Medley of old hits from any era no matter who or no matter why.
Take a look at what you missed.
Take time and Take it to the Max.
The last pub closes when the money runs out.
History Will Not Be Kind to You.
Last words she reads to him are these.
Last song on the JukeBox is Goodbye Felicia.
ADRIAN SLATCHER
DREAMS ARE CONTAGIOUS
‘I am on Air Force One, and Donald Trump has invited me to sit next to him. He calls over for one of his aides and a few minutes later we are delivered a platter of New York pastrami on rye. He insists I try them first, and I ask him if it’s because he thinks the food is going to poison him, and he laughs, and says something about “ladies first”, and somehow the sandwich is just something which we can both talk about so that I’m at ease with the President of the United States. I’m constantly thinking, this is strange, I don’t know why I’m here, and then the plane sort of jolts as if it’s hit an air pocket – well, I hope it’s hit an air pocket and it’s not a missile attack or something – and Donald Trump is white as a sheet and suddenly looks like the old man he is, and I pat him on the hand and reassure him and I think, that’s why I’m here, to make sure he gets down all right. I tell him I am a Jehovah’s Witness so that if anything happens I’m okay with it, that my place in heaven is secure, and that if he wants I can pray for him and that seems to relax him. And then the plane starts to nose-dive…’
‘Carol…?’ I prompt, after the pause continues for a few seconds.
‘…and then I wake up.’
I sit back, creating a bit of distance between us. My chair is straight-backed, uncomfortable enough to keep me from falling asleep even during the most repetitive of testimonies, whilst Carol’s chair – the client’s chair – is shorter, rounder, and more comfortable, the sort of chair in which you might feel comfortable enough to talk about your dreams.
There are the usual signifiers. I explain that dreams are the unconscious speaking to us, and that not everything in a dream is significant, that much of the detail of the story is the random detritus we pick up during the daytime and doesn’t actually mean anything in itself. Perhaps there had been a news article about Donald Trump? Had she seen a late-night film showing a plane crash? I told her what I thought, and she nodded, taking it in, and asked a few questions, and then talked a little bit about her life. She didn’t mention her faith again, and I didn’t want to be the one to bring it up, but it seemed important.
She looked pretty normal, well dressed, carefully made up, with an expensive haircut, the kind of woman who you would speak to if you were buying perfume for your girlfriend or your mother. Only as she left did I notice that she wore the most solid, sensible shoes I’d ever seen.
‘That’s the fifth one this week,’ I told Zuzanna from the other room. ‘They are all having dreams about Donald Trump. I wouldn’t mind, but why now? I thought we’d have got used to him by now. Did British people dream of Obama? Of Clinton? Of Dubya?’
‘Dreams are contagious,’ she said, ‘you know that.’
And I did know that. I had told her everything I knew about dreams whilst she worked on her algorithm.
‘Maybe it’s a sign that you should stop,’ she said, ‘and, by the way, I have finished the beta.’ And she pronounced it to rhyme with feta not with metre. I loved how she said the word.
‘That’s great news,’ I said. But I have appointments booked in all week…’
‘Stop now,’ she said, ‘before you catch the contagion.’
Her logic was impeccable.
That night in bed we made love and as I moved on top of her, finding my rhythm, I pleaded with her to ‘say it’.
‘Beta,’ she said, ‘beta, beta, beta, beta, be-ta…’
Zuzanna was a software engineer originally from Katowice who I had met via an online forum but who happened to live in the same city as me. Soon we were dating, and before I knew it she had moved in. My dream-consultation business had been going for over a year and had turned into something of a success. People were looking for something in their lives.
I had gone online to see if there were any dream apps that I might be able to recommend, and that’s when I’d found Zuzanna. She was marshalling a team of programmers across Eastern Europe and South East Asia to develop an AI bot that would make me redundant. The demand for dream consultation meant that the business would never develop with just one person doing it. Zuzanna had great plans for her software to go global. She paid her programmers in a cryptocurrency that was powered by the amount of new dreams appearing in the world. Every time someone wrote about their dream on social media, Zuzanna’s bots scraped the information and fed it into a database. In the early days new dreams appeared every few hours, but now, with a substantial database, new dreams were becoming as rare as mathematical primes.
The next morning I woke early. Zuzanna was already at work taking advantage of her programmers being in different time zones. I returned to my booth in the labyrinth of shortlet offices in Carmichael Street and carefully attached a sign to the door.
Because of unprecedented demand all dream consultations will now take place virtually.