Boris, a chicken, other strange things

And there it was. If you want to know your own heart with clarity, if you want to know what’s making you awkward and anxious, pay attention to your sleep. It’ll tell you what’s going on , albeit with a lot of incomprehensible froth and bubble. Because what fun is a dream we fully understand?

Mine began with me standing in a row of men who all had to take their trousers and underwear off and stand in a line. For some reason I was with them, wearing a long tee-shirt which I pulled down and used to cover myself. Then there was the bizarre sight of Boris Johnson, ex PM, totally naked and corpulent slamming himself up and down on a dead chicken repeatedly. It didn’t look like sexual congress though the act was hard to categorise as anything else. A giant chute appeared and Boris was dragged down into it, trying to cling on by his fingernails.

Then came the real dream after all the bizarre juxtapositions of an exhausted mind. A stern looking nurse told me the cancer had returned. She even pointed out where it was. There’s the real nightmare, once seen and known to be put in its place among the phantoms, the what-the-hells and the maybe/nevers.

I am awake ready for coffee.

A Thousand Miles

And I am in Aquitaine, of the famously brilliant queen and humanity’s earliest artists. Right now it is all about the honey coloured walls and smiling vineyards of Saint Emilion, a tiny gorgeous place where we will do very little except eat, drink, and sleep. I may even try to paint.

It’s an interesting car journey from Scotland to Bordeaux via Folkestone, through the Channel Tunnel, down through Normandy and the Loire, to this sunny quiet place. The weather was foul for much of the drive , worst past Calais, where for a moment we appeared to be entirely underwater. But the woods we passed looked deep and alluring, tall trees at their most magnificent, a place to seek faery… if it ever stopped bloody raining!

My soul is nothing like so adventurous right now. We are here and we need this light and heat. There is a huge column of jasmine growing in the patio garden, its sister clambering the stairwell. Together in the sun, their scent fills the street.