Tagfeels gooooood

Dream hens, milkshake flashback, polished by nature, naan heaven, distract my dream

1. I dream that our next-door-but-one neighbours have chickens too and that they’re chickens and are chickens are wandering around the gardens together. I wake up smiling.

2. Driving away from meeting the incredibly flexible baby Eva, we both think the same thing: milkshakes. Going into Headingley and to Shaky Jake’s is like reliving a random Saturday from 18 months ago.

3. The cool smoothness of conkers in my pocket.

4. The giant naan is fluffy and smothered with garlic. On the table opposite, I see some people – Omar’s virgins – eyeing it with concern, worrying about how many they’ve ordered for themselves. We’re finished before their food arrives so I don’t get to see their faces but from watching similar scenes for the last decade, I know how their eyes will widen, they’ll laugh and cameras will emerge to record the scene.

5. I start reading “The World in Winter” by John Christopher before I go to sleep and as soon as I start, I know it’s a mistake – the descriptions of the country falling into savagery disturb me*. I’m thankful I have another book – a gentle apocalypse-less book – by my bedside so I can distract my brain before dream time.

(Especially as, like in “The Death of Grass”, Leeds is singled out for a bad-shizz-going-down namecheck – as if the specific details of London’s decline isn’t enough to scare me…)

3BT – phezoo, gummy wisdom, it is quite social you know

1. We have a phone conference instead of our weekly in-person meeting. Restricted to just our voices, we’re more stilted and business like than usual but the phone service makes us smile with a comedy “phezoo” noise whenever anyone leaves. In our text-based chat later, Caius announces a sub-set meeting is over, saying “Participants dispersed in a hail of alien gunfire”.

2. My first wisdom tooth has finally made it into the open. The gum around it feels spongy and soft. I can’t resist tonguing it because it reminds me of losing teeth when I was a child.

3. I talk to a Romanian guy living in Sweden about life in the UK (and how it’s a balmy -6°C compared to his -25°C) while killing mutated turtles in a mythical land.