pumpkinstrokemarrow

I often puzzle about whether I have locked up in the 5 minutes or so after leaving the house. Usually, on checking, I find that I have. The other day however, cycling down the road, almost to TB, I decided that I could not remember locking up. I could remember locking the garage, but not the house. Cycle back to the house and find that this is indeed the case; house unlocked. Extra mile or so on the round trip to the baker. One used to talk of tying knots in one's tie to remind one of something or other, so perhaps something of the sort is needed here to encourage the fading short-term memory. Maybe one should enact an exotic key dance on the drive, if and only if one has locked the house door. The dance might be sufficiently striking to lodge in memory and one could be confident that if one had done the dance, one had locked the door.

But I think not. When computers do comparable things, like put up dialog boxes which you have to click through to confirm some potentially disastrous action, like deleting the file you have been working on for the last hour, it does not take long before you are clicking through them without even noticing them. I think the brain could easily jump straight from 'leave the house' to 'do the key dance', quietly omitting the 'lock the house' segment.

We had a void in the butter yesterday, perhaps a cubic centimetre or so. As far as I can remember, the first time such a thing has happened. I presume that butter, while sold by weight, is cut by size (the seller relying on the reliability of his equipment to maintain a sturdy relationship between volume and weight), and so, on this occasion, was a gram or so short of its 250.

This may have prompted one element in one of the three connected dreams I had this morning. The first seemed to involve a whole lot of us, some of whom I vaguely knew, sitting in a sort of natural amplitheatre on top of a grassy hill. There were some people sitting on the stage, in charge. The discussion turned to who did the weights and measures, trade descriptions things in the Roman world. I announced that there were special magistrates who looked after that sort of thing on behalf on the municipality, but was slapped down by the gents. on the stage who were very firm that such matters were looked after at a tribal level. I think, at one time at least, Rome was organised into tribes. While this was going on, I was pondering about what to do with this small cauldron of a thick gray fluid I had between my knees. About a gallon or so of the stuff. Contained various rather unpleasant bits and peices which needed to be removed before I could decently sell the stuff. How could I do this?

Abandoning the cauldron, then sneaked off down the hill, but managed to leave various possessions up the hill, which meant that I had to interupt the other two dreams to go and recover things. The hill mutating into a coastal headland in the meanwhile.

The second was set in a variation of my secondary school - although there was no-one about that I knew. There was some sort of game being played on some large chunk of the school field which involved setting out the pitch, of which there were lots, beforehand. Each pitch involving chunks of timber, netting and what-have-you. A cheerful young West Indian gent., who had had the duty for a long time, was very keen that I should take over the setting out and putting away of the timber and netting for a few days. He showed me round to the back of the school, where there was a great old collection of tumble down sheds and barns, to the barn where this stuff was kept, but not locked up. But what he could not do was supply a map or diagram of the pitches so that I should know where to set them up. All he could do was wave vaguely at the middle of the field, in which there was the odd large tree dotted about. Moved onto the third dream, or rather fragment, without resolving this knotty problem.

The third, was a variation of a dream which I have had quite a lot over the years, although not much recently. I think a relic of anxiety about aspects of the various houses we have lived in over the years. Leaking chimneys, dodgy roofs, rotten window frames, subsidence. All the sorts of things which surveyors get excited about when you are trying to sell a house. The house in this dream was a single storey affair with a masonry core but with timber outskirts or verandas, and was linked to the headland mentioned above, the house being just down, maybe a mile away, from the headland. A patch of heath in between. With much of these timber outskirts being in a very parlous state, to the point of sections of rafters crumbling away, including some over the supposedly sound masonry core. All very worrying. Could not afford or did not want to get builders in to do it. Would have to give the whole business some quality time which I could ill afford. Woke up at this point.

To close I record a factlet from a letter in the TLS, to the effect that Stalin, during the second war, was a closet prayer. There was a locked up church inside the Kremlin to which he had himself taken each afternoon for a private prayer. Which is rather odd; if not implausible, as I am reminded that it became legal to pray for Mother Russia during that war, despite the generally anti-church stance of the Party. Will I ever find the time to read a recent biography of Stalin which might through some light on the matter?