pumpkinstrokemarrow

More trouble down at the allotment with the live stock - or rather wild stock. My allotment neighbour had been telling me about some vegetable chat room he belonged to where there had been long discussions about mice and broad beans. It seems that quite a number of people had had their bean plantings decimated (or worse. One could live with one in ten) by mice, who, it seems, are attracted to the smell of the beans. The answer was to grow your beans in deep pots (so as to give the strong central root space), take them out of the pots, remove what is left of the bean and plant the plant less the bean out in the ground. The plant less the bean does not smell and does not attract the mice. To which my response was that this seemed like a lot of bother for broad beans which seemed to come up pretty well without anything of that sort. Or planting two beans to the hole - which would start to get a bit expensive the number that I plant.

Next day, down on the allotment to complete the third row, and there were signs of excavation in the first and second rows. Entirely consistant with the activity of small rodents. Odd that I should never have noticed such activity before but that it arrives the day after notification. Still, got to keep moving forward. Third row now in. Maybe we need a bit of rain to re-consolidate the surface to keep the wee mice out.

Third row associated to third year in some film I saw many years ago about the thirty years war. There was much devastation and destruction of growing crops. The story was that the peasants were persistant types and would carry on planting after destruction for three years. After that they would give up. Take to the bottle or become a bandit or something.

And a few days ago had a dream about some speciality shops that I am quite sure I used to dream about some years ago on a reasonably regular basis. Entirely fictitious: one in back streets behind Victoria Station, another in back streets to the immediate East of Trafalgar Square and one more woolly one further to the East. But on awakening, with the shop in question still vivid, when one tries to probe for more detail, the vision collapses. Vividity is no more. Rather as if it is just a peice of scenary built for a film or for a theatre and which will not bear close inspection.

Scenary associated to obscene - the derivation of which, I learnt recently, is 'on stage'. From 'ob' for to or towards and 'scena' scene or stage. Which meant things which were on stage, on view as it were, which should not be. The meaning gradually contracting to its present meaning. Which derivation strikes me as an oddly off-centre and ironic. I would have expected something more direct about the unpleasantness of whatever it was.

Also to a book about dreams which I also read some years ago by one J Allan Hobson of the Harvard Medical School. As well as providing a lot of useful material about sleep, Mr Hobson seemed to be very concerned to consign the views of Mr Freud to the dustbin. He went on and on about it. His view was that dreams were rubbish. Bits and peices floating around, assembled into apparently meaningful assemblies but which were not. I am sure he is wrong; that there is room for both views. That dreams are bits and peices, but they do, some of the time at least, have psychic import. That they do tell us something important about ourselves, or at least about our then current condition. Perhaps Mr Hobson had a bad experience with a Freudian shrink when he was a young and troubled adolescent and has hated the Freudians ever since.

Must be gradually acquiring a taste for literary biography, this being a genre I have largely eschewed for nearly sixty years. So my parents having read Aldous Huxley with great gusto 75 years ago, and my having read him with similar gusto (I must have understood very little of what I was reading. At least at the level of emotional intelligence. A deficiency which seems to be oddly appropriate, given what the biography (see below) says about the author) 45 years ago, I have now acquired a two volume biography by one Sybill Bedford - who, as it happens, my mother was also rather keen on. Courtesy of an Oxfam charity shop in Kingston - where the central shop is very expensive, but this one, the off centre one, has much more sensible prices. With the result that I now have three heavy weight biographies of literary heavy weights. A by-product of an expedition to do with the far more serious business of new worktops for the kitcher.

This biography is full of interesting snippets and insights. Some of these last arising, I think, from the fact that Ms Bedford is herself a writer - not just a biographer - which is not quite the same thing. So Huxley has the enviable distinction of a walk on part in Proust, under his own name. As opposed to some recognisable and unflattering fragment of him appearing under a nom-de-clef. I wonder what kind of accolade would be the equivalent today? He also spent a lot of time on Latin at Eton. It seems that for a time, Tuesdays from 8 until 8 were devoted to Latin and a good part of that time was devoted to Latin verse. That is to say that the teacher would hand out some chunk of Tennyson, Wordsworth or whatever and invite the class (each pupil separately) to translate the chunk into Doric streptameters or whatever. It seems there is quite a choice of sorts of Latin verse that one might translate into. But it seems that he loathed the Anglo Saxon to which he had to devote so much time at Oxford. So not one of the Tolkein gang at all. There is also a not very flattering anecdote about Joyce from a dinner at which they were both guests.