Keeping in Contact

I didn’t sleep well last night, for the usual reason.

I was in my Mother’s sitting room. She was sitting eating mince pies and discussing Russian cinema with her neighbours. Here we go again, I thought. Without lucid dreaming my nightlife would be dull.

I excused myself politely and slipped out of the house. It was a dark, starry night. I could hear the sea rather than see it. A cold wind was blowing and I wondered why I could never remember to wrap up warmly in my dreams.

I dream this dream every week. I know the way by now.

I crossed the sands to the island. At high tide it’s cut off by the sea so it’s pretty foolish to walk to it at night without even a torch. I wouldn’t like to get stuck here and have to wait until I have this dream again to get back to shore.

From the shore the island is a good quarter of a mile across wet sand. I frowned. Now it was a short walk on a sunny day, my bare toes warmed by the sand between them. What happened to the night and the wind? Who moved my island?

I reached the island and continued with caution. Those ruins have been in my dreams for sixteen years, I know every inch of their gloomy, foreboding shape. Grey masonry falling apart, the mortar crumbling, the whole structure seems to be rotting like a bad tooth.

Tonight, however, was different. I saw that the castle had been painstakingly, even lovingly restored. Now a warm biscuit colour, the stonework had been carefully repointed and new walls and roofs added. The castle looked habitable now, cosy even. I walked round to the back, to the part you can’t see from the shore. Now it looked like a house, with a path of pink granite, through a neatly laid-out front garden with hardy shrubs in pots on either side of the door. It looked like the National Trust had ganged up with Ground Force to give my dream a thorough going-over.

Further around the back of the island is a little beach with rock pools. As a child I could stare into them for hours and watch the crabs and the anemones. Someone was sitting on an a granite boulder, his trousers rolled up to his knees, dabbling his toes in the water and watching a little wooden boat bobbing up and down on the end of its string. He looked tired and slightly faded, but content, as if he had come home at last after a long journey.

“Hello, Father!” I greeted him brightly. “How are you getting on over there? Feeding you all right, are they?”

He showed no sign of hearing me. Fair enough, I thought. You haven’t come all this way to break into my dream just to engage in idle banter. I sat on the rock beside him, watched the boat and waited.

Finally he spoke, in a quiet, measured voice. It sounded as though it had been filtered of all emotions and only quiet resignation was left.

“You have no idea how hard it can be to bring up three lively children,” he said. “No idea at all. You have so much to learn, Sweetie.”

“We all have things to learn,” I retorted. “You never learned how to take care of a dodo. Anyway,” I continued, picking up a shell and turning it over between my fingers, “We’ve only got two children.”

“So much left to learn,” sighed my Father, starting to fade.

“Wait!” I said. “I just wanted to say…well…don’t get bored over there! Join a club or something! I’ll make sure you’ve got plenty to read and….don’t go….!”

It was too late. Laurence Llewellyn Bowen, accompanied by a National Trust volunteer with a chintz pinny and a huge alarm clock, bore down on me. They asked me to leave as I was causing a disturbance.

“I’ll get you for this, Bowen!” I shouted, as the alarm clock rang and I woke up.

“If you say so, dear,” mumbled Charlie into his pillow.

New Year's Resolutions and how to survive them

This term’s story is dedicated to my Father, who encouraged my love of stories from an early age. I shall upload a text-only version of this story to the “OuiJa” veil site, so he can read it, because I think he might like it and I don’t suppose there’s much to read over there.


The Christmas holidays were lively as usual. The children get so excited about Christmas, and what with the stress of losing Dodgson and finding him again only at the start of the holidays, I didn’t do half the shopping and baking I had planned.

I delegated decorating the house to the kids, as a result of which we had more bloody zombies and daleks than is traditional over the festive season. James decorated the Christmas cake. He made lovely little marzipan models of all of us, including a little marzipan dodo who left little footprints all across the icing. Minnie decorated a gingerbread house, complete with a little boy in a cage and a witch roasting in the oven.

