![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I was in a tearoom, which seems remarkable enough, and it is the way of the dream that I'm pretty sure who I was with was not necessarily the same people all the way through. At the crucial point it was Neil and Simon, which makes sense because we were all at schoool together. And who should come in but two of our old teachers, P and R. P didn't seem to have aged in eighteen years, although thinking about it, it may only be about sixteen years since I last saw P - and I may have seen him with R at the same time. R, on the other hand, was in a wheelchair. He was never in the greatest of health when I saw him almost every day - a vegetarian of the pale and interesting school - but my guess is that by now he must be in his seventies. Is he older than my father? I'm not sure.
The disappointment was that they didn't recognise us, but then it has been two decades. Even in a dream, it's true that no one forgets a good teacher. (No one forgets a bad one, or a psychopath, for that matter.) But as I discovered at the Iain [M] Banks conference, you don't necessarily remember everyone you teach, and in my case I only taught the student six years ago - albeit for just a term. Still, Simon, Neil, R, P and I spent a lot of time together, and had a fairly close set of relationships. I'm disappointed with my unconscious version of events.
It struck me that R might no longer be with us, but he's still in the phone book. Should I phone him? What would I say? One ghost to another. Even when we last spoke, I got the feeling that we had moved on, and they were in the same old place, and somehow that was our fault. May be a phone call would be rubbing it in.
What about P? There's someone in the phone book in the right general area, but were his initials PA or PR? It never was his initials twenty years ago - did he live with his mother or his sister or...? Back then he was, what, my age now? Give or take. He hasn't aged. In my dream, anyway. Now he'd be older than R was then.
In the dream, the reunion didn't go well. We felt bitter about it. I ended up paying the bill, more than fifty quid for three of us. Rather steep for coffee and cakes. I'm not going there again.
The disappointment was that they didn't recognise us, but then it has been two decades. Even in a dream, it's true that no one forgets a good teacher. (No one forgets a bad one, or a psychopath, for that matter.) But as I discovered at the Iain [M] Banks conference, you don't necessarily remember everyone you teach, and in my case I only taught the student six years ago - albeit for just a term. Still, Simon, Neil, R, P and I spent a lot of time together, and had a fairly close set of relationships. I'm disappointed with my unconscious version of events.
It struck me that R might no longer be with us, but he's still in the phone book. Should I phone him? What would I say? One ghost to another. Even when we last spoke, I got the feeling that we had moved on, and they were in the same old place, and somehow that was our fault. May be a phone call would be rubbing it in.
What about P? There's someone in the phone book in the right general area, but were his initials PA or PR? It never was his initials twenty years ago - did he live with his mother or his sister or...? Back then he was, what, my age now? Give or take. He hasn't aged. In my dream, anyway. Now he'd be older than R was then.
In the dream, the reunion didn't go well. We felt bitter about it. I ended up paying the bill, more than fifty quid for three of us. Rather steep for coffee and cakes. I'm not going there again.
Tags: