Crazy dreams

My dreams are very different from other people's. Everyone else seems to dream about real events and real people, while my dreams are totally abstract - bizarre figments of my imagination.

I often dream about an awkward workplace situation, even though I haven't had a paid job for some 16 months. I'm sitting at an office desk with no idea what I'm meant to be doing. Or I'm in a works canteen where everyone is stuffing themselves but I don't know where the food is being served. Or I'm at work trying to read an important report in a language I don't recognise or understand.

Where does this stuff come from? I've never been in any of these situations so my brain seems to go on a solo run as soon as I fall asleep.

I never dream about actual workplaces I've been in, or the people I've worked with. I never dream about the genuinely embarrassing, awkward situations I've encountered.

I dream about Jenny very occasionally and once I dreamt about a Facebook friend, but that's about it. I don't dream about my family, my friends, my neighbours or people I've met during the day. My dreams are nothing but a kind of nocturnal spam.

I've never heard of any other adult whose dreams are so abstract, but surely they must exist? Or does everyone dream about Aunt Gillian upsetting the teapot when she paid a visit yesterday? Or does everyone dream about winning the lottery or meeting their favourite celebrity?

I think I need some urgent adjustments to my dreaming software. It's seriously defective and needs to be replaced by something more normal. I want to dream about Annie Lennox. Or Bonnie Raitt. Or even Aunt Gillian will do.

Letting go

One of the hardest things about being a parent must be giving up the constant supervision of your children and trusting them to make their own decisions - hopefully sensible and intelligent ones.

When you've been keeping an eye on your children 24 hours a day since they were born, it must be quite a wrench to be less vigilant and stop constantly checking up on them.

I'm reminded of this by yet another teenager dying of a suspected drugs overdose at the Leeds music festival. The 17 year old girl had taken not just one drug but a whole cocktail of drugs. She trusted whoever gave them to her and assumed they weren't dangerous.

And every so often kids decide it would be hilarious to wreck the local children's playground or daub graffiti on the wall of the parish church.

At some point a parent has to allow their child to go out on their own and be responsible for their own actions. You have to make a judgment as to whether they'll be safe or whether they'll get into some kind of trouble - drug abuse, sexual harassment, a car accident, shoplifting.

I imagine the farther your child goes, and the longer they're away, the more nervous you get. If they're backpacking in Australia for two months, for example. Or maybe it makes no difference.

Of course at a certain age a child is legally entitled to do whatever they want and their parents can no longer stand in the way.

When I was a teenager I generally made sensible decisions, but not always. I remember driving my girlfriend home once when I was very drunk, as people did in those days. Luckily I didn't have an accident.

Just let go, they say. Easier said than done.

Apocalypse buffs

What turns people into survivalists? Why does someone decide they need to make elaborate prepar-ations for some sort of future apocalypse or arma-geddon? Why don't they just potter along hoping for the best like most of us do?

Apart from anything else, it's such a hit and miss business. You don't know exactly what you're preparing for so you don't really know what you should be stocking up on or making provision for. An economic crisis? A war? A biblical plague? Climate collapse? Aliens from outer space? It's all so nebulous.

Personally I've never had the slightest urge to prepare for some dire future emergency. I've survived for 72 years without taking any special precautions, and I doubt there'll be an apocalypse any time soon.

In any case, where do you put all the stuff you've set aside? You would need a very large house or basement and how many people have those? You would also need plenty of cash to buy all this extra stuff.

There was a wonderful story a couple of years ago about Joseph Badame, an American guy who had spent $1 million making massive preparations for a possible economic crisis, was made bankrupt by medical bills after his wife's stroke and faced having to dispose of everything he had stockpiled - including huge amounts of food.

At the estate sale, he met a Puerto Rican food truck operator hired to work at the sale and she told him of all the Puerto Rican families who were starving after Hurricane Maria had hit the country.

He arranged for all the food he had stockpiled - thousands of dollars' worth - to be shipped to Puerto Rico.

So something good came out of his personal tragedy.

Pic: Joseph Badame

Off the cuff

One of the slightly scary things in life is how a sudden decision, made without proper thought or reflection, made more or less on the spur of the moment, can have quite unexpected and even life-changing consequences.

A politician tweets a racist and abusive comment and his political career is instantly halted. A motorist goes through a red traffic light and is seriously injured in a head-on collision. Someone invests their life savings in a dodgy company and loses the lot. A woman befriends a man who turns out to be a stalker.

A lot of these off-the-cuff decisions are made under the influence of alcohol or drugs or infatuation or misplaced trust. Or someone feels the need to "break out", to escape from a rut, to be their "real self". Or it's just put down to "a moment of madness".

Often the decision seems quite out of character, something the person would never normally do, something that's totally inexplicable.

In the book I've just read, The Silent Wife by A S A (Susan) Harrison, a woman who is known to be placid, sensible and easy-going suddenly decides to do something shocking and illegal (no spoilers!), something that will completely change her life and possibly put her in jail.

