A Late Summer Afternoon’s Hypnagogia

A Late Summer Afternoon’s Hypnagogia

One of the wonderful things about growing old in Eastern Europe is, if I want to, I can lie on the settee all afternoon. There I can completely switch off, or look for faces and animals in the knots and cracks of the ceiling’s timbers, or allow the contents of that space where I might have a brain to just go floating off beyond boundaries set by society and its team of psychogenic cartographers. Maybe I shouldn’t do this, but nobody knows and nobody cares, and I’m sure I’m not the first. With all the war going on at the time, dear old Lev Tolstoy up the road in Silistra would often take to his sofa after lunch just for a bit of peace. And then he’d write about it later. Did somebody tell me that, or did I dream it?

I tend to interrupt my dreams to ask myself, am I daydreaming or nightdreaming? Perhaps I’m twilight dreaming? Sometimes I dream of becoming an oneirologist, but then I think all that studying would be a nightmare. You may say I’m a waster, and you wouldn’t be the only one. But what’s the harm in dreaming anyway?

Is time on an East European settee time more wasted than the hours I spent in Western Europe fifty-odd years ago trying to remember the dates of battles in a civil war or how many oxygen atoms there were in hydrogen sulphate? An afternoon’s mental meanderings today achieved no more and no less than a schoolboy’s studious torture (or torturous study) at the kitchen table of a 1974 Sunday, but at least these days I’m amused. With a mind that’s completely empty, or only partly cluttered, I’m never bored.

To compare my expectations with my achievements, I drew a Venn diagram in the dust on the coffee table, but nothing overlapped, despite the fact that I hold a faded and dog-eared ‘O’ Level certificate in Venn diagrams, vectors and matrices. I was sure Mr Collinson, through a cloud of chalk dust rubbed from a screechy, scratchy blackboard at the front of the class, had said 'mattresses' rather than matrices.

Perhaps this had been a Freudian slip from a weary man longing for his own settee. A tired old schoolteacher yearning for a bit of peace from the acned youths who imagined Tuesday morning’s double maths as a scene from A Clockwork Orange rather than the even more disturbingly dystopian Room 36, where Roxy Music had been carved on every desk lid with otherwise unused pairs of compasses, and where for two new pence Diane McIntyre would show you her knickers or whoever else’s knickers it was that she was wearing at the time.  

It was four atoms. I still remember, though nobody’s asked me since. Hydrogen sulphide was a different basket of eggs and something that, between you and me, could have done with a drop of oxygen or even Old Spice in it. But that was then. Who cares now? Certainly not me. I’ve got better things to think about.

Should I buy a bicycle? Would a bit of exercise be a good alternative to lying on my East European settee? Would it fit here on the settee with me if I got tired? The sun’s too hot today for doing anything outside other than sweating, and in a couple of months there may be snow. East European climatic conditions might dictate that a new bike would never get used. During the English Civil War, did it snow at the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644 (give or take a couple of years)? I’m sure it’ll have rained. I was there once for a picnic with my children. We had to eat our sandwiches in the car. Removing Pringles crumbs from footwells took longer than the battle had lasted. Were Cromwell’s kids as messy?

In Western Europe long, long ago, but more recently than 1644 (give or take a couple of years), I had a bicycle that I bought with money I earned from delivering evening newspapers on the estate at the other side of the ring road. What a wild and terrific place it was! The clever kids I knew didn’t have paper rounds because they were too busy memorising chemical equations or being binary in their bedrooms. But they didn’t have bicycles either. For me the bike was essential for getting away from savage dogs in a hurry. Did Cromwell find the Parliamentarians as vicious as the big Alsatian with teeth as sharp as the pointy bits on geometry instruments that lived at 44 Langbar Approach?

I’m sure I would have felt a greater sense of purpose in my life had I known who was the first kid in the world to have dashed home from school each day to spend an hour pushing Leeds Evening Posts through letterboxes. I loved the Leeds Evening Post. Once I got my picture on the cover, so I stole five copies for my mother.

