Unconfirmed Reports

I dreamt the other night that I entered an expensive nightclub, which led downstairs from street-level. When I got downstairs there were not many people around, but there was a door leading outside. I went out and found there a lake, with warm water that I waded into.

Above the lake, the sky was a deep, dark blue. The sun was shining at a low angle that I associate with northern latitudes - but it may have been evening or early morning. Although the sun was up, an array of stars were shining intensely. This view of stars and sun together in the sky was unexpectedly beautiful, and left me with a warm glow for the whole of my waking day.

I should try not to forget about how when we lived in that one room in Highbury Estate, we used to eat dinner sitting on the floor, with that little wooden table between us.

Unless I am much mistaken, after work it was usually me sitting at the desk, and Oriana sitting on the bed. Then she would start bothering me about when I was going to make dinner.

Besides that, I remember riding home in the dark, taking the shortcut through that little street behind the theatre - or riding to work hungover in the morning, stopping in Rosebery for sausage and onions in bread to try to quell my drunkenness.

And I remember sitting by that window, looking out over the trees in the middle of the estate, as the darkness closed in early.

And the night that Dan Shaw-Smith came around, after I’d just got back from Amsterdam, and we drank strong Belgian beers, then got stoned in the kitchen.

And the time I had been trying to cut that bike away that was locked to the front of our flat, then a little later on the nextdoor neighbour came outside and was asking if I knew anything about someone trying to steal his bike - and I think I still had the saw in my hand, but I just said “no”, and he didn’t say anything more on the matter.

Then when, Akari, our Japanese flatmate started to go mad, calling me to tell me that everything was wrong, that she’d done something terrible and didn’t want her parents to know. Her room became a tomb, which (still by phone), she insisted that no-one should ever enter. She told me that one time in Islington some men had tried to kidnap her, dragging her into a car then driving away. She says she later managed to open the door and jump out - and I was never sure if that really happened. When Akari lost it, and Savin (the Indian) stopped paying his rent, it really started to feel like the flat was falling apart. Li (the landlady) started calling me to ask about when Savin would pay his rent. Why did everyone call me?

And the walks we would take on Saturday or Sunday, with that evening again closing in, so soon after we’d set out. The low, silver light stencilling the bare branches. People walking past each other quickly in the streets, everybody’s hands in their pockets.

The drunken shouting in the streets after Saturday-afternoon football. Not being able to find a decent local pub. The time Oriana ran away, and I unsuccessfully went looking for her around the streets.

Frankly, I don’t know how we survived.

I recently purchased a pair of corrective spectacles, that I have probably needed for quite some time. I now realise that my long-distance vision had been degenerating - but gradually, so that I barely noticed the details I was losing. I only really became suspicious when I noticed that in playing football I can’t identify my teammates until they start moving (once they do that, every player’s distinctive style of movement makes them identifiable).

I received the spectacles in the post, having bought them on the internet from a Pakistani retailer. The package was stitched up in white cloth, and sealed with a glob of red wax. I’m not sure if it counts as ironic that a company should take its orders in hyper-text transfer protocol, and deliver them with sealing wax. Obviously our age of high technology and automation is somewhat patchy in its distribution.
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During the past month, one of the major reasons why this blog has been silent is that I have got myself a garden allotment. That is to say, I have obtained the right of usage over a little patch of dirt, etched out in a rectangle from the largish area of East Ward Allotments, Oxford. (map).

This cost seven pounds fifty pence in rental fee per year. It is about 10 by 15 metres, which started out covered with a mixture of long grass, blackberries and black plastic, but is quickly becoming a nice dug-over slilce of arable land. I am going to grow
tomatoes and
potatoes and
courgettes and
butternut pumpkins and
shallots and
garlic and
peppers and
leeks and
spinach and
radishes and
broad beans and
snow-peas

Notice how, of all these, only spinch is an “uncountable” noun that does not readily take plural form. I hope it will be easy to grow anyway.

I feel very proprietal about my Vegetable Kingdom. I feel very satisfied, standing there looking at it - and it would not be such a stretch of the imagination to see myself waiting there vigilantly with a rifle in my hand.

I don’t feel like that about the house that I rent, where I sleep every night. But there is something about the allotment that feels much more “mine”. I think it is because, as long as I keep using it and paying my seven pounds fifty a year, my custodianship is almost guaranteed. Renting a house though, I am always at the whim of the owner (or, at least, within 6 weeks of the whim of the owner).