It's not something she's reflected on for a while, weighed up the pros and cons. She makes the decision very abruptly and then goes through with it. It seems unbelievable, but in reality people do just that - make life-changing decisions with barely a moment's thought.

Luckily all my spur-of-the-moment decisions have turned out to be good ones and haven't led to disaster. I haven't lost thousands of pounds, got sacked, been hen-pecked, destroyed my health or ended up in jail.

I feel sorry for those people who've wrecked their lives with some stupid impromptu decision they forever regretted. It could happen to any of us.

Elephant in the room

So what to write today? I could blather on about this, that or the other thing - my neighbours from hell maybe, or my tyrannical boss, or my lucky escape from near-disaster. But all those little personal stories are starting to feel utterly trivial beside the enormous elephant in the room, the one thing that now dominates British life and every other conversation - Brexit.

On October 31 Prime Minister Boris Johnson, backed by a bunch of dogged fanatics, has promised to take the UK out of the European Union. Just like that.

He has only the vaguest idea of what will happen next or how our everyday lives will be affected. He just thinks it's a jolly good idea, and in any case it was voted for in a referendum three years ago and he has to obey "the democratic will of the people".

Like millions of others, I'm in despair at the possible consequences of this hare-brained decision. There have been hundreds of grim predictions from expert after expert about the negative effects on business, on the economy, on the public services, on agriculture, on the environment and on scientific research - just about everything in fact. But the predictions have been ignored by the Prime Minister, who regards them all as hysterical scare-mongering.

Jenny and I probably won't be personally affected, unless the predicted food and medicine shortages come about, but other people could be quite severely affected. But hey, we have to abide by the democratic will of the people, even if they voted for the mass slaughter of ugly babies.

I can only hope common sense prevails before it's too late, but that seems increasingly unlikely. The Brexit juggernaut is careering down the hill and nobody knows how to apply the brakes. An almighty crash seems unavoidable.

Pic: Prime Minister Boris Johnson

Neighbourliness

It's conventional wisdom that we should be friendly with all our neighbours so we can support each other in an emergency or whenever we need help - mowing the elderly neighbour's lawn, lending garden tools, watching the house while you're away, and so on.

But in practice it doesn't actually work like that. The neighbours might prefer to keep to themselves - especially if they have several kids and are fully occupied with parenting, or are just the reclusive type, or they decide you're not on their wavelength, or they don't want you to see the mess they surround themselves with. All sorts of hidden reasons in fact.

Then again you might think you're quite capable of dealing with emergencies and sorting out your problems without the neighbours poking their nose in, so why cultivate friendships you don't really need in the first place?

Although Jenny and I have been living here for ten years, we don't know the neighbours very well. Mostly we know their names and we say hello to each other but that's about it.

I take in parcels for the couple next door, and trim our joint hedge occasionally. The couple next to them are much friendlier and we've had some good chats since they moved in a few months back.

There's another neighbour a few doors up who looks after our house while we're on holiday, and we're very friendly with him and his wife and kids.

But the other neighbours keep themselves to themselves and I know next to nothing about them. I seldom meet them on the street as they travel everywhere by car.

I know much more about my Facebook friends than my neighbours, and that probably applies to most people. My Facebook friends may even give me helpful advice in a crisis my neighbours wouldn't even know about.

Well, so be it. I just take my neighbours as they come.

The spartan years

I would define my life nowadays as privileged. I have a loving partner, a comfortable home, enough money, good health, plenty to eat and drink, and (at the moment) I live in a peaceful country. But I wasn't always so privileged.

Between 1973 and 1979 I lived in a tatty bed-sit in Abbey Road, London (yes, that Abbey Road). There was no central heating, just a small gas fire, there was no toilet or wash basin (only a communal bathroom downstairs), there was no washing machine, there was a one-ring cooker, there was damp all the way up the staircase of the building, and needless to say, any requests to the landlord for repairs or improvements were ignored.

I could have afforded somewhere more comfortable, but I was trying to save money to buy a flat so I was economising. I never invited anyone round, as the shabbiness would have been too embarrassing.

The one-ring cooker discouraged any serious cooking, so I lived mainly on snacks like fruit, biscuits, fruit cake, boiled eggs and peanut butter sandwiches. Not surprisingly, I was a lot thinner then (about 10½ stone).

The other tenants weren't interested in joint approaches to the landlord to get things fixed. The elderly woman upstairs had a serious whisky habit and was usually drunk. The elderly woman downstairs just wanted a quiet life with no fuss or bother.

To keep myself amused, and avoid cabin fever in my tiny bolthole, I would go to all the museums and galleries and take long walks round the neighbourhood. I went to the cinema regularly, especially the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead. Or I would take a book to one of the local coffee bars and sit reading for hours on end. In the summer I went to seaside resorts, my favourites being Eastbourne, Folkestone, Hastings and Broadstairs.

Then in 1981 I met Jenny, and things took a turn for the better.