pumpkinstrokemarrow

Not sure who he was, but it is certainly very cold in Epsom today. Even a bit of sleet and snow a few minutes ago. The coldest run - with a very cold and vaguely North Easterly wind - to Cheam that I remember. Took the last two hot cross buns from the baker as a reward and a black pudding with the Paschal Lamb from the butcher. Half the black pudding, lard fried, went down well for a late breakfast, served with the finest Cheam pseudo-French round loaf and the finest Brita water. Have to ponder on how best to cook the lamb. Not something that we are particularly good at. Never seem to be able to strike the right balance between overcooked and undercooked.

Now completed my dip into the Odyssey. It seems that the marriage rules of the ancient Greeks were a bit lax. One chap had six sons and six daughters and paired them off, keeping the whole lot in the parental palace. Another married the daughter of his brother. And in a seldom published sequel to the Odyssey, it seems that the son of Circe by Odysseus went to Ithaca and murdered his father in the course of a raid on his sheep or goats or something. He then married his father's lawful wedded wife Penelope. Meanwhile, Circe married Penelope's son by Odysseus. Otherwise their morals seemed to be about the same as those of the Beowulf lot a couple of thousand years later in Northern Europe. OK to rape and pillage. Steal cows and goats (this last, it seems, being the main point). OK piracy. But it is also proper to show proper hospitality and generosity to a guest. I guess the trick was to get to the guest list from the visitors' book while you were still alive. I seem to recall that near-modern Bedouin worked along the same sort of lines - with the addition that once someone was a guest, he was OK for three days. I forget what happened after that. Maybe they gave you a fifteen minutes start before setting the armoured camels out after you.

Interesting dream about breaking into a ship recently. Some sort of large warship, moored up somewhere, and I seemed to be with someone although the someone never showed. So don't know who it was. The rear superstructure of the ship was a sort of wooden hump, covered in some kind of thick gray material. The hump might have been prompted by the chipboard-plus dormered roof being put on the block of shops and flats being put up next to TB. Break a person sized hole through the hump, exposing some rather naff stud work. Find oneself in the sort of room that would serve as a bed-sit in a university hall of residence. Amongst other furnishings were some spears, of the same type that we have acquired, by indirect means, from Kenya. The same distinctive, flattened portion of shaft. Move from the room into some sort of machine room or control room. Are shown something being fired up. There is a large viewing window onto the something. Escape back through the bed-sit and wake up very concerned - but not sweaty - about what the captain is going to say when he finds that the inspection team broke in through the roof. Vague thoughts about how it was a spot check so breaking in was OK.

And a dreamlet about being overtaken on the little roundabout at the junction of Hook Road and Waterloo road, while turning left into Waterloo road from the Epsom side. The point of interest being that the thing doing the overtaking was a large Snap-on (http://www.snapon.com/) van towing a trailer of the same size, in the same red and white Snap-on livery. Never seen such a thing in real life. Perhaps prompted by anxiety about whether I was going to manage to fit my new brake blocks all by myself - the current bicycle being more complicated in that respect than the one on which I last changed any brake blocks.