Anxious times

A mild anxiety dream last night, vaguely in the Treasury but with some detail-free odour of OPCS (now ONS) and of my secondary school about it. I was running the sort of meeting for which one needs to do preparation, to cook up some business, not the sort of meeting where there is something reasonably firm to bite on and which runs itself, but had failed to do the preparation and had failed to produce an agenda. But I did have a meeting room, copies of the minutes of the last meeting and copies of some paper promised for this meeting, with something unspecified being wrong with this last. The dream opens with my removing a warm covered silver plate or stainless steel platter from the previous meeting, a platter containing half a very large & savoury baked potato, with the half being the right shape but far too large, with the idea being to provide refreshment for the unprepared meeting in question.

I am then in the meeting room, having arrive a little late, and rather than take five minutes out to cook up some business (which is all the time I would have needed), I try to ad-lib it and rapidly get into deep water, at which point I wake up and sail off into more or less innocuous reminiscences from the past.

It presumably says something about me that such reminiscences are more often about things that I got wrong than things which I got right.

PS: I associate now to a meeting about the Postcode Address File, then a rather new thing in the statistical world, at which I did get into rather a muddle for lack of preparation. This being at a time before personal computers and when a file containing millions of records was a serious proposition - unlike now when one can run an SQL query on such a thing in seconds.