Beyond Selidor

The sun and warmth continues, and I've tried to spend as much time as possible outdoors and moving this weekend. The less said about the state of my mental health, the better — but there are still nice things.

Yesterday, Matthias and I walked for about 10km to the village of Sutton, which was having a beer festival. (I don't drink beer, but I like the vibes of beer festivals in new-to-me venues.) The first half of the walk is lovely: on a little public footway across the typical flat East Anglian fields, then through the village of Witchford (very picturesque), and past an excellent farm and gardening shop. After that, however, the second half of the walk is on a footpath/cycle path along a major motorway, and although it's not difficult to walk (flat footpath all the way), it's very noisy and cluttered with speeding cars.

The beer festival was — incongruously, to my mind — in a church, and was a fairly standard rural English affair: lots of families with little children running wildly around the church, a handful of older men who I see from time to time around Ely, dogs of various sizes, and a massive group of Morris dancers. Matthias and I stayed for a few hours, then caught the little bus back into town (which, astonishingly, arrived on time, and took exactly as long as it was supposed to take on the drive back to central Ely). The weather was so lovely that we stayed out in town, hanging out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar (along with everyone else, it seemed), and then eating dinner out in a newish restaurant that we'd been wanting to try for a while.

We were home early, and I was already tired enough by 8pm or so to want to go to bed, but tried to keep myself awake until a reasonable hour ... and of course when I did want to go to sleep, it eluded me for hours, and then was filled with ridiculous anxiety dreams (the dream in which I struggled for what felt like hours to get Zoom to load to teach a class at work, after which point one of my dream!students remarked sourly that if their trainer was unable to get Zoom to work, they didn't trust me to be competent enough to teach the content of the class, seemed too much on the nose even for me).

This morning, I dragged my exhausted self off to the pool, and dragged myself through the sunlit water, then returned home for the usual Sunday morning crepes, and laundry (the sight of which, hanging outside, drifting gently in the warm breeze, did lift my spirits). Matthias and I wandered around town, browsing a few stalls at the market, and generally enjoying the sense of everyone enjoying the first stirrings of spring.

This afternoon will be yoga, and reading, and rest.

Reading this week has been almost exclusively rereads, as I continue my nostalgic way through 1990s Australian YA novels. This time, this consisted of two series by two different authors: Robin Klein's Melling Sisters trilogy (historical fiction about four sisters growing up in genteel poverty in rural 1940s Australia, with a scatterbrained, dreamy mother, and a credulous father who has a tendency to be taken in by all kinds of get rich financial scams — prospecting for gold, buying shares in struggling farms or factories), and Libby Hathorn's Thunderwith and Chrysalis, about a teenage girl taken in by her father and stepmother after her mother's death, struggling to find herself in a life marked by loss and unmooring changes. Both series were as good as I remembered them — Klein's historical fiction in particular, which strikes a perfect balance between wacky childhood hijinks and a serious examination of the pain and petty humilations that come from living so close to the edge of financial disaster — and although they covered serious subject matter, they were exactly the kind of rest my brain needed.

The other book I read — Victoria Amelina's posthumously published Looking at Women Looking at War — was an exquisite piece of writing, and I feel I can't do justice to it in my current state. I'm hopeful I may be able to come back to it later and say more.

The breeze drifts through the open windows. The garden is alive with flocks of wood pigeons, and pairs of blackbirds. There are pink blossoms on the quince trees. The daffodils are promising to bloom, any day now.

Last night I dreamt that my younger sister had written an entire PhD thesis in six months and just passed her viva. My mother's response: 'See, it's really easy. I don't know what you're complaining about.'

Term has started again. Inevitably, I've caught a dreadful cold, despite not having gone anywhere besides my own house and the local shops in weeks. Yesterday I nearly lost my voice showing our new first-year undergrads around three different libraries. (They pay you £38 per hour to do this. I wasn't going to let a cold stop me.)

The thesis drags on. I'm attempting to have the final draft done by the end of the week. Needless to say, it takes longer than six months to complete a PhD.

I woke up today with such a strong impression of the final moments of my dream, and those final moments were so disturbingly bizarre that I thought I'd share.

I met my sister in the street in the early hours of the Sydney morning. We had obviously both been at parties, and were about to meet up to travel elsewhere, probably to a family event.

We both gave one another the kind of bemused, confused looks that you give when you're about to say, 'That party I was at last night was the STRANGEST experience I've ever had.' She opened her mouth, no doubt to regale me with the wacky adventures and shenanigans she'd got up to. I interrupted her.

'Yeah, but did yours involve Darth Vader and whipped cream?'

Sometimes, I really, really, really don't want to know.

I've stared at a screen for far too long. Snédgus and Mac Riagla are tap-dancing on my skull. The Men of Ross are keeping time by beating my brow with sticks. Donnchad mac Domnall is threatening to burn me alive in a house...oh, oops, that's what actually happens in my dissertation core texts...

Anyway, rather than doing what any sane person would do when faced with a migraine of such epic proportions, I'm blogging. Yay!

( dreams, writing and music lurk within )

The background to this: I had a dream where Peter Costello, the former Treasurer of Australia, read fanfiction. I was talking to one of my friends about it on Facebook.

( much bizarreness ensues )

I don't often dream this symbolically...

The beginning doesn't really matter, except that it established, in that way that you just know in dreams, that I was a 12-year-old boy who lived at the top of a tower with a younger sister. And my father, whose friend, for reasons that never were explained, wanted to eat me. Well, being a fairly life-loving boy, I didn't want to be eaten, and I escaped from the tower and hung out for a bit at the town down the bottom, but eventually accepted my fate.

I began the long climb up the ladder that stretched 170 floors to the top of the tower. It was very high and windy, and clouds floated past below me. Finally, I reached the top of the ladder. I had to step out from the enclosed ladder onto a narrow bridge, shaped something like the sole of a foot, and walk across it to the house at the top of the tower (where, presumably, I'd be eaten). But the thought of leaving the protective ladder filled me with horror. I looked at that exposed bridge, and blanched. I froze. And froze. And froze. I could not move forward, but I was now too frightened to climb down again. I stood, frozen in terror, at the top of the ladder upon which I had struggled, for hours, to climb, staring at the bridge onto which I must step, and could not move.

In case you don't know, I've just spent about a year applying for a place at Cambridge, and yesterday I did the last of the paperwork - sending off my student visa application. If all goes well, I'll be travelling all the way to the other side of the world, away from all that is familiar and safe.

Symbolism indeed. God knows where the stuff about being eaten comes from, though.