I HAD A DREAM…
Posted: 08 Feb 2026, 03:01
I HAD A DREAM…….
Written 3 November 2003
Not knowing what other people do when they lay themselves down to sleep means that I am about to run the risk of marking myself down as some sort of curiosity, but no matter….
I suspect I have always been aware of the workings of my brain and awestruck at the results. How does it manufacture a dream where I am in an ethnic bar eating organic sausages? Don’t even bother to explain that one to me. I can remember puzzling about this as a lad as I sat in the air raid shelter listening to the bombs dropping on Stockport. People used to say I was ‘always day-dreaming’.
When I go to bed and have got myself comfortable I consciously instruct my brain to clear out the files and discard any input that isn’t essential. Then I let it off the leash and allow it to run where it will. I can halt the process and wonder at the chain of connections it builds up and how within say six leaps of connection I can get from rain on the window to the importance of dragons in Nordic imagery. It fascinates me that I can range across continents and concepts with no effort at all. I really do enjoy it and the feeling of power that it engenders.
Right, that’s the revelation (?) now to the specifics. I went to bed the other night and found that my mind had flown to Mikel Hecht/Michael Howard and the leadership of the Tory Party. My God, did the images flow in at some speed. I went from his sneer and peculiar speech to musings on his vilification of the very process that had saved his father in the pre-war exodus of the Jews from Europe. Keith Joseph specifying a lunch of two lightly boiled eggs and white toast on a visit to Nelson and Colne college in 1980. Lord Young assuring me that my use of MSC persons was exactly what he had envisaged when the rules were drawn up. M Thatcher leaning towards the camera and saying ‘So there’ after pointing out she was the first PM to have a science degree. Her standing outside Downing Street and talking about ‘our brave boys’ in the Falklands and the sight of Portaloo’s face as Steven Twigg got the vote in 1997.
Normally I drift off to sleep and all these images fade away, they are redundant. The difference was that this sequence woke me up and I lay there thinking do they really think that appointing MH as leader is a good move? How many people were having exactly the same experience that I was having, a re-awakening of some of the most shameful effects of mis-rule.
My mind went to the under-belly of deprived kids who were robbed of the chance to get into work and start a useful course in life because the windfall of North Sea Oil profits was used to finance a pool of unemployment and the breaking of the power of the unions. I said at the time that we had squandered three generations of young people and have had no reason to modify that opinion. What’s wrong with an inefficient industry or public service so long as it is providing employment, financing a stable social structure and producing taxable wealth? I shan’t go on, you get the picture.
The problem is that it wasn’t a dream. Blind obeisance to ‘The Market’ has produced so much damage. ‘The Commanding Heights of the Economy’ are still worthy of public protection. When privatised utilities follow the course of rail privatisation and the lights go off or the water fails we will have a debate and use a lot of sticking plaster but it will be too late. Sometimes I’m glad I’m getting old, it’s their problem now.
So, you can see that the sight of MH standing in the Saatchi Gallery next to a shark pickled in formaldehyde did nothing for my health and temper. What is even more depressing is that these are intelligent men and on the whole they have calculated that enough people will swallow the lies to make the stitch-up worth while. Ah well……
I was going to bombard you with articles about the cars queuing up at the food hand out in Washington or the piece on Bush’s ‘state visit’ here in November or the leader on Iraq spinning out of control. But you know all this. So here are two items that might help alleviate the effects of my gloomy introspection.
First was a letter from a man in Bury asking where they stored the braziers that automatically appear on the picket lines when there is a strike in cold weather.
The second was this:
Lemmings
The vole truth
Leader
Monday November 3, 2003
The Guardian
Lemmings do not after all hurl themselves in large numbers over cliffs. After an intensive study of these vole-like denizens of the Arctic tundra, scientists in Helsinki have come up with a mundane explanation for the dizzying year-to-year oscillations in the lemming population. They say it relates to the varying incidence of the creatures - stoats, owls, skuas - which like to lunch off them. This is mixed news for lemmings: while it frees them from any compulsion they might previously have felt to jump off the edges of cliffs just to comply with convention, it also deprives them of their only conspicuous claim to fame. It is, however, unremittingly dismal news for those who like to spice their writing up with a dash of metaphor, as in "the lemming-like exit of five men in the closing overs cost Sussex much if not quite all of their hard-won initiative against Kent".
From now on, purists will have to abstain from using the adjective lemming-like, except in circumstances where the actions of a group might be aptly compared to those of a vole. And yet there is a chance that the term will persist simply because the language has need of it. All kinds of fallacies long ago disproved by scientists are so deeply embedded in everyday usage that even the most purposeful army of pedants could never now prise them out.
We know, for example, that swans do not customarily sing at the moment of death, yet because we need a term for that final inspiring performance just short of retirement we continue to talk of swansongs. We know that the allegation that ostriches duck out of crises by burying their heads in the sand is a fabrication, yet we need the term "ostrich-like" for the sort of people who almost until the swansong of Iain Duncan Smith were denying that he was lacking in leadership skills. And we still talk of storks bringing babies, even though in this 21st century everyone knows they are found under gooseberry bushes. Meanwhile, stand by for scientists' claims any day now that the stampede of the Gadarene swine had nothing to do with the reasons adduced in chapter eight of St Matthew.
One last thing. I was musing over the Old Norse 'Hafri' = oats and the fact that 'haversack' originates from oatbag and it dawned on me that this was a possible root for Havre Park in Barlick, a name that has always puzzled me. 'Oat Field', now that really is a significant piece of information........
