First off we had something like the odd object illustrated left, which started out as a sort of sandwich with the copious filling applied to both outside and inside. In shape not unlike the rather bizarre hamburgers which you get in pubs these days, the ones with a long wooden skewer holding all the layers together, the ones which you cannot eat with any decorum with either hands or tools. From where I associated to the sort of sample trenches that archaeologists dig across sites of interest, with the slices of bread doing service for trenches. I remember thinking that I must not confuse or conflate the part, that is to say the trench, with the whole, that is to say the site.
I also remember a sense of seeing the features which made the thing up, without seeing an integrated image of the thing as a whole. It was as if the part of the brain which integrates the visual features - like points, corners, lines and surfaces -which have been built up from retinal output into the image which we are conscious of seeing, had been turned off or by-passed. Perhaps it was just booting up, along with the rest of me.
Then we had something more substantial, or at least more remembered, prompted partly by being with someone from my university days and partly by visiting St. Luke's of Old Street the day before. Perhaps profound thoughts about parts & wholes were an appropriate point of re-entry to the self-important world of the student.
I was some kind of superior student, floating around in the uncertain ranks between mere undergraduates and proper teaching staff. I was involved in some kind of seminar, for which I had prepared three pages of typescript about something to do with the restoration, mistakenly taking St. Luke's to be a Fire of London rebuild, when actually it was a Queen Anne new build. The typescript was also a mistake as word processors were not to be invented until some time after I was at university.
I thought that it would be a good idea to have someone who disagreed with my views on the restoration to talk at the seminar, using my paper as a starting point. Then I thought that I ought to get someone, not me but who agreed with me, to chair it. Then I thought that the thing should be organised more on the lines of a debate, with a speaker for, a speaker against and a chairman. At which point I start to worry about how on earth I am going to persuade three middle ranking teachers to part with so much of their valuable time on such a venture and shortly after that I think I must have woken up.
Later on, having fallen asleep again while pondering about the seminar, I must have drifted onto the roundabouts of the previous post, as I woke up for the second time with them very much on my mind. No more idea about where they come from than I have about the opening sandwich. Perhaps it will come to me on the upcoming Ewell Village Clockwise.
PS; the illustration was the occasion for the first outing for a while of the brush noticed, inter alia, at http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/pocket-brush.html.
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