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.

The best Christmas ever!

Mary Dunwich writes:

Oh, I do like Magdalen College! I'm so glad I have finally had a chance to look round it. I tried to pretend I wasn't really that impressed, saying that it all looked a bit antiquated compared to my old Alma Mater, the University of Harrogate. But I have to admit I envy the students who get to spend time in those lovely old buildings. You can just stand there and feel yourself getting smarter.

The staff are lovely too, though not as old. Doctor Roisin Brack is really very pretty, tall and slim with auburn hair and freckles. I can see why Harry is so taken with her. He was even talking to her over lunch, and although the phrase "chatting her up" might be going a bit far, he was definitely responding to her questions and even volunteering bits of information about himself (mostly about his student days at Cambridge).

After lunch we went for a walk around the grounds. Lucy, Briony, Sam and Calvin all showed us around, and we had a good look at the earth around the fritillaries and in the rose beds. The painty footprints had washed away and we couldn't find any more clues, but it was still nice to be poking about in the park. We gave the kids a Fruit Shoot and a bag of chocolate coins each for their help in hunting for Dodgson, and Charlie presented them each with a jar of his Christmas Cranberry pickle for their parents.

To round off the afternoon we were invited to afternoon tea in the psychology department. Charlie, who doesn't really do small talk, excused himself and took Minnie off for a Museum crawl. Harry, having made a date with Roisin to go to a New Year's Eve party in the College, disappeared in the direction of the Computing Department. I was left with James to meet the members of the Psychology Department. Mrs Brith, who is the wife of one of the senior lecturers and also Briony and Sam's mum, had baked a big plum cake, so we all sat down and had a slice with a cup of tea in Dr Brack's office.

Over tea I got to meet the Great Man himself, the Professor. To tell the truth I was so overstimulated by that point that I don't remember much about him, although he seemed very nice. He even lent me a copy of his book, "Schizotypy: implications for illness and health". He said there was a test for schizotypy in it, and it wasn't designed to work on children, but I could go through it and measure how schizotypal I am.

The department use the term "healthy schizotype" for people with schizotypal characteristics but no signs of actual insanity. It's not a very apt name, sounding as it does like a contradiction in terms, like calling someone a "healthy cancer patient". I suggested an alternative term. I was told that, sadly, the term "madder than a bucket full of frogs" is unlikely to be accepted by the wider academic community unless sufficient experiments were performed on frogs to determine exactly how mad they are. The university wouldn't like to be seen to be performing unorthodox and possibly cruel frog research. I suggested "madder than a box full of hair" as an alternative (even the Animal Rights Movement don't fight for the rights of hair), but the Prof. said it would really be very difficult to establish empirically the madness level of even James' hair. So I told him that in that case he would jolly well have to think up his own terminology and he said he'd keep thinking about it.

We were joined by a fascinating little lady who didn't seem to belong to the psychology department at all, but who had expressed a desire to meet us. No taller than James, she spoke English perfectly but with an accent. She introduced herself as Catherine D'Urbanville, a language student from the Universiteit van Amsterdam. D'Urbanville? Sounds a bit Thomas Hardy to me. Maybe her real name is unpronouncable unless you're Dutch.

Catherine declined the cake and tea. "What I would really like," she said, "is a Fruit Shoot and a Mars Bar. Do you have any?" Puzzled, I opened the goody bag and handed her a drink and a chocolate bar. She smiled. "My great-great- (and a few more greats) grandfather Jan de Banweel used to love these!" she said. "He wrote about them in his log. I'll keep these as souvenirs if you don't mind."

I thought about this for a while. Catherine was older than your average student, late twenties maybe. She looked arty, and madder than a...I mean like a healthy schizotype. Was she actually insane? In Oxford University it would be difficult to tell. What would you use for a basis of comparison?

"Was Jan de Banweel a sailor?" I asked at last.

She smiled again. "That's right!" she said. "He was a Commandeur in the Dutch Navy. He sailed all over the Dutch East Indies. There was no-one in the Dutch fleet that could match his navigational skills throughout the seventeenth century."

I nodded thoughtfully. "He must have had a really accurate timepiece," I said.

She nodded. "It bacame an heirloom, passed down from father to son in my family for over a century. I would show it to you now but it leaked acid in the mid eighteenth-century and so my great-grandfather threw it away. We only have a picture of it left. It looked like a modern-day boys' watch, like the one your son is wearing!"