Charlie bought the presents. He got James a big thick book called “This Was Your Life: biographies of 1,000 really interesting Dead People”. James has been studying it with interest. I’m afraid he is picking out potential new etherbuddies to write to. Minne was easy, we gave her a sword, shield, mace and first-aid kit for her Hedgehogs Rampant uniform.

Charlie bought me a new mobile phone. It’s rather simpler to use than my old one, which I could never work and wasn’t really sorry when James traded it in the seventeenth century. This new one has a built-in mp3 player, which is very handy for LingQ. I can listen to German and Russian material while I’m on the school run.

Minnie bought me a furry mobile phone case. It makes the phone look exactly like a squashed hedgehog. It is part of a series of roadkill-themed accessories, apparently the latest craze amongst the under-twenties. How thoughtful.

I was more excited by James’ present. Having got his space-time travel module working again, he travelled back to the 10th of March, 1876, to record the first electronic transmission of speech in Boston. I now have Alexander Graham Bell saying “Mr Watson, come here. I need you!” as my ring tone.

All in all, it was a great Christmas. Harry came round for Christmas dinner, one of Charlie’s nut roasts with all the trimmings. There was a nasty moment when Minnie laughed so hard at the joke in her cracker that she nearly choked on her gravy. I thumped her on the back and told her she should chew it more carefully. She responded by showing me the proper way to deal with a choking victim, then explained a couple of ways to make your victim choke in the first place.

Harry was in on grand form and told us a lot of geek jokes. I was the only one who laughed at most of them. The one about the programmer who thought that COFFEE was written in hexadecimal….I really should get out more.

It is a grand tradition in our family that we get a really nasty lurg after New Year, and this year we got a festive bout of flu that kept us all in bed for a week. Charlie, usually the Man of Steel, even had to have three days off work, groaning, getting off his head on Lemsip and watching the Artex patterns spin on the ceiling.

Unfortunately Harry chose that time to start on his New Year’s Resolution and give up drugs. As Harry’s drugs are antipsychotics this is not a good idea. Usually Charlie keeps an eye on Harry at work and checks he’s taken his pills, but without Charlie nobody noticed until Harry was wearing a tin-foil hat and complaining that the binmen were trying to recruit him to spy on the Prussians. He had to have a short holiday on the secure ward in Sir Isaac’s until the Devil stopped talking to him through the electrical sockets.

I’ve been hearing a lot of disembodied voices lately myself. In my case they are mostly my LingQ students talking to me through Skype. My New Year's resolution is to help more people learn English, and already I have doubled my number of students.

My first student was TibetanChick, an eighty year old Tibetan expatriate, whose views on politics are forcefully and colourfully expressed. I have spent the last couple of months not so much increasing her vocabulary as cleaning it up. Still, I am learning all about a part of the world I could never have found on a map three months ago.

My second student is Yuri, a mining engineer from Uzbekistan. He seems to have taken a shine to me, and books an hour-long private session with me each week. He goes into great detail about various aspects of the mining industry, but so far has resisted all attempts to turn the conversation to more general topics. At this rate I will qualify as a mining engineer before he is comfortable discussing his plans for the weekend in English.

A welcome new face is Cees, a fifty-something Dutchman, a witty and charming conversationalist. His command of English may even be better than my own. I can’t fault him, which is unfortunate, as that’s exactly what I’m being paid to do. Either he’s attracted to my Estuary English accent or he just finds my discussions really interesting. In an effort to stretch his vocabulary I have turned to the “Interesting Thing of the Day” website. Cees has really enjoyed discussing lucid dreaming and the possibility of an English spelling reform.

The newest kid on the block is Lucy Chiang, a Chinese computer programmer living in Pittsberg. This is puzzling. Surely Pittsberg is in the US, which is in America, which is English-speaking? Can’t she walk into her local bar and act friendly if she wants to speak English? I’ve seen her photo, and men would flock to talk to her. I suggested this. She explained that men generally are less interested in correcting her use of tenses and more interested in making other suggestions. At least I don’t hit on her. What with a husband, two kids and a dodo to clear up after, plus all the LingQ stuff I've been doing, I haven’t got the energy to flirt anymore.