Savoir Faire

A filling station and a pile of bones – legacy of a scam and an unsolved murder.

A black woman driving an old black Mercedes – not driving it competently I must add; a threat.

A nuclear power plant and a PR woman patiently, laboriously explaining stuff to me – and me impatiently cutting her short, in the arrogance of my assumed knowledge.

Those were the features of last night's dreams, which I'm setting down here as a sort of neon sign for my memory. I do keep a dream journal, but paging back through its scrawled entries can be a bind sometimes. So I write it here. For last night my dreams took on the aura of wide connection: they were not at all about me, although some readings of them could make them appear self-addressed, I suppose. You'll just have to trust me on this- there was a feeling of tapping into the Web about last night.

On the home front, we spent a very quiet New Year. Very quiet, what with the television packing up on New Year's Eve. It's in the shop for repairs under guarantee right now and I do not miss it one little bit.

After sunset on New Year's Eve, the area was lashed by a thunderstorm, which somewhat dampened the firecracker-throwing activities of the local yobbos...err...children. The dogs were sedated as a precaution that night, but were entirely undrugged on the next two nights, when the local youth resumed their bombing. Scylla and Taranis were completely cool with it all, however – they lay around on the tiled floor looking not at all impressed, and I was proud of them.

The birds in the area however, were so startled at every firecracker that I feared for their safety – especially as we have a new Olive Thrush hatchling trying his wings in the garden right now.

The need for young humans to blow off steam I can almost empathise with – but not when it is at the expense of other living creatures. Don't get me wrong – I eat meat. As a Shaman I know moreover that the plant kingdom is possessed of a consciousness at least the equal of the animals', and I eat them, too. But this making of very loud noises – louder by far than gunfire – for very little reason had me wishing, vindictively, that the perpetrators' hands would get blown off in the act of lobbing a cracker. Nasty of me, yes.

Meanwhile my canine companions - as always, as always - are giving me a lesson in savoir faire. There is nothing I can do about the noise, so flop on the floor and ignore it, why don't you?

Pic: That's our sweet, intelligent girlie Scylla