Must be something in the lack of beer…
Well it’s been a while since I had two mental dreams just before I woke up…
This one, mind, wasn’t as fantastically funny as the last one, but, in the manner of someone with nowt better to do, I’m going to tell you all about it anyway (cue mass exodus from desks as people scramble to avoid hearing someone else’s dream…)
There’s this abandoned cottage, small, and run down, and with an upstairs room quite like the front bedroom at Mauld’s Meaburn, except the floor’s on two levels, and made out of planks of rotten-looking wood. There’s two big bookcases at each end, and I’m looking through their contents – entirely old penguin paperbacks, entirely made up of the General Fiction range, with a couple of Crime ones thrown in. They’re all really tatty, and I’m poking about without any definite aim…
…and Statto suddenly rushes in, and tells me about this really important meeting I’ve got to be at. So the scene dissolves to, for some reason, a cross between the big reading room in the Northwest corner of the NLW, which has been crossed with the Jekyll and Hyde, and at which there are loads and loads of people.
The meeting appears to be ready to start, and seems to be an old Guild GM, with Bethan about to chair it, and it’s running late because I haven’t turned up. And then my mobile goes, and I end up having some sort of conversation with someone on the other end, possibly about the books I’d been looking at. That takes ages, and Bethan gets really cross, and tells me to get off the phone so she can get on with the meeting (although why it can’t happen without me, I don’t know).
I tell her to get stuffed, because it’s really important that I take this call, and that I have to talk to this person (although I don’t know who the person is). Bethan reacts really badly to that, in the sense that she turns into Bec Corn, the meeting vanishes, and me and Statto are in a faceless indoor shopping centre, like the Bull Ring, or Telford, or somewhere, trying to get onto a travellator. It’s really hard, because it’s steep, and so we crouch down. It’s lucky we did, because I nearly get my head taken off by the transparent pale-blue plastic roof that’s over the thing about four foot from the floor.
Then it levels out, and turns into a pneumatic tube, which gets dark and less blue, and which is really bumpy and uncomfortable, and spits us out by the kiosk in Waitrose in Wallingford, where a burly guy in orange dungarees demands to know what we were doing in the corpse tube. I ask “what corpse tube,” and he explains that’s how they move coffins about the place, and it isn’t an escalator at all.
So we go and look for beer. (I dunno why, because Statto doesn’t drink the stuff) I can’t find any bottles, all I can see is tins, such as plum tomatoes come in, with orange labels, and pull-rings. Then Statto turns up really angry holding a bottle of Newky Brown, full of beer, but with a hole in it, and wants to know why I smashed it, and I say I didn’t, and he says that yes I have, look, it’s right in front of me, which it is, on a pallet loaded up with bags of sugar. So we have an argument, Mansbridge arrives, and the alarm goes off and wakes me up.
I’m starting to wonder if these might be stress-type dreams, of the sort I’ve not had for some time, and which I never remember to keep tabs on, so I’m trying with the tabs thing now. Of course, it could just be that I’m going mental… Certainly bloody sounds like it.
Edit: 18-52, 21/02/07
Put in links to Bethan’s blog. And, er, wikipedia page, the presence of which took me rather aback. In the interests of fairness, therefore, I’ve linked to a BBC page for Bec, since it was a choice between that, or the bit on the Guild website from when she resigned, and I dinnae trust the Guild to keep the site going with all the links where they are at the moment [or, you may rightly surmise, very much at all]. In t’unlikely event Bec’s wandering about over here and wants me to plug a proper blog instead, she’s more’n welcome to drop me a comment.
And now I’m going to get a shift on out of the Reserve, because in three minutes they stop paying me to be here.