ODD SENSATIONS AND NIGHTMARES

A strange inner peace has overwhelmed my savage breast a couple of times this week. I'll have been pottering around the kitchen, with Radio 3 wafting classical music round the place, and a totally alien feeling of quiet contentment has stolen over me. It usually ends, fairly quickly, with an over-boiling pot, a painful crick in my back, forgetting where I've put my glasses, or some other this-worldly occurrence. Then I remember that I'm a struggling artist, partly disabled and working my socks off to keep the wolf from the door in a recession.

Last weekend I dreamt that my sister Thelma and I were in a Chinese restaurant. I was loaded down with a pile of stuff, including a large potted plant, and I was unable to either eat my peking duck or pay the bill because I couldn't offload this heap of rubbish. I inevitably fell out with the staff on account of this, and all the customers, mostly middle-aged men in dark suits, were looking at me rather indifferently. I was glad to wake up from this nonsensical nightmare.

In my nightmares, I'm always trying to accomplish a task which has been set for me, either through necessity or designation by someone else. My attempts at getting this done are doomed to failure by either my own ineptitude or the crowds of people who always populate my dreams. They mill around in a completely unco-operative manner, deaf to anything I try to tell them and the setting is always a completely incongruous version of one of my previous workplaces.

Perhaps I should turn to surrealism.