Dream geography

For many years I had a recurring dream about being in an immensely high and narrow building, little more than a lift shaft really, with small rooms off it. Apparently it was where I worked, and I was very anxious about being able to operate the lift successfully. Being trapped was an ever present fear. Since September 2001 I have never had this dream, but then during this time I haven’t worked in the building that I thought the dream imagery represented. It never occurred to me at the time that the location might have been New York; that realisation only came retrospectively.

I have other New York dreams, though, one of which starts by the Hudson, at an elevated station near where the twin towers used to stand, and proceeds round the waterfront, Battery Park I suppose, but then mysteriously seems to transform into the Praça do Comércio in Lisbon. Another dream takes me on the Subway to Smith and Carroll, high above Brooklyn, and close to a junk-filled Gowanus Canal. A dream of upper Manhattan is full of brown warehouses; on Central Park West I sob bottomlessly for my favourite Beatle. None of this is very satisfactory. Presented thus it sounds daft and mildly pretentious.

Why, I wonder, do I dream like this? My knowledge of New York isn’t bad; my waking state mental maps of the city likewise. Why does my dreaming brain need to distort geography in this way, and consistently so? Does it tell us anything about the hidden similarities or patterns between places, about suppressed analogies or repressed desires? What is the point of it? Why do I dream that I’ve been to Brazil, on a journey home from the US, when I know full well that I haven’t? Why, in my repetitive dream of Sydney, is the Bridge to the south-east of the city centre rather than the north-west, as in real life? Rearranged thus it doesn’t make for a better city. Could it be that my sleeping cerebral hemispheres fail to compensate for the southern terrestrial hemisphere?

Perhaps a psychologist could help. Would Freud have anything to say, for instance, were he still in business? I’ve nothing against him, although I’m not a huge fan - not that I would, as it were, want to indulge in a Viennetta with (or against) him. Wouldn’t want to slip up or anything. However, I rather fear he might have suspicions about an occasional Liverpool dream of mine which features a building labelled Herman’s Laundry. To make matters worse, it stands right next to the Overhead – which isn’t there any more. Or about my dreamtime obsession with underground stations – suitably matching my daytime obsession with underground stations. Birmingham New Street as a two platformed affair, rather like Baker Street Circle Line station, murky and steam powered. Oh, how I wish it was. Or Holborn as an ecstatic subterranean maze with escalators oozing counter-intuitively out of small holes in the sides of cavernous passages, rather like on the Jubilee Line extension. Then the old escalator thing of being sucked into the mechanism, too amusingly clichéd to be a nightmare. Bliss.

My dream London is very strange, it has to be said, and surprisingly disappointing. Perhaps I spend too many waking hours contemplating the city and thus use up all the best material for things to be otherwise. Mostly the dream version consists of a wide strip of paving slabs in front of the National Gallery. Off to the left (not the right, as it should be) goes Charing Cross Road, beyond which, to the left, is Soho, coloured Prussian Blue (it’s always dawn), and consisting of an enormous hole centred on Berwick Street. (Sometimes, Sigmund, even in Soho, a hole is just an excavation for Crossrail). Long and vague and hugely uninteresting grey roads head northwards – think Goswell Road or City Road in the wrong place – towards mainline stations, just as likely to be Nord, Est or St Lazare as the terrible terminal triplets of Euston Road. Dream Paris, by the way, consists mostly of an open air market with a large slightly sloping empty space in front of it with a really good bookshop in the south-east corner, while the Channel Tunnel reaches all the way from Calais back to London. Which, in a sense, I suppose, it does.

 
In the waking state it’s hard to recall much of the detail, or of further dream-geographic instances, of which I suspect there are many, but once asleep it’s all able to reappear and to connect together. By which time, of course, I’m in no immediate fit state to report back in order to blog. How splendid, though, that this systematic parallel world exists within me, within my mind, a mostly unsuspected but wonderfully wonky information space that tugs at my creative urges and inflames my wanderlust whilst I snore. Well done Chief Designer !

