Regression

Most of my dreams involve my time at the Treasury, a grand institution even if my stay there was not particularly grand. But last night there was regression and I found myself back at what was then the Department of Employment (complete with Regional Controllers and a Regional Controllers' Room in the St. James's Square office, complete with lockers for their overnight bags).

At a meeting in what had more the flavour of a school room than a meeting room. The chap in the chair being a 67:33 blend of the then Deputy Director of Statistics at the Department and the Deputy Head at my old school.

The meeting opened with my trying to punt some scheme or other, a scheme which the other people at the meeting found both tedious and implausible, not least because of my spotty track record in such matters. The trying seemed to involve my trying to attach a shaft of wood (modelled on the shaft of the bedside lamp which had caused me a little grief the day before) to a desk using some kind of G-cramp, but failing because the edge of the desk top was too fat to take the jaws of the G. I then suddenly realised that the whole problem could be avoided by installing a much larger screen for the PC involved. A much larger screen which would hugely facilitate the display of materials from ICL's DDS (ICL now being part of Fujitsu and the Data Dictionary System probably being extinct). Were application generators still the way forward? Did ICL's Application Master still exist? Complete nonsense, the parts of which I cannot now link together.

The meeting then moved onto the formal approval of various strange pro-forma requests from local authorities.

The meeting also included one of those old style, older civil servants who had fallen into one of those bureaucratic jobs which gave him considerable bureaucratic powers over the progress of affairs. A sort of superior parking attendant who got a great kick about being obstructive at all points. Who could certainly punch well above his weight. Grade A pain in the behind for pretty much everybody else. (This being the third real person in the dream. Even more unusual for me to have dreams involving real people than it is to have dreams which are not set in the Treasury. Not that I am having that many dreams at all just presently, at least not ones that I know about).

But I woke up to realise that there was a design fault in the lamp holder attached to the top of the shaft of the bedside lamp which was the root cause of the problem. Or which at very least made the lamp holder unsuitable for this particular task. So despite all the nonsense, some part of the brain had been doing something useful.

Rounded off the proceedings with another touch of regression, putting my hand to the spot in the kitchen where we kept the house keys some years ago, rather than to the spot where we keep them now. House keys needed so that I could get through the garage into the shed to search for a better class of lamp holder. A search which, in the event, failed.