We all looked at James' Swatch. Then we all looked at Catherine. "Wow!" I said at last. "Any chance of having my mobile phone back?"

"Sorry," she replied. "I have no idea what happened to that. Jan didn't have much use for it, so he didn't keep it."

"Ah well," I sighed. "You can't win them all. Did you know Jan gave James a dodo in exchange for the watch and the snacks?"

Catherine laughed. "Of course! Jan wrote about that in his journal too. It's one reason I wanted to come to Oxford. I wanted to paint a dodo and I thought it would be a good place to get some inspiration."

She explained that she has an assignment to paint a series of murals inspired by British children's fantasy stories, so she jumped at the chance to spend a term on an exchange to Oxford for the Carroll, Tolkien and Lewis vibe.

"And did you find inspiration here?" I asked. Catherine gazed out of the window and smiled dreamily.

We had finished our tea and cake by this point and it was getting late. "Well, I suppose we'd better be making a move. It was a pleasure to meet James' sailor friend's descendant, " I said.

"Before you go I have a present for you," said Catherine. "It's in the porter's lodge. You can pick it up from there on your way out to your car."

We gathered together our coats and bags, said our goodbyes and wandered over to the porter's lodge to claim our present. It turned out to be a wooden crate with holes in the lid and a large envelope attached to the box with string.

I opened the envelope. Inside was a pencil sketch of a dodo, beautifully drawn, and a card with name and address in Amsterdam. I examined the picture very carefully. The dodo was wearing a collar.

I prodded at the box cautiously. It stirred.

"Doo-doo!" said the box.

"Dodgson!" we cried.

Carefully, ready to grab him if he made another dash for it, we opened the box. We looked at the dodo. He looked in excellent shape, although an hour or so spent in a tea chest had done nothing for his temper. He glared at us with an injured expression. Tears welled up in my eyes.

"Our birdy's back!" shouted James. "This is going to be the best Christmas ever!"

I nodded, too happy to speak. This was the best present I could have asked for. The whole family, together again for Christmas.

"Gods bless us every one!" said (not-so-tiny) Jim.


Mary Dunwich is on holiday now until the New Year.

An interesting invitation

E-mail from Dr Brack, Department of Psychology, Magdalen College. Monday.

Dear Mrs Dunwich and family.

Thank you for your e-mail, and also for the cheque for £2.50 and for the jars of home-made "Death Pickle". It caused quite a stir at the Departmental Christmas dinner!

You clearly have taken the subject of schizotypy to heart and you have many interesting questions about it. What a pity you were not able to come up to Oxford to visit the college with your husband and son on the day of the study.

Would you like to come up to look around the college and meet some of the staff? We can answer your questions and perhaps give you some further reading material on our schizotypy research. You can also look around the grounds and the Deer Park for traces of Dodgson yourself, and satisfy yourself that everything possible is being done to find him. Would you, your husband and your children all be free for 12pm on Monday 22nd? Your husband should remember where to find us. Perhaps you could invite Harry too?

Your sincerely,

Dr Roisin Brack.

E-mail to Oxford

E-mail from Mary Dunwich to Dr Roisin Brack, Department of Psychology, Magdalen College, Thursday.

Dear Dr Brack, Professor C. and anyone else who understands this schizotypy malarkey,

Thank you very much for your kind and noble efforts to find Dodgson. It sounds from your findings that he has been captured and is at this moment being held, possibly against his will, for purposes unknown but possibly related to Art. I can only hope that his captor is looking after him properly and will release him unharmed. Christmas morning won't be the same without his expectant little face at the patio doors.

I am sending you a cheque to cover your expenses with the dodo-hunt, plus four jars of Death Pickle for the grown-ups. Don't ask what's in it, but it's very good in cheese sandwiches.

Please could you tell me how one measures schizotypy to determine where one is on the spectrum. Also, have you done any work on schizotypy in children?

By the way, Harry is very fond of Chinese food, in case you might need that information for your files.

With festive greetings,

Mary Dunwich and family.

Traces of Dodo

E-mail from Doctor Brack, Department of Psychology, Magdalen College.
Monday.

Dear Dunwich family,

Rest assured the search for your family pet carries on into the holidays.

