HOME Friday, 17 August 2001

I went into a supermarket to buy some groceries. I filled up my basket and then, as I made my way up the aisle, I tried to get the money out of the back pocket of my track suit trousers. The zip fastener was closed and I couldn't get it opened. I knew the thing had this problem, that if it was closed completely, neither the powers of heaven or earth could get it open, yet, inadvertently, I had closed it. So I had money on me that I couldn't get at. Extraordinary!   After struggling furtively with it for a few minutes, I had to put my basket down near one of the shelves, leave the shop and go to a nearby public toilet. In one of the cubicles, I ripped the back pocket off from the inside and, after some Herculean struggles, managed to break open the flimsy teeth of the fastener and get my money. Then I pulled out my T-shirt to hide the hole, returned to the shop, picked up my basket and paid for my purchases.   How has a thing with such a lamentable history of failure as the zip fastener survived to plague the human race? They won't open when you want them to, and yet they open on their own accord when it will embarrass you most. They break and they nip you in tender places. (There probably isn't a male alive on the planet to whom this has not happened.) Yet they appear to be the only means of fastening a garment left in the world.   Bring back buttons, I say and consign the zip fastener to the scrap heap of Dismal Failures, where it belongs.

Wednesday, 29 August 2001

I don't know why it is, but I've been remembering dreams a lot more frequently in the past few weeks. Not that there's anything sensational to report from dreamland. It's all a slightly off-centre version of the mundane.   What is the use of dreams if I can't use them to give myself supernatural-super powers, or got to exotic and unusual places, for a few short hours? Who would have thought the subconscious could be so infernally boring? All day long it bombards me with visions to stretch the imagination, when, being as I am in the actual world, I can't act them out. Then, when I enter the world of elasticity, where human beings are made from modelling clay, it just wants to play house.   The dreams that have stuck in my memory could be counted on two fingers. Just a few years ago, I had a dream that I learned how to fly and what I remember thinking in my dream was how simple it was. I know where the material for that dream came from. In more than one of Patricia Lynch's books, the leprechaun, Brogeen, instructs the humans to "Jump, and then jump on top of your jump." And so they go jumping away through the air, away from whatever was bothering them. When they are high enough, they apparently glide.   The other dream is, I suppose, really a nightmare and I had it regularly each night when I was five or six. It got so bad, I used to dread going to sleep. The background to it is that my brother was taking out library books at the time, and I used to read them, but, of course, I had to read his choices, and I wanted to choose my own books. So I dreamed I was going to the library. But -   The library was a dark room, the floor scattered with books, with a small empty space in the middle. I couldn't see the books nearest the walls and in the corners, because it was darker there. The unpleasant thing was that there were snakes hidden among the books nearest the walls and when I went to get a book, they would hiss out at me. So I had to dart in, pick up a book quickly and run out again. With this kind of lottery, I found that I seldom got a book I wanted to read. So much for choice. I only got the dream once a night, so in a way, it was a relief when I woke up and realised I'd had it, and whatever I dreamt the rest of the night wouldn't disturb me.   All the same, I still feel we ought to get more out of dreams. After all, dreams are short and life is long.