Month: May 2021

’Had a bad night. Not horrible, just one long, bad dream. Of course I know that dreams don’t last all night – or do they? People tell me that dreams only last a few seconds. And the ‘human science (or maybe that should read ‘human séance’) columns in the Sunday papers tell us that dreams are confined the REM periods in our sleep. Well, the human-realistic dream in which I played a prominent role, and didn’t come out of too well, went on all night. Or so I remembered when I woke up.

 In fact, I didn’t come out of it until I was fully awake. I opened my eyes just before what would have been, almost certainly, an ignominious ending and was relieved to see the sunshine peeping through the gap between the curtains.

I lay there for a few minutes thinking first about the dream, the memory of which, except for the basic outline and the potentially horrible ending, faded rapidly, and then about what I was going to do today. I wrote a rough, mental list of what I intended to achieve on this bank-holiday Sunday:

Master the controls of my new, DAB radio

Deal with everything in my ‘in-tray’.

Cut back the overgrown privet bush that’s trying to take over the garden.

Write another chapter of the novel I’ve been writing for the last thirty years.

First, whilst drinking my coffee and eating my slimming-sized-sliver of toast, I would read the instruction book that came with the new radio, which is a birthday gift from my family to replace the steam powered job I’ve been living with for the last fifty or sixty years. It was breakfast time before I’d learned how to pre-set the stations I intended to listen to, and a long time after breakfast before I’d successfully linked my iPod to the machine. “iPod”? my youngest son said, not quite scornfully, when he finally reached ground floor level. He thinks I should have linked my new smartfone to the set.

But, by lunch-time I’d just about got the radio where I wanted it. I’ll learn how to switch it on and off tomorrow.

Further inroads into my job-list were postponed when it was announced that we were about to set off to walk to the post office to post a parcel. It was I who discovered that our local Post Office, which is within a Co-op store, is open on a Sunday! That I discovered when I turned up and found it shut just after lunch on Saturday. ‘We’re open from 7am until 9pm on Sundays.’ I was told. I found it difficult to imagine people queuing to buy stamps or post parcels at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

On the way home we observed what we think are Ash trees which are suffering from ‘Ash-die-back’. Sad.

Once inside the garden gate I was immediately invited go out again, to dispose of a basketful of weeds. That involved braving ‘stinging-nettle alley’. The ‘stingers’ have been prolific this year and those that line the edges of the short, narrow path to the compost heap deliberately lean in towards the middle. The best way to deal with them is to put on wellingtons and cut them back before negotiating the path carrying a staggering load of weeds. Of course, I’m male, so I don’t do that, I confidently stagger up the path – and get stung.

By the time I got back to my desk it was time for dinner. So I couldn’t start any more of the jobs on my job-list, but I didn’t publish or announce its contents, so the only person who knows is me. I’ll make another one tomorrow.

I walked into the sitting room.

The TV was on. Loud.

Wearing helmets and snug-fitting, silver suits, human-like people, with strange-looking weapons, fired lethal, green rays, that deleted (that’s the only word for it) scaly-skinned, non-earth-beings who also had strange weapons, but seemed not to have been very well trained in their use because they never seemed to hit any of the opposition. This was all taking place on a colourful battleground made up of sharp-looking, purple rocks, pools of pure blue liquid and a backdrop of dark, jagged mountains against an even darker sky pierced with a myriad of silver-white stars. The musical accompaniment to this one-sided battle was fast-moving and dramatic, punctuated by the pchiouw sounds of the green rays slicing across the scene to decimate more scaly-skinned, non-earth beings, and cries from male and female voices, in English, making comic-book battlefield noises like: ‘gotcha ya bastard’ or ‘die you galactic dungball’ (I made that bit up).

I took all of this on board in the time I spent looking past the just-opened-door and deciding I didn’t need to sit in my sitting-room armchair. I retreated to my little office in what used to be the lean-to conservatory at the back of the house. It’s comfortable there too.

I sat back and mentally revisited the TV scenario that was still bright in my mind’s eye. Then I projected my thoughts a bit further, towards stories I have read and films I’ve watched, and the plays and musicals we go to the theatre to see: ‘Midsummer Murderers’, ‘Non-Cooperation Street’, ‘East End Antagonists’, Macbeth, Les Mis, and, and, and so-on. Confrontation and violence the main ingredients.

Think about it.

So many of our heroes are gladiators, male and female, who win victories against the odds.

Should we wonder why children grow up to be violent?

Lift the filter jug and swing it over towards the open kettle, tilt it in the appropriate direction and pour enough water into the kettle to make a cup of tea. Simple – or should be. It wasn’t this morning.

Between the initial lift and pouring water into the kettle the jug had to pass the milk carton, either over it or around it, I chose ‘over’.

A tiny misjudgement of the height of the milk carton and how high I had to lift the jug to clear it was the direct cause of an incident.

As I swung it, the bottom of the jug caught the top of the milk carton – whose screw-top had already been unscrewed, removed and placed to one side so that, in the almost immediate future, a dollop of milk could be added to the tea that was about to be made.

I expect you will already have worked out what happened next.

Quickly I put down the filter jug and reached for the tottering milk carton. I caught it. I caught it! Before the tiniest dribble had escaped through the open neck of the carton.

Then the incident occurred.

In my mind.

A clash of two directions of thought.

1. I still have lightning reactions when there is no time for conscious assessment of the requirement.

2. My unconscious conscious judgement of the muscle power required to perform a physical task is inaccurate and, from previous experience of similar occurrences, always on the ‘too little’ side. Too many spilt milk situations.

Upon investigation I learned that the message from the brain to an arm or leg to perform a familiar function is based on what is known as muscle memory, which of course is a misnomer – muscles can’t remember anything, it’s the brain that remembers, and part of what it remembers is the power required for a specific muscle to perform the familiar task.

Now, if there has been a time gap between the last occasion when my brain memorised the muscle power requirement for lifting a filter jug and the current situation, and if I haven’t been maintaining a constant muscle-tone level, my brain might well have sent a message with a power requirement that would have been sufficient for a previous job, but not this one.

Which makes ‘muscle memory’ a double misnomer.

I call it ‘Brain Lag’.

(Of course, this morning, the filter jug might have had more water in it than the time when my brain’s memory of the lifting power requirement was last established.)