Between dreams and reality

There's a space in my day which is full of possibilities. It comes in the minutes between sleeping and properly waking, when my dreams fill the room and distort my real life like fairground mirrors.

Einstein is teaching me to play the penny whistle on the top of a scaffold. I'm baking not-gingerbread cookies for a not-Christmas fair which is really a car boot sale that will make my fortune. A good friend is secretly getting married in a wooden house in Bavaria.

These all seem completely plausible versions of reality as I lie, half aware that they are fading into nothing. But they leave an open space where they once were, of dreams as yet undreamt and unimagined possibilities that somehow now seem entirely possible too.

Dog days

After only a week, the heat is beginning to take its toll on the Londoners - famed for their tolerance of everything except the constant vagaries of the English weather.

The itinerant drunks who pepper the high street near my house look more jaded than usual, listlessly nursing extra large cans in paper bags on sun streaked benches. The seemingly hundreds of construction workers supposedly engaged in essential works on erupting pavements and roads laze together in groups of bare arms and high visibility jackets. They idly watch the guts of the city spew out of the holes they have made, perfecting their tans and trying their luck as young women in impossibly short skirts saunter by.

Taxis drive more slowly and traffic piles up on the escape roads from the baking city. Petrol fumed air filling the nostrils of tired mothers pushing limp children in buggies that have gained twenty kilos in the heat.

In the corner shop an old Irish lady, in for her twenty cigarettes and scratch card, laments the weather to the man serving her.
"It's lovely but it's too much", she says, shaking her head.
"It's alright if you're not doing anything" He agrees.
"It's alright if you're at the seaside. That's where I'm going come Thursday, thank goodness"
"Oh, there's rain coming Thursday."
"Oh well that's just typical isn't it. I'll have another scratch card, see if I can't win myself a place in the sun."

Between sleeping and waking

A thought I took from my dreams this morning:

Asleep, his breathing is the sound of brushes sweeping snow.

Castles in the sky

The scaffolding has reached the highest point of the bridge and workers walk along its many levels, like characters in an Escher drawing. I am reminded of old engravings of London Bridge before the fire, a city suspended above the water with houses, shops and workshops all piled on top of each other.

The imaginative possibilities of this temporary, towering structure are not lost to the construction workers either, who have fixed flags to the top of each turret. They seem proud as clever children as they look up at the England flag waving our team on in the World Cup. A gesture to put all the car pennants in the city in the shade.

Vauxhall bus station

A summer's morning. The scent of apricots and gardenias from women wafting by gives the illusion of Mediterranean warmth in the hot diesel fumed air. Pale light glances off brushed metal surfaces and shimmers on the station roof, a brief shoal of mackerel in a blue Mediterranean sea. And then the moment ends. Descending into the damp atmosphere of the undergound station you are back in Britain, a dull urban cityscape with a chill underneath the sun.

On the road

A stationary position with one foot on the accelerator seems like a modern meditation. But you're moving, vibrations on the steering wheel tell you so. Moving faster than you can really imagine - just a blurred drone if you saw yourself from the side of the road.

Watching the scenery close in and recede past the windscreen is a strangely calming experience. In the early summer all is lush, fresh and idyllic. Nothing is seen in close up, and from a distance no imperfections of daily life are visible.

Stopped, for a moment to pick up a punnet of strawberries in a layby on the road. The woman's arms are brown and ample, her fingernails brown also. Gorging on fruit with one hand not looking as you pop each gritty haired, knobbly ball into your mouth, the smell of childhood briefly fills the warm, plastic air.

Each journey on a well-travelled route is an echo of a previous trip, another motivation, summers long past but still alive in the picture book of your mind.The space in between leaving and arriving is filled with memories and future imaginings, place names pass quicker than time, a single stretched out moment on the road.

The school run

Walking down the nearly trafficless road to the bridge, school children cross into my path, like flocks of brightly coloured birds.

A mother hen nervously shepherds her four green and yellow charges, wobbling and racing on bicycles down the road. Her red skirt too long and tight for cycling really. The job is not made easier by having two toddlers under her own wing, one before and the other aft on her sensible bike. She shouts fruitlessly as the ducklings chatter along ahead.

