the age of 30 and have nurtured since.

          These days, I don’t like to walk more than ten miles or so. Any more than that and I find it tiring. What’s more, the beneficial effect of outdoor stimulation turns toward mild boredom and a desire to be back in civilisation. But the other day, in bright weather and bright company (my Other Half), I enjoyed a lengthy, circular coastal walk (it’s a peninsula). Halfway along, we stopped at Kingsand, a former fishing village turned twee holiday destination, where many of the businesses close for the winter. I speculated on the possibilities of renting their temporarily vacant premises to establish some form of reverse-season business. The capitalist in me hates to see assets lying idle, but I suspect I would not be the first to come up against the buffers of there being insufficient potential customers outside of the summer months. Still, the hike served as an informal ‘date’ for us to catch up with each other without the distractions of life’s routine interruptions and it exercised me into a pleasant state of weariness so that I took a nap later on the sofa, while my OH went for a supplementary work-out at the gym.

          There’s no doubt that I enjoy walking with a fellow human in ways that I cannot with a canine companion, as was reinforced last week when I was ‘volunteered’ to do our friends a favour by taking their dog, Rosie, for a bit of exercise. I’m not saying that I found it uninteresting. I was fascinated, for example, by Rosie’s thoroughness and persistence in sniffing out whatever it was that so strongly attracted the attention of her olfactory organ. Ideally, I would have liked to have had a conversation with her about it while she sat feigning patience as I savoured a lonesome flat white in a hip café. Later, she found a use for me as a ball thrower in a seemingly endless game of ‘fetch’ that stretched the boundary of my enthusiasm but not hers. A moment of drama did liven-up the proceedings when a snarly little terrier-type dog barged in and turned nasty over ball possession. Its owner was slow to arrive on the scene, leaving to me the business of separating them, which proved difficult given their lack of response to reasoned argument.

          On the way home, I soothed my nerves with a swift half at a newly opened pub, done up in the modern style and with coffee and tapas to attract a broad clientele. “They’ve made a good job of this, Rosie”, I said as she lay at my feet dreaming, perhaps, of a nice game of ‘fetch’ or another bout with the razor-toothed terrier. It would have been nice to share a drink and conversation with, say, Roland about the things we have in common – such as not keeping pets.

 

Not My Patch

          During these long, dark winter evenings I’ve been watching a lot of catch-up TV – something that wasn’t possible before the internet. Back then, millions of us used to tune in simultaneously to a limited range of live broadcasts, thereby ingesting fare that became a binding agent for society – or so the argument goes. Whether that resulted in a ‘better’ society would depend on who was in control of media and messaging, but the technology was perfect for the promotion of monoculture, a system that discourages individuals from questioning the majority view.

          But thanks to the internet and, to some extent, the relative diversity of our media, we Britons have escaped the monocultural hell of, say, North Koreans. We find ourselves, instead, with something more like a patchwork culture – a colourful blanket of mini-monocultures stitched together. I spent the past week immersed in someone else’s patch.

           I was in the historic cathedral city of Salisbury, not in order to delve into its heritage as I would have liked, but to assist with the sensitive business of relocating my Other Half’s Aunt Jill from her house to a nursing care home. The combination of physical frailty and dementia had at last made it impossible for Jill to be cared for anywhere else, though she was in denial of the fact. It was tough work emotionally and a saddening, tiresome task physically. My part concerned mostly the latter, the sorting of possessions, which was daunting since she never knowingly threw anything out of the house, apart from kitchen waste. Her welfare is in the hands of professionals and she now has only the essentials plus a few comforters around her.

          From my point of view, the real value of Jill’s possessions lies in the way they illustrate the story of her life (and that of her parents, since she had kept most of their things as well). As I sifted through evidence of a life that had once been filled with musical activities, charitable causes, friendships and a devotion to the Church of England, I was saddened by the way in which all this had finally slipped beyond her control and now lay in useless piles around the house. It was as if none of it had ever really mattered. And if that is true for Jill, is it not true for all of us? The process reinforced my long-standing decision to divest myself of my redundant paraphernalia long before someone else had to do it for me. I’ve already made progress in that respect by ditching CDs in favour of a Spotify account, for example. And, come springtime, I might put my kayak on eBay. Not that my demise is known to be imminent, but it’s as well to bear it in mind.

          Perhaps Jill’s tendency to keep everything she ever owned is more complicated than can be explained by the word “hoarder”, though I could only speculate as to what that explanation might be, since she came across as pragmatic rather than materialistic. Her values, which I’ve gleaned from knowing her superficially, conform to the Christian textbook and manifest themselves in traditional, conventional, middle-class English behaviour. When talking with her, there never seemed to be room for the intrusion of anything else: any attempt to engage her with new or controversial ideas ran straight into the buffers of uninterest. She liked the cocoon of her own mini-monoculture. Don’t we all, to some extent?

          Jeff Beck died yesterday. He was a guitar hero to my generation of rock/blues fans, but I suppose Jill was unaware of that, even though he was only two years younger than her: she abhors ‘pop’ music. But I’ll be wallowing later in the nostalgia of my own mini-monoculture, watching YouTube vids of him (something I could not have done pre-internet).