Tom's dream

Is Tom wondering where he left his bag?

I called home. It was my uncle's birthday.* I was sitting on the deck of a fish restaurant over looking St Ives Harbour, waiting for my mussels with no cream & extra chillies, and the water in the bay was both turqoise and seemingly infinite, and it made me happy thinking about how it went all the way to New York. Tom answered the phone.

"Oh, it's you!" he said, in his gravelly Estonian voice.

Yep, it's me all right. Happy birthday, Tom!

"Thank you. But I don't have birthdays any more," he said; "there's no point, when you have one foot in the grave... and you always have one very dirty sock." He went on: "but anyway, I had a dream about you the other night, and it's turned into a poem."

A poem?

"Yes, Mary keeps threatening to send it to you."

He said, "I dreamed that you called me, and you were on a bus - you're always on a bus when you call, anyway." (This is the story of Ms B's life.) "In the dream you were going on a bus to Brighton, but in the poem I changed it to Bridgewater. You called me and you were describing all the contents of your holdall bag; that was the whole conversation."

I was describing the contents of my bag? But I love this! It seems wonderfully realistic!

"Yes, I thought so," said Tom. "Our conversations always are like the contents of your holdall bag."**

















Now, if I regret one thing, it is that I didn't think to ask Tom what the dream contents of my bag were. That is: what did his unconscious think I had in my bag? (Was it a replacement Chanel Rouge Noir? Or is that my dream?) I want to know.

* It was also Mama Baroque's birthday, and also His Excellency the Duc de Baroque's birthday; when I was a child I used to think that when you grew up you met someone with the same birthday as you, fell in love and got married. But although I tried to call them the only person who answered his phone was Tom.

**n.b., the above illustration is a dramatic reconstruction of my holdall bag; the objects depicted are a characteristic sampling only and are not intended to represent today's - or even Friday's - bag.