I woke in the small hours from a strange, nightmarish dream in which I moved from writing an early novel on a borrowed typewriter in a back office of the government building in which I worked on leaving the RAF, through an all-night walk through an antique, quasi-Victorian London, all sleaze, grime, and hidden menace, to the back-streets of an Athens which exists only in my imagination.
And, somewhere in it, my walk was in the company of an older version of a young man I once knew, with his wife and two near-adult children I never knew. We were comparing sports jackets. I wanted a traditional Donnegal tweed rather than my coarse-wove Harris and he was just about to inform me of a good supplier when I was forced out of bed and into painful wakefulness with an urgent need to visit the bathroom.
Hot coffee and a bit of time-shifted TV documentary on the computer and I was calm enough to go back to bed where I slept easy and thorough, right through to 09:30. And even then I woke only because we’d been hit by torrential rain, roaring down the gulleys and drumming on the pavement.
A funny old night, then, and the day so far has been equally odd and disjointed.
Not unpleasant, though, not even in my vivid dream where my wits were sufficiently gathered to pull out a battered old Leica from my pocket and record the never-London through which I roamed on a strangely warm early colour film process.
And now that I’m fully awake again, it’s good. Rather damp, somewhat confused, but good. There’s sometimes a feeling of grateful surprise on waking to find that another day has dawned and that you’re still around to enjoy it. The older I get, the stronger that surprise becomes, and the deeper the gratitude to go with it.