This weekend we brought out our secret weapon in the hunt for Dodgson. The academic staff brought their children in for a Dodo-hunt. Lucy (age 7 and a half), Briony (age 9), Sam (age 10) and Calvin (aged 11) were all heavily bribed with Mars Bars (which I trust will come out of the reward offered) and set to hunting. The results were very promising, and demonstrated that motivated primary-school children can outperform Oxford undergraduates who've been celebrating Christmas early.

The findings of the team may be summarised as follows:

One feather, large and grey, similar to a pigeon but larger. We have sent it to the Biology Department who has said that they are currently busy, but they will look at it after their Christmas dinner.

One bed of hardy perennials, trampled and pecked, with the surrounding soil much scratched and disturbed. Possible evidence of roosting by a large bird.

One of the art studios reported by cleaning staff to be "messy, with a funny smell".

Footprints, as of a largish bird, on the path leading from this art studio. Traces of paint, possibly guache, on the prints.

We have accordingly put up some of your "Wanted!" notices around the art department and rewarded the intrepid hunters with four Fruit Shoots.

Thank you for sending me Harry's full name, address, phone number, mobile phone number, e-mail address, star sign and favourite topics of conversation.

Wishing you all the best in the festive season,

Dr Roisin Brack.

Mary writes a song

Sunday.
Mary Dunwich writes:

I have spent most of the weekend sitting by the phone and worrying about Dodgson. It's very nice of the psychology department at Magdalen College to be putting so much effort into looking for our dodo, or rather compelling their students to spend their last days of term looking for him, but term ended on Friday and he has not reappeared. If he is still roaming wild in the deer park in this weather then I fear for his health. On the other hand, the porter who followed his tracks is convinced that he has been captured by person or persons unknown. Doctor Brack is sanguine that no undergraduate would harm him (other than feeding him on the normal undergraduate diet of beer and kebabs). As the undergraduates have now presumably all packed their bags and gone home for Christmas, I am worried that whoever has him may have more in mind than a mere undergraduate prank.

To take my mind off my poor little kidnapped dodo I bought a copy of Professor Claridge's book, "Personality and Psychological Disorders" and have started reading it. What I think I have understood so far is the following:

- All of us have a particular personality type;

- Our personality type predisposes us, under certain circumstances (like stress), to a particular form of mental illness.

In other words, we are all on a spectrum, with normality at one end and the insanity of our choice at the other. As to which personality type we are, that seems to be a matter of genetics. Whether we ever become insane ("personality disordered" or even "mentally ill"), that seems to depend on the kind of upbringing that we have experienced.

I studied the list of personality disorders with interest. I could think of at least one member of my family who seemed to personify each one. "Schizotypal" sounds the best fit for James and me. It's a bit worrying to see this described as being "on the schizophrenia spectrum", as I'm pretty sure that schizophrenia isn't a very pleasant thing to have. I really don't fancy a stretch as an inpatient in St Isaac's psychiatric hospital. I therefore read the next bit of the book with great attention.

It said: "in moderate amount the underlying traits predisposing to schizophrenia are perfectly adaptive features of personality; in the same way that mild anxiety traits can be beneficial."

Ooh! So you can be madder than a bucket of frogs (I don't think the good professor uses this actual phrase, but it is clearly what he is driving at) and yet, at the same time, perfectly normal. Have I got this right?

Further on I read: "...fully dimensional theorists have made considerable use of the notion of 'healthy schizotypy' to denote (perhaps the majority of) individuals who are high on the dimension but who show no evidence of illness...".

I considered briefly the idea that fully dimensional theorists meant fat academics. Then I wondered how you knew if you were high on the schizotypy dimension. It sounds like a line from a Hawkwind song.

"I'm ridin' on the schizotypy dimension, (boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-boom)
My eccentricity is manifest
My magic powers are worth special mention
And the Men In Black want me for tests.

I don't get out to parties, cos I have social anxieties,
I hang with the ghosts and the ghouls and the goblins
And I can even talk to my dead gran.
Though she can't get down like the Devil can.

I look like a freak, people call me a geek
They tell me that my head is in the middle of next week
But who needs the sane when I've got the voices in my brain
And my old gran can party like it's 1949

So bring your voices round to my place,
Summon the pixies and the Devil and the elves
We'll all ride high on our schizotypy
Cos these freaky traits are all a healthy part of ourselves

Oh yeah".