pumpkinstrokemarrow

Next, the military theme was blended with the forthcoming spending cuts. For some reason, I was back in the Treasury charged with some very important support function in the run up to sealing and publishing the deal on cuts. The scene was the old building where I did most of my time, rather the new building the Treasury occupies now. With an Islington flavoured canteen, an Internet Cafe and a sadly diminished library. I had to go down to the second floor where all the bosses lived, presumably to see about a printer jam, to find that the place was full of top brass. Chaps with lots of braid and medals. With special coloured hats - this was what someone in the dream said - to distinguish members of the Army Council. Something I learn after the event that the IRA still have but which we have abandoned. Not sure what we have in its place. There were also some very junior squaddies out in the corridors, all suited, booted and tooled up, there to guard the distinguished members. Someone tells me that as there were no suitable barracks available in London, they were having to put the guards up in the Netherlands and fly them in each morning for the cuts negotiations.

The next day, the dreams get a lot more vague with only a few snippets surviving long after waking. There is a vague flavour of execution and hanging, but a flavour not translated into scene or action. In fact, the only scene I can remember now is being in some large shopping mall, in the Netherlands, so we have a link to the previous dream there, a shopping mall selling all kinds of bizarre goods and services. Eventually I work my way through to a delicatessen where I am able to buy bread and sausage. Bread, round and inferior. Rather like the stuff BH has to buy at Sainsburys in an emergency. Sausage looked like quite decent cabanos. They were sold by the each rather than by weight, so I chose a Siamese sausage. That is to say a sausage which branched into two half way along, making a Y-shaped sausage. Cheap, but not much better than the bread. Nothing like as good as the brand sold by Waitrose. Bread element of the dream presumably brought on by my failure to make it to Cheam yesterday; not sure where any of the rest of it came from.

Dreams of a different sort are documented in this week's TLS, in the form of an article purporting to review three books about one A. Warhol, about whom I had known next to nothing before. He makes Dame Emin look like a complete joker, being able to parley his modest talent as a commercial artist into a huge empire with his considerable talents for self publication and business. A huge empire which is the subject of much musing in academe - but musing with not much more at its core than paintings of tins of soup. On the way, seeing off the previously fashionable gang (Ab. Ex.) who were macho and drunk and with whom he did not get on. Impressive as a life story but depressing that so much fame rests on personality rather than product. But he will survive as it seems he was rich enough to endow a serious museum in his home town. On a par with Carnegie.

I also learned that he had a personal proctologist. A sort of doctor that one does not hear about very often. So rarely in fact that the usually reliable OED (first edition, somethingth reprint) makes it clear enough what one does without listing the word itself.