Next: a navy uniform, with long bright red legs, like a wading bird. Heard before being seen, her huge backpack is adorned with dozens of ornaments and soft toys on chains that ring and jangle as she runs.

A brother and sister kick a hazelnut down the pavement, scuffing their school shoes. Their father walks ahead, ignoring the time wasting antics, is surprised as they rush him all at once, grabbing his arms and swinging them.

Finally, just before the bridge, the regular sight of a tandem bike, the back seat lower than the front. Parent and child in perfect, silent synergy with crash hats and high visibility jackets.

Sunset over water

The photograph can't capture it, I don't know why I put it up there really, except as a kind of visual signifier of what I mean. It's something you almost need to paint to truly experience again, once the moment has passed. But a still painting would miss the fact that a sunset isn't a snapshot, it's a movie, a rolling film of colour, expanding and contracting, intensifying and softening over the screen of the sky.

This one was a huge angora blanket. The clouds were the texture of raw lambswool that we plucked from the grass a few hours before. The redness was like the glistening heart of a pomegranate, leaking rich juices over fingers and sleeves, bleeding into the water below. Not the pale imitation from the camera, too sensitive to light, not able to relax its retina in the face of such glorious colour.

The grenadine blanket stretched over the sky, dripped a colour even more intense into the lake, and filled everything, - not just the eyes, but the mind, the mouth, the stomach. A rich meal, satisfying, but always consumed with a tugging fear, the aching knowledge that too soon it would be finished.

The colour finally faded, like a fruit ice sucked out, leaving behind an astringent sweetness and a chill on the arms.

A Lakeland post

They're an odd couple in the Landrover - bickering over everything in low, gruff voices. A father and son up on the fells moving sheep.
"Keep the gate open then!"
"It is open!"
"Hep, hep. Get out you lazy sods. They usually run."
"I know"
"What's wrong with them?"
Silence. The older man has clearly had enough of idle conversation. He stares out into the distance, where the mountains' outlines are grey and hazy even in this bright sunshine.

The Lakeland Fells feel like the back garden of these old guys - dressed in thick cotton trousers, collared shirts and caps, each clutching their own wooden walking stick. They roam the lower hills, imparting their wisdom to eager walkers, or conspicuously ignoring the steady traffic of holiday makers.

It's not really a wild landscape, parts of it could be mistaken for the work of Capability Brown, except that they were probably his inspiration. Perfect lakes, fringed with oak and beech trees and surrounded by mountains on all sides. At the edge of Grasmere lake two hills meet with a road running through, like the childhood landscapes I used to draw, only missing the sun peeking over the top.

Perhaps the best thing, and maybe what attracts the aged farmers to the fell walks again and again, is the feeling of sitting on top of the world, watching the toy sized trees and houses below. If only those damn sheep would run, you'd be master of all you survey.

Long shadows

In the early Summer the sun shines hotly and bright, even while most people are still in bed and asleep. Giant shadows of trees and buildings stalk the ground, more reminiscent of the evening light, but with a pure washed colour that only appears at the beginning of the day.

Signs of madness

It's hard sometimes to distinguish between the mad and the sane in a city environment. There is the man who sings loudly to himself as he walks down the street at six in the morning. If you're lucky enough to be awake at that time of day, you can hear the tunelsss no-word song echoing down the empty morning street.

Then there are the unkempt, seemingly unloved and defiant figures who wave, gesture and shout on corners and in doorways. A small twinge of, what? Guilt, pity or fear for one's own mind - is quickly overtaken by the preservation instinct that tells you to move away, but not so obviously that you draw attention to yourself. The currents and eddies of movement on a city street will often tell you where these unfortunates lie.

But there are some more difficult cases. Take, for example, the people who stand in the park and shout in the air, barking officiously at nothing in particular:

"Arthur, Arthur. No, Arthur no. No, no NO!!!"
"Berkeley... Berkeley..."
"OUT!"

I swerved in an unconscious reaction to one of these frenzied screams on my run this morning, only to realise that it was just another dog owner, trying to retrieve their pet from a rhododendron bush, the corpse of a bird or something even less appealing.

It made me think that if only the crazy people had a mobile phone, pet or child to shout at, they wouldn't seem mad at all. And if the dogs in the park all disappeared, it would just be full of sad, angry, mad people shouting at the air.