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 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.
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