Uncle Vladimir said: recount a dream, lose a reader. But for those of us who remain committed transcendental idealists the opposite remains the case. Indeed, I’d sooner hear about someone’s dreams than anything else. I’d far rather they took me by the hand and led me through the warped corridors and funhouse apartments of their dreamscape, than bored me with details of their propery acquisitions.
In Wiltshire for the weekend, the M4 is retrospectively rolled up and stashed away in a carpet warehouse of dead roads. I lie on eiderdown, bluebottles buzzing from meadow through drapes, then round my sleepy head. My sons organise painfully exact tableaux of the D-Day evacuations and I urge them to shoot at the advancing 002. scale Wermacht with air pistols. The man with the neat white moustache who’s obsessed by fishing (Catherine Martell’s husband in Lynch’s Twin Peaks?), stands talking with two of the same – and me – over glasses of elderflower presse. This could perhaps go on forever…
But no, there is late morning, and coffee and toast, and the newspaper with its own rumpled dreamscape. The Prime Minister has been in Cumbria, talking about how a community can get over this sort of thing… Strange, as the Anglican Church withers away, so the executive – who after all appoints the Primate in the first place – takes on the cod-spiritual duties of the established church. No wonder no one can get it right.
There is talk of a new Tory MP, famously dashing, to whom posh totty is attracted like flies to… yet he does nothing. Sometimes… Clovis drawls… I think the asexual hide behind the widespread assumption that they must be gay.
