I had a dream.
Not like Martin Luther King, more like Martin Scorsese, it was filmic in its unfolding.
My Great Aunty Becky was lying in a bed in the London Hospital on Whitechapel Road. I loved her. She painted her nails, always visited with a string bag full of goodies, and when she died she left me her heavy beaver lamb fur coat, the kind that lipsticked Jewish women wore. She was my grandmothers sister, they arrived in England in the 1890’s, having escaped from yet another Pogrom. A medium had told Becky that her husband was fighting for the Bolsheviks, so she refused to marry in case he came knocking on her door in Aldgate. He never did so she had a long term affair with a Mr. White. She was everything a downtrodden woman wasn’t. Joie de vivre seeping out of her perfumed pores.
But I digress
In my dream Aunty Becky was lying in a hospital bed in a spotless ward. Her hands placed outside the sheets, her red fingernails beautifully manicured. I sat in the chair next to the bed. She asked me to get closer. I bent into her and she whispered in my ear;
‘Go and look at my shit.’
I stayed glued to the chair, horrified. She was my Great Aunt and she was dying, if that was her wish then I had no choice. I got up and walked through a pair of swinging beige doors that had two little Georgian wired glass windows. I could hear the squeak, squeak, squeak of my shoes on the beige Lino.
I turned right into the lavatory.
Opened up a cubicle door and, taking a breath, looked down into the pan.
Lying under the water were two chocolates. One plain chocolate with a snip of parma violet the other milk with a slice of candied Angelica on top.
‘Good News’ was a brand of chocolates, made by Macintosh popular during the 60s and 70s, a box included dark strong chunks and light milky squares, the precursor to ‘Quality Street’ – which by the way are now owned by Nestlé, who have fucked the recipe, made them smaller and taken all the delight out of Christmas.
But I digress
I stared at the two lumps of confectionary in the bottom of the lavatory and headed back into the ward. My feet squeaking on the beige Lino.
I took my seat next to my Great Aunt who slowly turned to me and said
‘You see, nothing is as bad as you think.’
And she was right, as dreams go it was a corker, concise with a potent message. It is true that a dream can change your life. When I was in my early twenties I auditioned for ‘Tomorrows World’ the science programme for the BBC. I had to interview people who had had lucid dreams. An artist had been fitted with sensors to wake her when she started dreaming. On her first night the sensors told her to wake, she was surrounded by geometric shapes of all sizes and colours, she then wandered through her sleepy fantasies. When she woke she was told to set to work on what she had seen. That lucid dream awakened something in her psyche and she became a successful artist using the very shapes and colours she had walked amongst.
Another interviewee only knew she was dreaming because the birds flew upside down.
I didn’t need sensors for Aunty Becky, whose advice gave me the confidence to follow my dreams. Nothing really is as bad as you think it’s going to be. But now, what with everything going on in our ailing world dreams are few and far between. If I do have them I don’t remember them. Sometimes I wake up with a feeling that something has occurred but my power of recall is not what it was.
Dreaming is good for all of us, but sadly we are living in a time where the dream snatchers have seized the day.
Dream snatchers that have taken away a viable future for so many. The vampiric Truss who is in the process of sucking the life out of anything that is true and good. The zomboid Sunak who has designs on dismantling what’s left of the welfare state. Ok let’s blame Thatcher, but this latest band of dream snatchers are even worse than she was.
That kettle of vultures think nothing of taking billions of pounds of profit, whilst we are robbed in plain sight.
Disgusting money grubbing bastards paying themselves hefty bonuses while the rest of us squirrel away our pennies so that we can boil an egg.
The old git and I had tea in a caff that has a tree from 1582, it’s seen it all. Sitting under the branches I got talking to an ex RAF man who travels around doing something or other. We were talking about the collective names for crows – a murder of them. Owls – a parliament of them. We were joined by Raymond and his boyfriend. The ambience was gentle as it should be whilst sitting amongst roses and rudbeckia. Whilst we scoffed on scones and frothy coffee I looked up the collective noun for hippos it’s a Bloat, larks – a bevy of ’em. I decided to find out about cheetahs. It’s a coalition. A coalition of cheetahs, without a beat Raymond said
‘Sounds like our Tory Party.’
Oh how we laughed.
So I wonder what is the collective noun for dream snatchers – I think it could be a SUPPOSITORY of dream snatchers, or maybe a DEFECTAION of them. Whatever it is those Westminster dream snatchers are a pile of shit, they couldn’t transmute into ‘Good News’ chocolates if they tried.