Sometimes the most innocent passing comment can have the most profound effect. Well, a comment was passed in The Castle at Old Boys and this week it had an effect - a big one. Before the big fella down-under suffers some soft of seizure I’d better explain….

“You are like our little version of Bill Bryson…”

Now, up until this week, Bill Bryson was just an author. Up until Wednesday 2nd February 2005, as far as I was concerned, he wrote several books I have always meant to get around to reading but never quite managed it. You know how it is, I have always felt the same way about The Bible and The Highway Code.

On Wednesday it all changed, I managed to obtain by various means, audio versions of 3 of Bill Bryson’s books, read by the author himself. I squirted them onto my IPOD thingy to listen to at work and skipped up my front path, the weight of my tupperware sandwich box lightly bruising my thigh as my manly satchel bounced against me. I sat at my workstation, twanged my headphones onto my head and prepared for the next 8 hours to fly by in the company of this well respected, popular and no doubt loaded american writer. One minute later I knew it was all over. I AM A LITTLE VERSION OF BILL BRYSON. He talks like me and he writes like me. Little did Stan know what he was saying and what a profound effect it would have on me this week.

My only consolation is that I am pretty sure he has never written about The Duke Of York’s Royal Military School. I won’t be absolutely sure until I read everything he has ever written, which at the current rate will be sometime next Tuesday evening.

So now you know. My secret is out. I have been subconciously piggy-backing on the writings of a bearded American. That’s twice that has happened now. First there was that week last year when I couldn’t stop talking about abolishing slavery and now this.

Strangely enough, this was going to be the first blog entry not to mention the school at all. I have already screwed that up but stay with me until the end and you will be, as always, rewarded for your efforts.

Warning! Scary Bit Below!!

This next bit works better if you imagine me sat in an high-backed leather chair, dressed in a maroon smoking jacket and lit only by a flickering candle. Actually that is scary all on it’s own but there is much more…

I have often related my dreams here and despite not recieving one sympathetic or less-than-sarcastic comment I will continute to do so. I doubt my dreams are that different from anybody else’s, featuring as they do, a mix of the surreal, the Dyrms and my current life. You know how they go, I go to work and find it staffed by you lot and my cats. All of a sudden Sara Burnham gives me a biscuit and Reggie Addams runs off with it. Cue me waking up worried about not having clean brasses for parade. As I have said before, this happens about once a month.

So, in the third installment of my semi-regular dream analysis sessions, its time to relate the story of Monday night this week. It is 1982, a fact I am sure about due to the fact that we moved house about once a year in the 80s. My parents are still married, I am 14 and my sister is 10. We have recently moved to Beaconsfield near London but have journeyed back to Tidworth to have dinner with some friends we made there. I suppose we had left our home in Tidworth about 3 months earlier and for curiosity’s sake we stop to take a look at our old house on the way. It is late evening as we drive up Plantation Road, intending only to take a driveby peek, turn around at the top of the road and head off for dinner with our friends. As we slow down to pass number 12 it is obvious that no-one has moved in and the place is still empty. The grass is knee high and all the lights are off. Dad pulls into the big drive and we all climb out to have a nose about - for what reason exactly, I still can’t remember. It is my goodself who decides to try the (wooden) patio door knob and it is me who freaks out a little to find it unlocked. The power is of course turned off, bathing the interior in cold and shadow. Inside is the weirdest thing of all (to us anyway). It appears that no-one has been in the place since we “marched out” 3 months ago. All the crockery is laid out on the dining room table, upstairs all the linen is laid out just as we left it. Only a smattering of dust gives away the fact that 3 months has passed. As we walk into the kitchen, I see the thing that freaks me out completely. The cereal bowl I had put in the sink on our last morning and forgot to wash is still in the sink. Mum and Dad look at eachother and decide its time to go and I got the sense that this was freaking them out a little too.

On the face of it, there is nothing weird about the above situation except that it felt creepy at the time that all that stuff had just sat there for 3 months undisturbed. But what is weird is that I should have a vivid dream about it 23 years later, an almost completely linear dream that causes me to wake up cold and scared. I cant’ think of anything that would trigger the images and certainly nothing came to mind in the days following.

And then yesterday, mum told me she got a letter from Canada. From the people we had dinner with that night. People we haven’t seen since 1982.

Night Night

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