We all know who the first man on the moon was. You’d be mad not to know who brought potatoes and packets of fags back from the New World to titillate and delight the English queen. And only a fool couldn’t tell you who patented the spinning jenny in Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire in 1764. But who was the brain behind paper rounds on council estates? When William Caxton invented the printing press, what did he do with the things he printed? I wonder if Walter Raleigh cycles to the shop to buy his tobacco these days. I can’t recall the history teacher’s name. Those lessons were so long ago.

In Eastern Europe they’ve never had the Leeds Evening Post or paper boys or paper girls. Even the newspaper taxis were banned from these shores until the late 1980s. And Tolstoy’s works were always too thick to fit through a letterbox. One of the few things that I’ve experienced in both Western Europe and Eastern Europe is a bite from a savage dog. Western European dog bites didn’t hurt so much because I would always be wearing long trousers, one of the benefits of that awful cold weather they insist upon having over there. 

My children all used to have bicycles. What have they done with them? Do they still ride them? I know they eat potatoes because I’ve seen them doing it, but do they smoke cigarettes? I hope not. These things introduced to us by people who go poking their noses about in the New World can be such a worry. It’s funny how that ayahuasca potion they have in the Orinoco Basin didn’t catch on in the same way. Maybe it did where my kids live. They’re in Manchester, and I’ve heard it’s very moreish.

In another science lab, a man with halitosis like hydrogen sulphide told the few who were listening that Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Was Newton lying on his settee when he dreamed up this notion? What is the opposite of lying on the settee? I suppose it might be getting up to put the kettle on. And what is the opposite reaction to being bitten by a dog? Whenever I’ve been bitten by a dog, my reaction has always been to run away, shouting, “Fuck off, dog!” The opposite action must be to bite the dog back.

I wonder if they sell tigers in pet shops, and if so, how does the price of one compare to that of a bicycle? I’ve never known anybody who has owned both a bicycle and a tiger. Back in the day, as an evening newspaper delivery boy, had I bought a tiger to protect me from savage dogs, what would I have needed to do to prevent it from biting me?

I thought for a while that when I eventually managed to remove myself from the settee, I would search the internet for written records of boys in their mid-teens being mauled to death by tigers on Whinmoor Estate in Leeds. Then I wondered if there was any point because if such a tragedy had ever taken place, then surely Brian, the manager of the R.S. McColl’s newsagent’s shop whose team I was a valued member of, would have warned me in advance. He hadn’t said anything about the savage dogs that I had the pleasure of meeting on a daily basis in what seemed like a Yorkshire version of the Pamplona Running of the Bulls.

So what was all that health and safety in the workplace nonsense about then? I’ve promised myself that the next time I’m in the England area of Western Europe, I’ll confront him about the danger I had to face as an unarmed fourteen-year-old. I’m currently sixty-eight, so by now he must be in his late nineties. It will be something to chat about at his one hundredth birthday party, if I’m invited. I expect they’ll put a notice in the Leeds Evening Post. Bring a friend. No dogs allowed.

What’s the opposite of blowing out candles? I remember Brian’s wife being a bit of a dragon, so she’ll be able to help out there.

As I was forcing those newspapers into letterboxes fitted with spring-loaded steel flaps as lethal as rat traps, wherever possible, I would have a good gawp through the front windows of the houses they belonged to. I distinctly remember seeing a man in his pyjamas watching afternoon television and eating a Birds Eye Supermousse, a woman dancing to ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ by Carl Douglas that was playing very loud on her record player, a cat gnawing at a whole raw chicken on a living room carpet, and a boy of my age with his head stuck in a chemistry textbook. All in different houses, of course. I felt sad for the man, Carl Douglas, the carpet and the boy.

I like to think the people who lived in those 1970s West European council houses were all lying on their settees in semi-conscious states and dreaming about things that didn’t really matter to the vast majority of the population of Western Europe but which they found highly entertaining themselves. But why hadn’t I seen them doing this? On further reflection, having just reminded myself that Leeds was in Western Europe, they’d have all been at work and daydreaming about growing old and going to live in the more sedate Eastern Europe. An almost pipe dream situation in which, if pipe dreams ever came true, they really would be able to take maximum advantage of their sofas. But then there was Britain’s rising unemployment and the three-day working week to take into consideration. So who knows where they might have been and what they would have been doing there? Oh, it’s all too complicated. A thousand of my brain cells die with every challenging thought.

