Brexit dream #2 *: Fair Weather Friend

[Written on July 7th, 2016]

Yesterday I succumbed to a feeling of exhaustion, after the strain of the last few days, which got to me in spite of trying to detach from it, for I knew that the situation was not mine to untangle. So after breakfast I went back to bed and succumbed to a blessed emptiness. After a while I thought to scribble some thoughts, the kind which arrive of themselves since nature as they say abhors a vacuum. So I picked up a notebook which lay to hand, one I haven’t been using lately.

The most recent entry was June 12th, describing something I’d completely forgotten since. Note the date, twelve days before the Brexit result. (Only in hindsight did it convey the sense of being constricted by unwanted obligations; filled with a primitive urge to cut the umbilical cord, however disloyal it might seem.) My notes read as follows:

Awoke from a dream, in which I went with my friend to a distant town in the Eastern counties, perhaps Norwich. We’ve both made appointments to see a very good dentist there, a sole practitioner. We arrive early, to discover a tiny consulting room leading off a large waiting room with several other doors. Through these doors there’s a flow of functionaries having improptu discussions with one another and stopping to talk briefly with patients. It begins to feel more like the lobby of an important hotel than a dentist’s reception area, and enlarges accordingly. Clive goes in for his appointment. Mine is booked directly after his. A tall woman approaches, the receptionist I suppose, but she carries herself like the chief PA in a consultancy or lawyer’s office. She tells me that Clive is having serious problems and I should expect a delay. He’s lost some blood and is under a general anaesthetic. That’s all she has to say. I’m rather shocked, I ought to ask for more details, but am too stunned. Then she says brightly that I could wait if I want but I might get bored. The practice could find things for me to do, on a voluntary basis. For example, I could act as a run-around, ordering taxis for people. Or maybe I could chauffeur them myself? At this point she suggests I may need time to think about it, and goes off. I decide that when she comes back I’ll say if they want my services, they’ll be charged at my standard rate per hour.

But then she flits from one person or little group to another, never catching my eye, like a busy waitress in a restaurant. (This actually happened the day before, when we hadn’t booked a table, and were told there’d be one free soon.) Increasingly irritated, I realize I don’t want to keep my own appointment. I shall wait for Clive, of course: or should I? His next-of-kin should be informed, more like. I dread getting tangled up in this business. Yes, I’ve called him my friend, but that was when we worked together, nine years ago. We’ve inevitably got out of touch, he still working on full-time contracts, I almost fully retired. We don’t have so much in common now. I decide to stay till his case is handed over to responsible professionals and his family told.

First I must catch the woman’s eye, tell her my updated intentions. Meanwhile I have to go on sitting here, in this place I don’t trust, where I don’t want to be. So I daydream of freedom, remembering the days I lived in this town. I did live in Norwich once but dream towns are less specific. This one is an amalgam of Norwich, Paris, Lisbon, Chesham, Hastings, London and other places, the archetype of all my town dreams stretching back over the years. All the time sitting in the waiting-room, I dream a dream within a dream, itself a fragment of all the other dreams. I imagine walking out of here, finding the straight route that leads to the high ground on the horizon, those steep cobbled streets at the other end, that Montmartre of the soul, peopled with characters and curiosity shops from Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens.

Will I betray my friend in his hour of need? I’ll never know. I’m still in the waiting-room, waiting to catch the receptionist’s eye, when I wake up and realize none of it happened.

And as for yesterday’s scribbles, the effect on their author was magical. They helped me recover from the strain and exhaustion of the last few days, and see things in proportion again, and carry on. I meant to transcribe them and publish, but now when I read them back they hardly make much sense. Another time, perhaps. All I’ve managed so far is the title: “None but ourselves can free our minds”.

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* “Brexit dream #1” is described here