23/03
My eyesight is getting worse. I can’t quite make out the book at the end of my arm. I am in the shower, reading a 20p copy of Water From The Sun, and have terrible déjà vu: The phrase ‘Culture Club’ in said book; a conversation about the merits of Joint Honours degrees with respect to the normal kind; the smell of cinnamon-and-rice soap.
I know it’s impossible, because I only bought the book on friday, and have never read it before, but the situation feel so familiar that I try and remember what’s going to happen next. Instead, I am caught in thoughts about the act of reading in the shower, and whether or not it is as strange a thing as people have told me it is. There are one-armed people, after all, and they must shower too.
I dreamt last night that I was dredging a crystal-clear canal for diamond rings. I found earrings and brooches and necklaces, shoes and dolls, but no ring. My father was there, and my youngest brother and sister, and we searched for days. The canal got muddied, and we moved to a river that was as clear as the place we’d started in. Then I cut to a different dream - an older one, based on an exaggerated Llandudno. I am on Great Orme, and looking across a high wall - like Hadrian’s, but coastal and intact - and trying my best to summon the courage to walk along it. I know instinctively that the situation is taken from a day spent scaling the walls of the lime kilns in Beadnell when I was maybe 13 or 14 - they’re made of great cut stones, and drop away to the North Sea; the boundary between the two is filled with huge granite boulders, angular and evil-looking, and all soaking wet and slippery. It’s terrifying, at first, when the waves are eating at your ankles and your fingers can’t quite grip the slime-covered walls, but by the time you’ve made your way around two or three times you’re filled with a suspect sense of confidence. On top of the kilns there is a flat grassy area, reachable by way of a collapsed, crenellated wall. We light fires and burn dandelion heads.
