pumpkinstrokemarrow

Whereas I woke up to a vision of a large black box car, the sort of thing you might get in a Poirot or a film of a book by Dennis Wheatley. Great big thing with a long bonnet, four doors, big lamps and so on & so forth. Parked in some suburban street, pointing down hill somewhere in north London. I was with someone but the dream did not bother to tell me who. Quite clear about where I was but not who I was with. Then the car morphed into something rather larger, but clearly a conversion of a Routemaster bus, despite the much enlarged hole to the left of the driver. Still black. Then it morphed again to something which was clearly a conversion of two Routemaster buses. The front two thirds of one and the back two thirds of another. Still black and still a family car, albeit a rather large one. The only prompt I can think of is one of those Chelsea tractor things parked across the road from us. Which on closer inspection turns out to be a black Land Rover. Nothing like the sort of Land Rover I used to break half shafts in all those years ago.

Which reminds me of somebody else's blue long wheel base I once used to move half a yard of wet concrete. The thing could manage but it did make the handling rather odd.

This week's TLS very feeble. Much banter about the bard, but apart from that I glean two factlets. First, that our very own Pevsner was, by origin, an assimilated German Jew of a Russian flavour. A very talented art historian with a university lectureship. Who was of a mildly right wing persuasion and mildly pro-Hitler, up to the point when the racial laws cost him his job. He was not very sure that we in the UK were very into his sort of art history, but as things turned out this is where he turned up. And the rest is history. All of which reminds me of Irene Nemirovsky and her sympathetic portrait of the occupying German forces in France in 1940. According to the TLS, this sort of thing was quite common in the Europe of the time, strange and sad as it might seem after the event.

Second, that the famous Lenin had an elder brother, executed for participation in a failed assassination in late 19th century Russia. A question of interest to the writer of the book under review being the extent to which Lenin's later career was driven by an urge, perhaps subconscious, to obtain revenge for his lost brother.