This is a drawing of last nights dream

 

Yesterday I drew a circle around a 'situations vacant' ad for a  'Senior Odour Consultant' 

Then I went to our local pub and  overheard someone explaining about biometrics, that her sister has a car that she can open without a key because the door handle can read her fingerprints, the person listening looked puzzled - So how does she start it up, does she have to lick the steering wheel?

 

An intense odour filled the bedroom

in the early hours this morning - the sort of scent I associate with perfumed fabric conditioners. I lay still, concentrating and  trying to work out where this smell was coming from. I did an imaginative olfactory tour of the smelly items in the bathroom that might have exploded but none of our soaps, shampoos or shaving foams smell like this.

Something was preventing me from getting out of bed to have a look but I finally decided that the smell was coming from outside the house, the only rational explanation being that youths no longer disturb the peace by shouting and spraying grafitti, these boys have grown wings and are going round puffing perfume through people's windows.

I was involved in a nightmare scenario

 in a supermarket.

I was already in an emergency-style hurry  to get to a kitchen where I would demonstrate cooking in front of an audience. I am not going to name the event for reasons that will become clear.

I was late for my turn in the kitchen because I was in the supermarket running around the aisles looking for a substitute for fresh dill (there isn't one!). An urgent message asked me to find a lot of 'firm, white fish - not frozen'. I ran to the fish counter and hopped from foot to foot while the lady in front of me tried to choose between the fish that I wanted and some other fish, I psyched her into buying the other fish, then I asked the Fish Wife if she had more like the one I wanted - loads more!

Fish Wife emptied her entire stock of the necessary fish into large bags, which I grabbed and dashed pell-mell to the checkout. The conveyor-belt tills were full of everybody and their weeekend shop. I went to the self-service till - the place you're supposed to go if you just have a bit of tea and a cake to pay for.

I plumped the first bag of fish onto the scanning bed where it flopped over and - to my horror - all the fish flowed out - rapidly onto the floor. I applied the three-second rule and tried to scoop them up quickly but they kept swimming away and spreading way beyond the till area. It took far longer than three seconds to round them up into my large shopper where they basked alongside my baguette and a bag of flour.

I hope nobody filmed this.

this episode was somehow reminscent of a dream that I recounted here a few years ago.  

Last night I dreamed that I roasted a chicken

Then decided

My sister would like this

so I wrapped it up still warm and greasy and put a stamp on that cost me nine pounds and went to the post office where they weighed it and said that I needed to put another ten pound stamp on

I am thinking

this chicken is getting really quite expensive 

and it was already slipping out of the paper

I don't think it arrived because she hasn't mentioned it yet

Accumulations

turquoise is loneliness - wendy walgate

The days have been doubled up busy - painting and clearing out the Brain Surgery, tidying the community garden and making-lists for the annual cooking-with-music event.

Nooks and hidey-holes in the Brain Surgery are stuffed with accumulations. I sort and make collections of things that go together and make homes for them. The sorting and collecting and homing has infected me.

I dreamt about a vast bed in a dark wooden room, a high four-poster stacked with many layers of mattresses and pillows, filed in between them are dozens of sleeping labrador puppies, black ones and yellow ones. I patrol the bed pulling out a floppy hibernating puppy here and there, checking it's breathing before slipping it back in place and continuing my rounds. Also, in the interstices of the bed frame are tiny wooden tubes, each containing a bee which need regular, gentle watering.

Then Lennie Kravitz came into the room - I didn't want him to know about the puppies

This Easter Weekend I Tried To Fix Things

Bedroom by Geraldine Pilgrim



I bought special non-drying paint for the window sill but only discovered this marvellous thing when  I attached my newly made window box onto the newly painted window sill and the paint wrinkled up. This happens to me when I paint my finger nails and I suspect it has everything to do with lack of patience on my part.


I have mended a sheet and a pillowcase and dyed a huge duvet cover the wrong colour - the sort of pink that will hurt my eyes if I sleep under it - this is because I tried to make one pack of dye stretch too far and now I have to go and get another pack and do it all over again.


Last night I dreamed that I was in a strange basement apartment. I wasn't supposed to be there and I didn't have any clothes on but I'd promised to feed the man's turtles which were on the floor in the kitchen. They were very thin and almost transparent so I had difficulty seeing them and I was worried that I would tread on them. The cat was normal so I fed that instead and then the daughter came home and was surprised to see me standing there, naked in her house. I wanted to ingratiate myself so I told her.
I fed your cat

she said
We don't have a cat
and left the building

Trying Not To Kill People

Once upon a time our business consisted of two Camera Boys, Miss Whiplash and a big pile of kit, our main concern was to insure against bad men running off with a camera or the film stock getting eaten by tigers.

Now that we have a proper grown-up out-of-the-house building and lots of people, the responsibility for not killing people is mine all mine.

Paperwork about Regulations and Compliance rain down on me. I’ll have just filled in a stack of forms for security arrangements or arranged fire warden training, when another hazard looms. I dream that a giant rabbit is living on my lap, every few minutes it burps and gives birth to several kittens and I have to keep them all within my capacious skirts - they keep dropping on the floor and some of them break and I have to scoop them up and hide the bits in my pockets and try and glue them back together when no-one is looking.


I’ve just subjected myself to some intensive coaching about how to be a good employer, my coach is patient. To deal with different situations, he suggests scenarios where I imagine putting on a succession of different coloured hats or confronting a series of doors, there are diagrams too - one looks like a hairdryer.


Yesterday afternoon I had set up a broad range of policies and contracts and insurances, I thought I had it all covered...

I had forgotten the rogue fourteen year old who I rashly said could come and do a week’s work experience with us in the summer. Today I got a phone call from the child labour inspectoriate demanding an interview, they want to come and grill me and my premises and look at my policies ...

High Anxiety

I fought my tendency to pessimism for years - then I realised that living in that state of happy surprise when things aren’t ever quite as disastrous as I expected is probably as good a place to be as any.

Making television programmes demands that an enormous amount of money and energy be invested before any project has the slightest hope of getting off the ground. I am a partner in this particular business but The Director and Miss Whiplash are in charge of most of the buttons - I just peep between my fingers from behind the sofa while they move noughts around on spreadsheets.

Earlier this year our company made a film which was really rather good, we’re up for more prizes and there have been talks about making more programmes. The talking goes on for ages before anyone actually writes a cheque so we have to get on with ordering equipment, booking flights, finding new premises and keeping our fingers crossed.

I try and internalise my predictive gloom which leads to some funny symptoms like the ones where I think I’m having a heart attack or that I've got flu or that I am slowly being paralyzed by worms. I also get those dreams where I discover myself in a state of public disarray, this weeks prize dream involved being at the hairdressers and asking if I had any bald patches, Oh yes Madam said the hairdresser and held up a mirror to show me that not only was the back of my head bald but my brain was exposed and bleeding.

That might explain my grumpiness - an exposed and bleeding brain is not easily accessorized.

The first filming trip for our new set of programmes will be to Sri Lanka, there would be job for me on this one and I really really want to go - naturally I’ve refused to believe it would actually happen, I went along for the innoculations (just in case). Then, yesterday, after a kafkaesque morning at the Sri Lankan Embassy I stood blinking in the sunshine with my hurty arm (from the jabs) and a fistful of officially stamped documents and I woke up to the fact that 1000 people per year die from snake bites in Sri Lanka and I’d better get a move on with my bespoke suit of full-body armour - I’m having special added spikes attached to foil the leopards and crocodiles.