IN DREAMS

SLEEPING WITH THE WINDOW OPEN during the summer brings in dream-inspiring sounds from the outside, and it is a sad reflection on the state of the world that the most innocent noises provoke in me the most hideous of nightmares. If I hear the sound of a bicycle on the gravel path I dream of someone being raped and beaten; if I hear the sound of the lapping water in the stream I dream of someone falling into a canal; and the sound of an airplane overhead sends me into the nightmare of being in a ladies’ hairdressing salon.

I AM NOT SURE WHAT SOUND provoked me to dream of David Cameron, but in the tap-room of a dingy bar in what seemed to be Liverpool, Cameron was getting the locals to stand as candidates for the Conservative Party in the next general election. Having managed to get the entire bar to sign up, he showed how confident he was about victory when he finally turned to me and said, “David. What about you? Are you going to pitch up?”

THIS WAS ALL IN BLACK AND WHITE, and there were large, fifties-style prams in the pub (not in fact surreal in Liverpool), and free-standing bathtubs with plants growing in them (ditto), and in the middle of this scenario I explained to Cameron that I thought his party was going nowhere.

I EXPLAINED HOW KEITH JOSEPH had got the facts wrong in the eighties, and how the Tories still hadn’t come up with any sensible economic approach since then; how foreign policy today could not be based on simply protecting the English Channel and moaning about the Suez Crisis; and how people, both candidates and voters, would like to know what Cameron really wanted to do. Throughout this process, although Cameron appeared to be listening to me, I was being pushed aside by an increasingly threatening bunch of “party workers”, so that by the end of my explanation there were six or seven burly men between myself and our future prime minister.

THE SURREAL NATURE OF THE DREAM did not exactly end with a weeping clown and a shot of a broken violin on the floor, or even a penguin alone in a huge, empty shopping arcade, but rather with me telling Cameron that the Conservatives should abandon their foolish posture about the idiocy of global warming and carbon footprints etc., after which the dream seemed to fade away and went, no doubt, back into a more usual episode of people being beaten senseless on cinder towpaths and being thrown into canals, or other dreams I sometimes have, into the details of which we will not be going here.

THUS, IT WAS WITH SOME amusement that I read this morning about Cameron and his latest “guru”, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. According to the powers that be, Mr Taleb, an American author whom Cameron has greatly admired of late, has been saying similar things to that which I produced in my dream, claiming he “enjoys” financial crashes and thinks global warming is “rubbish”. Otherwise sensible politicians, in a sort of McCarthyist “guilt by association” clamour, have called for Cameron’s head for “mixing with global-warming deniers”.

I FIND THIS AS SURREAL as any dream, and while mainstream politicians behave in this manner they will understand why I don’t “pitch up”, but always put my faith in the Monster Raving Loonies and the candy-coloured clowns they call the sandmen.

CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR

HOLIDAY TIME DOES HAVE ITS ADVANTAGES, but one of them is definitely not the fact that I am often forced to spend time away from my wife, a torture worse than anything that any devil or daemon might set in store for me after death; thus, as it were, I can safely state that the time I spend in her company guarantees me eternal happiness.

THIS SUFFERING NOTWITHSTANDING, I am occasionally diverted to pay attention to what our leaders are up to, and the football match yesterday evening was one of those occasions. It appears to me that the English, despite what has been stated in popular fiction in the XIX century, have basically no ability at sport. We may be good at inventing games, but as soon as we tell foreigners the rules we will be thrashed into oblivion at our own game. This is not exactly being hoisted by our own petards, but a close simile.

THE DUFFEST ASPECT of the issue nowadays is that we no longer rely on drab Englishmen to drag Englishness through the mud, but bring Europeans into the mix. After having Sven-Goran “Shagger” Erikson as manager of the England football team, we might have learned that Europeans should not be trusted because they have never understood our values, as hardly any of them went to Eton.

ALAS, THIS IS NOT THE CASE. The present foreign manager of the English team speaks about the recent dismal depression in form as if he were a minor character in a Marx Brothers film, or at an audition for a Neapolitan comic opera. Of course, none of this is really serious at the moment, but after the recess, we will have to get down to the proper business of setting things to rights. One wonders whether Gordon is actually paying attention to all this in his spa clinic in Switzerland, where he is presumably having his brain washed.

MORE EVIL FROM EUROPE

THE RECENT ATTACK ON OUR HEALTH coming from the so-called European Union, also known as the Franco-German Empire, should surprise no one. The “European Law” that tells our work-loving trainee doctors that they are no longer allowed to work or train for more than 48 hours per week will do little more than turn decent, middle-class chaps into bare-faced liars when they fiddle their time sheets in order to do a good day’s work.

FEARS ABOUND FOR OUR NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE when in the future we have doctors lazing around in garden chairs while we suffer from the diseases imported by the increasing Europeanisation of our dietary habits. While many people believe that the hamburger was invented by Genghis Khan in 1180, so he would not have to dismount from his little pony while conquering Europe, and others believe that it comes from our cousins in the USA, it is clear that the origin of today’s hamburger is in XVIII century Germany.

WE HAVE RECORDS OF IT as early as 1802 in New York City, eaten mainly by the large German population and then called “steak cooked in the Hamburg style”, or sometimes known as the “Frikadelle”. Descendents of these same Teutons must have taken it to California, where it began unleashing its poison gas in a lethal attack on the western world.

HAMBURGER GAS IS RESPONSIBLE for more deaths than any other known illness in history; and is without any doubt the cause of global warming and the hole in the ozone layer. Phenomena such as the hamburger gas cloud hanging over Los Angeles (above), one of the most afflicted areas on the planet, the fog on the River Tyne, the blackening of public buildings in London, and acid rain are all due to it. Indeed, one of the only benefits of this foul chemical swarm is the latter case: the prevailing winds over the British Isles send large amounts of its noxious poison over to the north coast of Germany.