13 May


I am at a theater in some part of London I don’t usually go to. It is a round building with concrete and glass walls. There are two ways in, front and back.

I have gone to see a performance of Cats. However, the audience are not allowed into the building; we have to watch the cast coming and going through a corridor which links the dressing room to the stage, which we can see through one of the plate glass windows. There are a lot of costume on clothes hangers up against the wall.

After the show we eat in an Heston Blumenthal style restaurant. I do not remember what I have for my main course, but after dinner I am given what is described as “beef tea”. It is a very small cup with hardly any liquid in it and I have to drink it in one go. I am then given a hot chocolate into which a whole chocolate muffin is stirred. There are small square chocolates to finish.

I have read enough Freud to see what “looking at pussies through glass” means and even “beef” could carry a double meaning. Theaters obviously represent bodies, especially if people are going in one end and coming out the other end. There is altogether too much chocolate for my liking in this context.

Everyone has been talking about when theaters might reopen, and whether watching plays on YouTube could ever be a substitute. The original stage production of Cats is being live-streamed this week, but only for a very limited amount of time. Mr Lloyd-Webber was in my mind because I included a video of “Poor Jerusalem” in one of my Biblical blogs. Also because someone on Twitter had asked how Mr Lloyd-Webber could possibly have come up with such an outlandish idea as a hideously ugly composer who writes songs for a beautiful woman to sing for him. This joke was first made by Spitting Image about thirty five years ago. One of the theaters and both the chapels at my universities were large round concrete buildings. I very briefly appeared on stage as Second Servant On The Right in Twelfth Night on one of the stages. L has taken to drinking tumeric tea, which I do not like, and which stains the cup yellow: I like tumeric well enough as a cooking spice and remarked that perhaps she should think of flavouring the dinner with Earl Grey. At the end of my journalism evening classes a few years ago we went to a short lived veggie restaurant in the new Millennium Square development. The food was unremarkable but there were complimentary chocolates made with double cream and fresh nuts. They were square.

I am pretty sure that dreams are like those kids' picture cards where you can have the head of a rhino, the body of a caterpillar, and the tail of a panda. I think they probably work at a verbal level: the big green car and the angry traffic warden manifest three nights later as a big green warden and some very angry traffic lights turning to green. But I may be wrong.

I will not become the kind of writer who goes on and on about his dreams. Except that one time.  And that other time. But in general, not.



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