pumpkinstrokemarrow

At first glance the fat book by a gent. is going to be more helpful than the thin book by a lady. The latter is a picture book despite being called a bible, while the former has a lot of information and very few pictures. I shall report further in due course.

While collecting the bread books from the library, I also picked up a copy of 'Never let me go', the book which sparked the interest in Ishiguro and the 'Remains of the Day' and which is about to be released in film form. Struck by his coming up with the idea of breeding humans specifically to act as organ donors, with the fourth donation being fatal. You can only manage without so many organs. Rather Japanese you might think. But I found I could not read the book. Got through the first quarter and then skipped to read the last ten pages to see how it ended. On closer inspection the whole idea of organ donors became more and more distasteful. Neat at a distance, nasty close range. One then wonders whether Ishiguro's world is populated by the sort of half baked people I have come across so far? Is this a product of his creative writing course at UEA or his being born in Nagasaki at a time when the experience of the second bomb must have still been raw? Or of English being his second language?

Another odd dream last night. I was back in the Home Office, near Victoria. A lady colleague and I went out shopping one lunch time, taking a bus to get there. At some point I noticed this large second hand bookshop, in the dream at the Victoria end of Victoria street, where there is no second hand bookshop of this sort in real life. There was also a large building site next door, which had been the site of the Cabinet Office war rooms and which was now, many years after the war, being noisily rebuilt. But at least the people in the bookshop had a bit of a view for a while, before the new building filled the hole. Get off bus a few hundreds yards up the road and, after hesitating for a moment, decide to walk back and take a closer look. Wander into the shop, thinking to creep in quiet and unobserved, but am spotted by a couple of smartly suited floorwalkers who clearly want to tell me all about their shop before I get any further. Which one of them proceeds to do.

Along the way he tells me of the very elaborate locks used to secure the more expensive books to their bookshelves, rather in the manner of a medieval chained library. The locks were a bit more sophisticated than chains and had all kinds of strange, biometrical keys. I also get presented with a bunch of flowers when I set off on my tour of the shop.

Which turns out to be more like a provincial auction room than a bookshop, with all kinds of second division second hand furniture awaiting sale. Deposit the flowers on one of the second hand tables. Don't find anything of interest in the book department - a lot of the books being far to big and expensive for me - and emerge unscathed to find myself in a street which I ought to know but don't. Everything completely strange. Hilly, which Victoria Street is not. Decide that the way forward is to get a bus. I might be lost but hopefully the bus would not be. So I get on a bus which says it is going to Westminster via Horton Hill - this last being in Epsom rather than anywhere near Westminster. But I should be able to find my way from Westminster to the Home Office. But, unfortunately, the bus pulls up in a bus garage inside Victoria tube station and I am still lost. I think I must have woken up at that point, rather mystified. Unusual in that my dreams are usually more or less complete fabrication, with just a few bits drawn from life, pegs on which to hang the thing, or more or less completely feasible and reasonable. This one falls between the two stools.