It’s about me, actually

TV reviews are not really my style, but there’s one programme I enjoyed the other day that I feel the need to comment upon. Sean Fletcher, who I hadn’t seen before (my televisual habits being somewhat ungenerous), was walking a stretch of the River Lea towpath in east London. A real treat, offered to us by a man almost gurgling with excitement about his subject, yet who – unlike so many presenters – didn’t get in the way of his material. Instead, what he gave us was half an hour of easily digested information, a useful sample of statistics, explanations, reasons, history, intelligently simplified maps, glorious aerial vistas - plus the stylistic riot that is the Abbey Mills pumping station, the golden gasometers of Bromley-by-Bow and the funny little lighthouse where the Lea meets the Thames.

More importantly, what he gave us – gave me - was his enthusiasm, and a subtle and seductive invitation to explore a part of a great city that many people surely dismiss, if they ever think of it at all, as a drab, post-industrial edgeland. It isn’t, despite the encroaching plasticised banalities of the Olympic Park and done-over Docklands. It’s every bit as varied, as quirky and as fascinating as the rest of London.

What Sean Fletcher demonstrated implicitly is that these sort of place-based programmes (of which there are many) are best aimed at the viewer, at you and me, rather than being about the glorification of the presenter. We see far too much of the sort of characters - some of them genuinely worthy personalities, others less so – who are whisked off to places we might want to visit ourselves, and then encouraged to be embarrassingly inept at skills that require a lifetime to master, or undergoing peculiar procedures, therapeutic, masochistic or otherwise, or gawping at something you’d give your right arm to see, and mouthing “wow” and finding everything “iconic”.  Or someone the other night exploring Sydney, allegedly, and all we saw was the inside of a very ordinary room supposedly at the Opera House, the inside of a tattoo parlour in a seedy suburb, and the inside of a club - full of odd and sweaty people - that could have been (almost) anywhere. What a wasted opportunity.

No, I like to watch a travel documentary that’s all about me – that is, about what I will find at a particular destination, how it will improve my quality of life, why it will make me happy, why I should be interested in it, why it’s visually or otherwise stunning, why it should be important to me and my understanding of the world, why I should go there. Call me egocentric but - with respect  - unless you, the guide, are specifically the subject matter or have a rare talent for inventive presentation, I don’t want a programme about you.

 
So, on that basis I shan’t be going to Sydney in the near future. Admittedly easier and cheaper for me to reach, I will, however, most definitely be revisiting stretches of the River Lea as soon as I can. Thank you, Sean Fletcher, for whetting my appetite, and for channelling that remarkable waterway directly into my field of vision.

We shall soon be arriving at Somewhere Very Dull

No, not Brexit. No chance. Bus announcements, and three observations based on recent travels.

1) Recorded audible announcements, while helpful to the minority, are an intrusion for the majority. Especially if the announcer sounds stroppy, officious, has a weird accent, or thinks that railway stations are called train stations. The technology may be available, but does not necessarily have to be used. If so, why can’t it be focused directly – narrowcasted - to those equipped with properly tuned gadgets? A broadcast to everyone isn’t generally necessary, unless something very unusual (a diversion) or potentially calamitous (an approaching Duke of Edinburgh) is about to occur.

2) If we must have announcements on buses, they should be useful and meaningful. Something like “next stop, town centre”, or “the High Street”, or “the market”. If you are in a rural area and are coming into a small and unfailingly delightful village, you want to hear “Groping Sideways” or “Farting Slightly”, or whatever its name. You don’t want to hear “Boggins Farm” or “Arthur Daley Mansions” or the name of some small thoroughfare of poxy little townhouses that went up last week, “Stoat Droppings View” or whatever, that nobody has ever heard of. Neither do you want to be told what the next stop is, just yet, if it’s four miles away. Nor, if you’re travelling for miles and miles along a very long road, say Watling Street, do you want to be told that “the next stop will be Watling Street”.

