Don't be so facetious

 

There has been a fair amount of time spent in churches of late not for all the happiest of reasons either, but those stories are for another time.

There is something about being in the church which makes it quite hard (for me) to be there being serious and contemplative, and it’s to do with a particular word which tends to come up a lot, because it is church after-all, and the word is Christ. I can’t hear the word now without my brain flicking immediately to a very particular character from a very particular BBC drama. (I wonder if anyone will know where my brain goes when hearing that word before I get to the end of this daft ditty, when I shall tell you.)

But it means if I am sitting in quiet contemplation under the roof of the church and a vicar starts wanging on about Christ, it’s hard to continue concentrating on the job at hand, without a small immature chuckle and a wondering of the mind.

Then when my usually quite empty brain starts moving in this auto-word-association manner, I am launched back in time to prep-school where I was taught science by a man called Alan.

Poor Alan. He didn’t stand a chance against us awful south England uppity children. Alan was from Up North and he had a ginger beard and tight belly squished snugly into what can only be described as golfers-jumpers. We used to laugh at him constantly. He would stand at the front of the class aggressively scratching his ginger beard (don’t get me wrong, many of the absolute best people have red hair, my first ever kiss was in a graveyard with scrumptious chap with light strawberry-blond hair and a face of freckles).

But we were also quite frightened by Alan, he had a powerful shout and a scorching scowl and we didn’t always understand what he was saying, which grants a bit of authority (because even bratty 10 year olds can’t constantly say what/pardon/excuse me? to find out how to light a bunsen burner without beginning to feel stupid).

Oh how he disliked us. Going into his science lab was never easy – it smelt strongly of vinegar and he would make us cut up red cabbages to see what colours they were made from by soaking them onto blotting paper. The most interesting class we had with him was when he prepared us for the appearance of Hayleys Comet – a once in a 75-year chance; we didn’t see the comet though as we all had to be in our chilly metal framed beds when it passed over school. (I’ll be 85 when it next passes through our sky, so possibly dead or on another metal framed bed in a different sort of institution...)

Because we were a fairly foul bunch of kids we gave him the nickname Fungi. And we would howl with laughter thinking about Fungi and draw cartoons of giant red and white spotty toadstools in his class. There’s no way he couldn’t have seen them and wondered of the provenance of this name. I suspect it was as basic as the fungi being red and livid looking.

He once got so angry with us (proving to us that red heads really are angrier people) that he shouted loudly over our heads: DON’T BE SO FACETIOUS! And the way he spat out the word facetious has never, ever left me. So when I am having little moments in church tripping over the word Christ and having a chuckle, my thoughts bring me back to that vinegary classroom and Alan yelling (dangly thing in his throat waggling manically) full throttle in his northern accent (proving to us that Northerners really are angrier people). He really lost his shit.

To give him his due, he got us – well, me, at least – back in spades, by showing us the terrifying film Poltergeist a few weeks later one weekend (I believe it was an 18-cert. We were 10.).

I didn’t sleep in my grim metal framed bed for many months after that, in the certain knowledge I'd be taken from my bed by a posessed tree.

(Did you guess? It’s Alison Steadman as Pam in Gavin and Stacey “OH MY CHRIST MICHAEL”, clutching her cheeks with both hands. If you’re called Christ, or Michael for that matter, I’m afraid I can’t take you seriously anymore. Word associations, it appears, stick for a very very long time.) 

 

Ah, it's the change.

Oh no! It's The Change!

And there go the flowers... The gladioli are listing to one side like a tall yacht mast in a storm; roses which got caught unopened in the downpours last week are now melting into brown balls of sad unfolded petals; and the leaves on the trees have started very quietly to turn, the bold beech greens losing out to a murkier pond-like hew. As though if they do it without making too much noise we won't notice and kick up a stink. Shhh. Don't tell them it's time.

Another sign of The Change is the bantams are moulting. There are feathers all over the garden. The cockerel, Buttercup, in particular looks pathetically scrawny, he struts around the garden a bit embarrassed by his feathery discord but trying to remain handsome for his lady-friends who are looking quite healthy and shiny. It's like when you turn up to a party having misread the invite - everyone is in their spangly disco kit and you've come in your old gardening jeans covered in mud, held up with a piece of string. I feel for Buttercup. I know he knows he's in the wrong clothes. It is hard to hold your head up high and crow with confidence when you're in your underwear.

Meanwhile, and I don't tell the bantams this, yesterday I saw four dead pigeons, as though they had just given up on it all. They foresaw 6-months of rain, darkness, muddy footpaths, thunderous gun-fire ricochetting around the valley and just felt it was easier to drop dead out of the sky than stick out another endlessly wet winter.

