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View Article  Some bits of pocket fluff
Idly browsing on Wikipedia, I found myself with an old favourite poem, John Donne's Meditation XVII, replete with delicious quotations and phrases. Skipped from there to Valediction: Forbidding Mourning with its rather, ahem, specific compasses metaphor.  Smiled, and browsed on.  A scant twenty minutes later, a link on another site altogether mentioned that Stephen Fry had a morning slot about language on Radio 4, and posted a listen again link.  I duly listened.  It was about metaphor.  Not really all that special as a programme, so I got on with other things.  While making a cup of tea, drifting from the living room I heard Mr. Fry's silken voice intoning,
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Don't know where I'd be without such happy synchronicities.

I've been having quite vivid dreams lately, and remembering them quite clearly, due, I've no doubt, to sleeping with the window open at this time of year, and the streets of Romford being extra-specially noisy.  An interrupted sleep tends to be a dream-rich sleep, after all.
Last night was no exception. The subject matter however, mystified me.  Regular readers will know I have a tendency to emotional victimhood, bewailing ad nauseam my solitude and inability to acquire any sort of love life.  For a host of reasons, that's been my prevailing mood over the last few weeks, and in particular this long weekend; last night producing a sort of decision, if no actual solutions.  I went to bed with a mind more than usually full of wild and emotional thought, fully expecting some powerful dreams. I was not disappointed, but I did not dream of love, nor of its lack.
Instead I had two quite distinct and separate dreams, each in their own way dealing with creativity, and its abuse by those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.  A thing about which I have strong feelings, certainly, but not something that's been much on my mind recently, so goodness knows where it came from.
View Article  What a shame
How wonderful to find that Keeper of Traken has a commentary by Anthony Ainley, recorded just before his sad demise a few years ago.

How sad that Johnny Byrne, Matthew Waterhouse and Sarah Sutton, are so busy talking about their own participation, that Anthony barely gets two words in.  Would have loved to hear a commentary with Tom and Anthony, but sadly it was never to be.
View Article  It's all about me
So what is it? Hmm?  What is it about me?  It's clearly something major, but something so fundamental, that I can't see it myself.

What is it about me, that every person, every single person, I've ever felt a genuine attraction to, has plonked me firmly in "not boyfriend material" box?  Always, I've been the friend, never the lover.  I freely admit I'm hardly an Adonis, but people do, occasionally, tell me they find me attractive.  Which is lovely, but they're never, ever, people that I find attractive. 
Am I, as I've sometimes feared, simply terminally dull?  Do I subconsciously twist the heads off chickens while I talk?  Do I have, unbeknownst to me, the shifty, drooling look of the vaudeville lech? What?

In eighteen months time, I shall be fifty.  Am I really to reach that landmark having never once shared a moment of intimacy with anybody I cared about?
View Article  A tiny inspiration
While I was in Edinburgh, I had a kind of half-dream, which I remembered only dimly at the time, and don't remember at all now.
When I awoke from it, though the dream itself faded, it set me off musing, as I dozed and drifted towards full consciousness. I found I was imagining a possible scene for an as-yet-unwritten play.  Just the scene though - no story, no context, not even anything like a character. It seemed a nice scene though.
In due course I got up, and promptly forgot all about it.

Just came back to me, over a week later, so I wrote it down - purely as stage directions, no dialogue (since there was none in the scene I imagined).  I picked a character name out of the air, just to have a handle for the person whose actions I was describing - it could always be changed later.

Then I saved it, and, in naming the file, suddenly found that, entirely by accident, by randomly naming the character, I had also given the play a title, and what's more, a suggestion of a plot.

Rather chuffed.  I've no idea if I'll ever add any more to it, but it's genuinely the first time I've had a proper idea for a play that didn't immediately make me cringe.  Intriguing experience.
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