My settee is like a desert island surrounded by cat-infested waters, hazardous reefs of piled-high paperback books, and predatory spiders so fearsome they’d curdle the blood of the most courageous pirate, fisherman or vacuum cleaner. Once I’ve been washed onto its shore, I’m marooned until a lounge Leucothea comes along to save me. An ornately carved wooden tray with a teapot, cup, saucer and milk jug, none of which are matching, is my life raft. It’s rare that I wish to be rescued because I’m very happy there. I have everything except desire.

I actually bought this East European settee in Western Europe and brought it to Bulgaria with me. It’s acclimatising well. In my little world it’s the place where east meets west, like a leather-upholstered Constantinople scratched and ripped to bejaysus by East European cats. But those scratches distract the eye from the Turkish coffee stains on the armrests and the sparkly beads fallen from the flimsy garments of imaginary mid-afternoon belly dancers. So maybe a camel would be a more suitable addition to my menagerie than a tiger. When the salesman at the DFS shop in Swindon all those years ago asked me, “Is there anything else you need, sir?” I just shook my head without having even the vaguest notion of admitting Asian wildlife to my household. The thing is, it’s only when I’ve been lying on a settee a few hours that I think of these things. I’m sure DFS (in fact, all shops) would enjoy much greater commercial success if they had test sofas for people to lie on for an afternoon before deciding upon which purchases to make.

It's probably worth pointing out that my treasured island of ready-assembled furniture isn’t just a settee but a bedsettee with a place for storage underneath. So perhaps when I’m as old as Brian the West European newsagent, they could put me inside it instead of digging a hole in the garden to throw my redundant skeletal frame into. Holes are too much effort, especially on hot days like today. And in my hidey hole I’ll be a bit of company for whoever it is that succeeds me in the task of lying on the settee all afternoon, drifting in and out of a living room’s dead zone. If I’m to lie on my back for all eternity, I’d rather do it amongst Tolstoy’s tomes than amongst nettles and stones. At our village cemetery there are no measures in place to prevent savage dogs from entering.

When I noticed that it was almost five o’clock, I had to decide whether to slide away into the runcible hidden folds of the deepest slumber or face life’s harsh reality and feed our dogs. Regularly transferring dog food from a tin to a glazed earthenware bowl with the word ‘dog’ embossed on the front is one of the recommended steps to follow for those who don’t want their dogs to bite them. I find this a simple and rewarding task under normal circumstances, but if I get even the tiniest morsel of that slippery, slimy stuff on my fingers, shuddering and nausea consume my entire body, and any return to the couch has to be put off for several days due to the possibility of nightmares with meaty chunks.

But before getting up off my back and doing anything at all, I spent ten minutes wondering if that ‘dog’ word really was on the front of the bowl or if it was on the side or the back or midway between any of those two positions and if those two positions were actually three or four positions. All of this was further complicated by the fact that we have two dogs and two bowls. Thank goodness dogs can read!

There was no obvious answer, so I abandoned the perplexity and moved on to asking myself what was the retirement age for men in Central Europe, at what age would I be considered too old to be able to ride a bicycle safely, and how could I check that hydrogen sulphate still had four oxygen atoms? My dear partner, being neither a man nor a cyclist, was unable to help me with the first two of these but did suggest that the chemical compound’s atom content was likely to be shown in the list of ingredients on the back of the packet.

I love the way she chops onions and tomatoes. Did she tell me it was a trick she learnt when she was living in Martinique, or did I dream it? And why didn’t they teach us how to do that in chemistry lessons at school?

Image:

My own photograph of the fortress in the Danubian city of Silistra in Bulgaria. Lev (Leo) Tolstoy was stationed there in the spring of 1854. The Siege of Silistra was a crucial early campaign of the Crimean War when the region was still under Ottoman control.