3) Again, if we must have these announcements, we don’t want too much of an anticipatory build-up. Not too much preamble and poetry. We don’t need to be teased that “we shall very shortly be arriving in the vicinity of Chlamydia Avenue. Alight here for the Dorothy Clutterice Academy”, or made to get all worked up because “in a moment or two we will be pulling into Salmonella Gardens. Unless it’s Wednesday you can get off here for the Smegma Research Institute”. Least of all do we need a breathless declaration that “we are now commencing our final approach to Horatio Bagwash Crescent”.

If you’re a regular, you’ll know already. If, like me, you’re an old geezer with a bus pass, you won’t be able to stand the excitement – especially as you know very well there’s absolutely no chance that “we are now stopping right outside A&E”.

An Appreciation of Paddy Apling

I was saddened to learn recently of the death of Edward Chatterton “Paddy” Apling on 4th October last year, at the age of 93. From various references on the web it appears that there was much about this man of which I was personally unaware, and so I can only write from my own experience. I never knew him as “Paddy”, only as “Mr Apling”, or by his initials, which I shall use here.

I first met ECA during Fresher’s Week at the University of Reading in October 1968. I had arrived to do a preliminary year prior to a 3 year course in Food Science, and I had been assigned ECA as my tutor, someone who would keep an eye on my progress, someone to whom I could turn if in need of support or advice. Along with another nervous new student I went along to see him, on the London Road “main site” of the university. We’d read all the bumpf about what was expected of us, and presented ourselves in academic gowns. I remember nothing of the meeting except that ECA was affable and pipe-smoking, seemed as nervous as I was, didn’t know what to say, bit his nails, and that as we were leaving he remarked “by the way, I never want to see you wearing those bloody ridiculous garments again”.

Clearly, he didn’t tolerate fools, and could be moody. Around the start of 1970 he began to grow a beard, which eventually settled down into a bright white, but was the subject of some disrespect for a while, as it was going through a badger-like phase of contrasting colours, his head hair being jet black. In one early Food Science lecture someone asked a question which revealed a profound lack of understanding of some particular point and resulted in ECA delivering the rest of the lecture at a painfully slow speed. Obviously he thought he was talking to a bunch of morons. On one occasion around this time he lectured with his flies undone, and on another, admitted that he had forgotten his notes, and talked to us instead about his childhood in Dagenham. On yet another occasion – a double lecture – he said that he “really couldn’t be buggered” and cancelled it. A man with his own agenda, who sensed what was really important, and what didn’t matter all that much.

Although he could and did lecture on most aspects of food science, ECA’s speciality was cereals, and the science and technology of baking and brewing (I think his father had worked as a drayman for Truman’s brewery in Whitechapel). Under his leadership we learned to bake some extremely tasty bread (which by the next day was as hard as concrete), and found out all about the Chorleywood breadmaking process, and the arcane specialisation known as dough rheology, featuring the much derided Brabender apparatus.

 In 1972

ECA, for all his irritability and dislike of pompous authority, was a kind man, and I recall being embarrassed when he made a fuss of me one day when I was going down with flu and feeling terrible, insisting that I went home and had a good sleep. I met him once, not long after graduation, at his home in Sonning Common, when he was in a bad mood because he was jet lagged after a trip to Canada. Thereafter we kept in touch, however, and he was helpful with references for job applications, and then after he retired to rural Norfolk we continued to exchange Christmas cards.

 
I assumed I wouldn’t see him again, and so it was with considerable astonishment that one day in 2008 I received a phone call from him, saying that he was touring the country, dropping in on old friends and colleagues, and that he would like to come and see me. Sure enough, the next day, he turned up in his large camper van, and we enjoyed a pleasant lunch and a natter. We had a good laugh about some of those fondly remembered old times – and people - in Reading. A complex, private, multi-talented man, who I was privileged to know and to count as a friend.

 

In 2008