The Weather is also Changing. It is representative at times of the natural world enacting the experience of a menopausal human woman. The inconsistency of the garden thermometer is a valid starting point. Hitting 18 degrees in the day, dropping to 4 overnight - the sweats to the shivers with the nonchalant rise and fall of the sun. The unpredictable moodiness of the winds - one moment blowing a gale, dropping with no warning to as still as a glassy lake. Trees falling down in rageful surrender as their drought ridden roots can no longer cope with the squalls, while in the boarders of a garden the vibrant dahlias are in full bloom laughing in their joyful mad colourful bursts of energy, firmly denying the pending loss of light and heat. The fields all ploughed and brown and lumpy and barren, yet here are the lawns as green as they have ever been this year, needing to be mown weekly by surprised gardeners. The restless sleeplessness at night - waking to the owls screeching and the mad moon shining in through the crack in a curtained window, the world can't sleep when it's going through The Change...

The mood swings, the highs the lows, the chaos - it's autumnal vibes alright, lunacy almost, contradictions, inconsistencies, fog, the cheeky laughing-at-you-all with the mystery we cannot control.

And talking of parties where you misread the invite, who the heck invited all the spiders to the web-making-party across the doorway, so on the way out to your confusing walk (jumper on, jumper off, jumper back on, no, off again, sweating, frozen, sighing, swearing WTF) you have to get through 8 invisible webs and just pray that the spider hasn't fallen into your hair enroute. I'll tell you who invited them: the f'ing Weathopause (my new name for autumn), that's who.

Next issue: ranting country woman gets sucked into a muddy quagmire and finally there is peace in the valley.

Am I dreaming...

Do you have recurring dreams? I have regular recurring dreams and for some reason they are generally mainly of the anxiety genre. I know I have the daily challenges like getting out of bed in the morning and the work challenges like I ought to work more and harder and the what's actually in my bank at the moment challenges and the oh crapsticks my hair is definitely greyer this morning challenges. But I lead a relatively peaceful existence, thanks to the calming influence of the half Egyptian Pharoah Hound who lives with us, so when I have these dreams I rub my chin and lean on my elbow and question where it's come from. 

There are two main dreams I have. 

The first is about trying to go up a hill and my legs are so tired and malcoordinated that I can't really move, and the hill (it's always an interpretation of the hill I can see out of my bedroom window) seems to bend up steeper and steeper to the point where there is a risk I might actually fall off it. Meanwhile there is an urgency to go up it despite the danger of the climb. But I can't. So I have this wading and heavy feeling over my whole body. In this moment of dreamworld paralysis I also am trying to use my phone to make an emergency call but for some reason I can't work out how to even switch it on. And then the dream ends. My body tense. Probably a little clammy too. Nice.

The second dream is a tooth dream. I'm chewing gum (which in real life is a hateful thing to do, I strongly disagree with its existence) and it fills my mouth. Fuller and fuller to the point where I need to spit it out else I may gag, but I can't get rid of it and as I am chewing I realise there are actual teeth in the hateful gum, my teeth, which are merging into the gum and now such a big ball of crunching chokingness that I can't talk. And I know there are gaping holes in my gums because I am chewing my own teeth. The frustration at not being able to get the gum and teeth out of my mouth is visceral. 

I used to have a whole heap of orthodontic work as a teenager and I think some of the visuals for this particular dream emanate from that period. Rubber bands. Head gear. Double layers of train tracks. Visits to the orthodontist to get them tightened. Headaches. Humiliation. My boyfriend naming me Metal Micky. Bits of food hanging off the tracks. It was a fun time. It's a relief to wake from this dream. No missing teeth. No bits stuck in my mouth.

But now I have a new recurring dream. It's an extremely happy dream that then becomes an extremely sad wake up moment. I dream in a variety of scenarios that Dad is hanging out with me. In a recent dream which is particularly memorable we are walking through some meadows in the village and we are both laughing like drains. We are bent double laughing (so much so that in my sleep I think I can feel myself actually laughing) because we are trying to make a plan to work out how to tell people that he's not dead any more and it's utterly hilarious. We are talking about going on social media to let people know and then cracking up. At one point in the dream I think he's holding my hand and I can feel his slightly rough and dry outdoor-work-man-skin. It's so damned real. It's actually insane what the brain tells you is real in a moment. Waking up from that is a toughy. 

So I looked up 'dreams' on the internet and there was a strange page about 'vivid dreams' which went into the causes of 'vivid dreams' - one being early stages of pregnancy (oh no! what? how did that happen!) or possibly being schizophrenic... Neither of which seem that feasible for me right now. 

I guess Freud may have a point - that dreams might reflect unresolved emotions, hidden desires and fears generally, but I also liked a bit I saw, in a probably unsubstantiated article, around how back in the day the Egyptians saw dreams as divine messages. Without sounding like a total wanker I'd prefer to think I'm receiving Divine Messages. And in that vein my half Egyptian Pharoah Hound is sending me a divine message right now, the message is this: get off that bloody computer and take me for a walk.