SCG/03 November 2003
Written 3 November 2003
Not knowing what other people do when they lay themselves down to sleep means that I am about to run the risk of marking myself down as some sort of curiosity, but no matter….
I suspect I have always been aware of the workings of my brain and awestruck at the results. How does it manufacture a dream where I am in an ethnic bar eating organic sausages? Don’t even bother to explain that one to me. I can remember puzzling about this as a lad as I sat in the air raid shelter listening to the bombs dropping on Stockport. People used to say I was ‘always day-dreaming’.
When I go to bed and have got myself comfortable I consciously instruct my brain to clear out the files and discard any input that isn’t essential. Then I let it off the leash and allow it to run where it will. I can halt the process and wonder at the chain of connections it builds up and how within say six leaps of connection I can get from rain on the window to the importance of dragons in Nordic imagery. It fascinates me that I can range across continents and concepts with no effort at all. I really do enjoy it and the feeling of power that it engenders.
Right, that’s the revelation (?) now to the specifics. I went to bed the other night and found that my mind had flown to Mikel Hecht/Michael Howard and the leadership of the Tory Party. My God, did the images flow in at some speed. I went from his sneer and peculiar speech to musings on his vilification of the very process that had saved his father in the pre-war exodus of the Jews from Europe. Keith Joseph specifying a lunch of two lightly boiled eggs and white toast on a visit to Nelson and Colne college in 1980. Lord Young assuring me that my use of MSC persons was exactly what he had envisaged when the rules were drawn up. M Thatcher leaning towards the camera and saying ‘So there’ after pointing out she was the first PM to have a science degree. Her standing outside Downing Street and talking about ‘our brave boys’ in the Falklands and the sight of Portaloo’s face as Steven Twigg got the vote in 1997.
Normally I drift off to sleep and all these images fade away, they are redundant. The difference was that this sequence woke me up and I lay there thinking do they really think that appointing MH as leader is a good move? How many people were having exactly the same experience that I was having, a re-awakening of some of the most shameful effects of mis-rule.
My mind went to the under-belly of deprived kids who were robbed of the chance to get into work and start a useful course in life because the windfall of North Sea Oil profits was used to finance a pool of unemployment and the breaking of the power of the unions. I said at the time that we had squandered three generations of young people and have had no reason to modify that opinion. What’s wrong with an inefficient industry or public service so long as it is providing employment, financing a stable social structure and producing taxable wealth? I shan’t go on, you get the picture.
The problem is that it wasn’t a dream. Blind obeisance to ‘The Market’ has produced so much damage. ‘The Commanding Heights of the Economy’ are still worthy of public protection. When privatised utilities follow the course of rail privatisation and the lights go off or the water fails we will have a debate and use a lot of sticking plaster but it will be too late. Sometimes I’m glad I’m getting old, it’s their problem now.
So, you can see that the sight of MH standing in the Saatchi Gallery next to a shark pickled in formaldehyde did nothing for my health and temper. What is even more depressing is that these are intelligent men and on the whole they have calculated that enough people will swallow the lies to make the stitch-up worth while. Ah well……
I was going to bombard you with articles about the cars queuing up at the food hand out in Washington or the piece on Bush’s ‘state visit’ here in November or the leader on Iraq spinning out of control. But you know all this. So here are two items that might help alleviate the effects of my gloomy introspection.
First was a letter from a man in Bury asking where they stored the braziers that automatically appear on the picket lines when there is a strike in cold weather.
The second was this:
Lemmings
The vole truth
Leader
Monday November 3, 2003
The Guardian
Lemmings do not after all hurl themselves in large numbers over cliffs. After an intensive study of these vole-like denizens of the Arctic tundra, scientists in Helsinki have come up with a mundane explanation for the dizzying year-to-year oscillations in the lemming population. They say it relates to the varying incidence of the creatures - stoats, owls, skuas - which like to lunch off them. This is mixed news for lemmings: while it frees them from any compulsion they might previously have felt to jump off the edges of cliffs just to comply with convention, it also deprives them of their only conspicuous claim to fame. It is, however, unremittingly dismal news for those who like to spice their writing up with a dash of metaphor, as in "the lemming-like exit of five men in the closing overs cost Sussex much if not quite all of their hard-won initiative against Kent".
From now on, purists will have to abstain from using the adjective lemming-like, except in circumstances where the actions of a group might be aptly compared to those of a vole. And yet there is a chance that the term will persist simply because the language has need of it. All kinds of fallacies long ago disproved by scientists are so deeply embedded in everyday usage that even the most purposeful army of pedants could never now prise them out.
We know, for example, that swans do not customarily sing at the moment of death, yet because we need a term for that final inspiring performance just short of retirement we continue to talk of swansongs. We know that the allegation that ostriches duck out of crises by burying their heads in the sand is a fabrication, yet we need the term "ostrich-like" for the sort of people who almost until the swansong of Iain Duncan Smith were denying that he was lacking in leadership skills. And we still talk of storks bringing babies, even though in this 21st century everyone knows they are found under gooseberry bushes. Meanwhile, stand by for scientists' claims any day now that the stampede of the Gadarene swine had nothing to do with the reasons adduced in chapter eight of St Matthew.
One last thing. I was musing over the Old Norse 'Hafri' = oats and the fact that 'haversack' originates from oatbag and it dawned on me that this was a possible root for Havre Park in Barlick, a name that has always puzzled me. 'Oat Field', now that really is a significant piece of information........
SCG/03 November 2003
