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Friday, April 26, 2002 14:28
It is not a haggisThis really weird thing happened last night. I went to bed, far later than I had intended, then apparently 'fell asleep' immediately. A lot then happened, a lot lot, and while I can vaguely remember the face of a woman with wavy reddish-blonde hair, perfect skin and an angelic smile, and I know that what was happening was very important, I can't remember any details (except that my Mum was in it somewhere). Afterwards, I woke up very suddenly and as far as I was concerned it was much, much later. Possibly days later. I looked up and said "Why is it dark?" Frood said "Because we've only just gone to bed". Although I'd been away for days, only about a minute had gone past in the physical. Strange how that happens. Then, this morning, I was dreaming about attending a dinner of the Pudding Club. Except we were on the main course, which was some sort of ham, served with broccoli, baby courgettes and petit pain (you know, those miniature squash things). This all came in a sort of potage, and, not currently eating meat and it being very important that I didn't eat meat, I was somewhat perturbed. the woman at my table, who was quite important and it was necessary that I make a good impression, was a 'strict' vegetarian and I wasn't sure what to do. The dinner was silver service and the waitress asked me if I'd like some of the ham. I said no. She then served me with vegetables, which were, of course, covered in meat juices. I was rather dismayed, but the woman with me was also served vegetables covered in meat juices and didn't seem at all concerned. Evidently vegetarian doesn't mean the same thing wherever it was that the dream took place. Of course, my morning alarm woke me up before I got to the pudding course, which is really rather distressing, as it was a meeting of the Pudding Club, after all. We should have joined while we were still in Oxford. Currently my diet is getting cleaner than ever. I'm experiencing a severe protein need and cravings for really fresh, raw food like salads. I've experienced my first ever craving for brown rice, and have suddenly found myself obliged to reintroduce fish to my diet. Not entirely sure why my body is making these sudden demands, but I'm helpless in the face of my biochemical requirements. Must....have....protein. It's blowing a bloody gale out there now. If you don't hear from me ever again you'll know I've been blown off my bike underneath a passing lorry on my way home. Still. It's Friday. There's always a bright side.
Thursday, April 25, 2002 16:47
Not so MerrivaleIt has been a very strange couple of weeks. Last week we were on holiday, a whole five days off work in a row. On the Saturday we went to Maidencombe to have another attempt at catching spider crabs to cook on the pyromid. The Booze Monkey and I spent all of around 5 minutes in the water before giving up due to poor visibility. I don't just mean poor - Budleigh Salterton a few weeks ago was poor. This was abysmal. This was the sort of visibility in which you can't see a rock even if your hand is touching it. I tried to get down to a lobster pot that I'd dived before, and it got dark at 5m. That was not a pleasant snorkel. I also managed to lose the grid for my kelly kettle - the beach ate it. Other than that, and aside from the small yappy dogs who were present for the first couple of hours, it was pleasant enough. The pyromid does wonders for beef, I can thoroughly recommend that. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday out on Dartmoor - what a faff. Our plan was just to jump on a bus up to Exeter and then find one going to Princetown or Two Bridges. In the off season? You have got to be joking. The woman in the information office told us quite bluntly that there was no way we'd get onto the moors at this time of the year. The closest we could get, according to her, was Okehampton. Now I know that she was the one behind the desk, but I found this very difficult to believe. We decided to go for Tavistock, because that was just about within walking distance of Merrivale, which was our intended destination for the first night. This required a change at Okehampton. On the offchance, we stopped in at the Okehampton tourist information office on our way to the pub, and the lady there was extremely helpful. With her help, we found ourselves on a bus to Tavistock, with an hour stopover there, then another bus that took us from Tavistock bus station direct to Merrivale. Merrivale is a complex of two stone rows, several cairns and cists, and two stone circles (one of which is only 3 and a half feet in diameter!) Aubrey Burl says that it is well worth spending an extended period there, because there is so much to see, and I decided it would be nice to spend the night near a megalithic site of that complexity. When we got there, however, having trudged up from the bus stop, I found myself strangely disappointed. For all my love of megaliths and prehistoric sites, this really did nothing for me. It was like Stonehenge, only more like just a pile of rocks rather than something that has lost its beauty to tourism. I can't decide whether it was just that this site has lost something, whether it is hiding, or whether the ongoing changes happening with me right now are affecting my ability to connect with these places. We wandered about a bit, made rather half-hearted 'ooh' noises, then decided to head up towards Great Mis Tor, with a view to finding a nice hut circle in which to sleep (we have this standing invitation to come to tea in a hut circle, and we very much intend to take it up). We spotted that the Merrivale firing range was just beyond, and we had already observed red flags on Great Mis Tor, but we weren't entirely sure what they meant, so decided to go up to Little Mis Tor and read one of the notice boards. The notice boards confirmed that firing was taking place, and this was confirmed again when a man in dirty fluorescents, on a horse, trailed by a couple of happy looking border collies, trotted over and asked us whether we intended to go onto the firing range. We assured him we did not, that we were just going as far as the top of Great Mis Tor to get a look at the view. He nodded and mentioned that they might still be firing before wending his way across the moor towards the road. We did that, staring over at our intended hut circles (Grid ref SX 5580 7790), which were absolutely glorious and gave me a real pang of disappointment that we weren't going to be able to get there. The hut circles and settlement affected me in the way I would have expected the stone circle and rows to have done, which was quite odd. With a promise to return when they were more accessible we turned round and spent the (pretty damn cold) night near a river, with the sound of the water rushing and ponies munching on grass. The next day we walked to Princetown. Dartmoor prison is a serious place. It has a starkness about it in the same way that some industrial buildings have. It very much looked like an industrial building, where the cogs in the plant inside were the prisoners. A sort of human machine. It reminded me of some of Scarfe's imagery from the Pink Floyd album The Wall, which I suppose is entirely appropriate. We had lunch in the pub, accompanied by a couple of pints of jail ale, then started the convoluted process of finding our way back to Exeter. We decided to go by Plymouth, to circumnavigate Dartmoor by public transport. This was rather more eventful than we had intended, as our bus became involved in an altercation with a tree, and our window was smashed. I ended up with blood dripped from my hands and arm where the glass had collapsed on top of me, trying to brush it off my clothes and out of my hair without getting any in my eyes. In the end I had to strip off down to my underwear, practically, and with a bunch of high school kids in the back as well (I believe they were suitably impressed by my calm and pragmatic attitude). A swift wipe with some iodine pads and all was fine, although the delay did mean that I missed T'ai Chi. The next morning I felt quite ill as well, and was quite sick all day, so had to take the day off work. I felt quite anxious and panicky about being apart from Frood for a few days after that as well. Anyway. Back to the grind now, and I'm really not enjoying my job at the moment. I'm not feeling stretched, except in terms of getting lots done in not much time. The challenge is getting through the volume of work, not in the intricacies of the work itself (there are none) and I'm feeling as if my skills are being wasted. I've even started looking around at other jobs - I'm not doing what I want to do, but I suppose I could at least get paid a decent wage for doing something that isn't what I want to do. Besides, property prices down here continue to escalate inexorably, and it would be kind of nice to move somewhere where we could afford to buy the sort of property that we need. I suppose I could always turn my attention back to writing and try to save the world by influencing people the way Kim Stanley Robinson influenced me. I could work anywhere I chose to then. Pipe dreams.
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