Sniff

I dreamed I was teaching Christianity to a group of Muslim converts. I hadn't done any preparation and the class was progressing at a snail's pace as I desperately improvised the lesson. The Bible wasn't helping. I started to expound the Feeding of the Five Thousand only to find that the story no longer ended as I remembered.

I woke up once or twice- then dropped back into the same dream. The students were being very patient and pleasant and I  felt really bad about how dreadfully I was letting them down.

I've got a snuffly nose this morning. Winter has been going on so long I'd forgotten I suffer from hay fever. I guess I need to go buy a nasal spray.

I read a chapter of Nightwood by Djuna Barnes last night. I don't know quite what to make of it. At first you think you're in some sort of realist novel- albeit one written in gloriously baroque prose- and then you notice that the characters are an unlikely mix of aristos and circus performers and then this Irish doctor comes on board and starts delivering  himself of huge paragraphs of non-sequitous whimsicality. It's the sort of novel Fellini might have written if his career had taken that turn. T.S. Eliot liked it a lot and I'm - well, I'm intrigued.  

Rag And Bone

"What we're missing is rag and bone men, " said my father-in-law, apropos of nothing.

Well he's right, isn't he? Rag and bone men were so entirely green- what with the horses and the carts and the recycling.

We used to have one come down our suburban street of Poirot-era houses when I was a kid. You'd hear him a long way off- a long, whooping cry- a little like a wood-pigeon but bitten off at the end. Then you'd bustle about- as the cries got louder and the slow clip-clop of horseshoe on tar-macadam kicked in- gathering together all your nasty, old but not entirely useless junk. 

Raaaganbohn.......

Raaaganbohn.......