First, a few items arising from watching an elderly adaptation of a yarn from P. D. James, a yarn called 'Original Sin'. Most of which was set in a fancy looking building, a replica Venetian palace, said to be on the bank of the Thames in Wapping. Lots of shots of Tower Bridge. But so far, neither Bing nor Street View are coming up with the goods. I have failed to find the building - which I still think was a real building rather than a set, even if the interior shots and exterior shots were not taken from the same building. One more thing to attend to in an odd moment.
Then there was a moral dilemma, a dilemma often posed in slightly different clothes by John le Carré in his yarns. Suppose you are a senior civil servant in occupied France during the second world war. Your war aim is to mitigate the occupation and the accompanying extraction of people, goods and services to support Germany and its war effort. In order to maintain some space in which to do this you need to supply the German occupiers with tokens of your good faith, tokens of your support for them and their aims. Tokens which need to involve doing something unpleasant to some of your fellow Frenchmen, probably Frenchmen involved in something the Germans want to stamp out. Perhaps engaging in the black market, perhaps facilitating the escape to Spain or Switzerland of people the Germans want to get hold of, probably in order to kill them. How many small bad deeds can be allowed in support of big good deeds? A dilemma the French have wrestled with ever since, a dilemma complicated by the fact that many Frenchmen were sympathetic to both German ends and German means.
And, interestingly, we had a Jewish wedding in what I imagine was a rather old-fashioned London synagogue,with lots of brown wood, certainly old fashioned compared with that noticed at reference 2. So a white wedding, with top hats and tails, much as in an Anglican wedding. But after the solemn part of the ceremony, there was a band and dancing. All very jolly, not at all like an Anglican wedding as far as that goes. I don't think I have ever seen film of such a thing before. A credit to the station formerly known as Anglia Television.
Some hours later this was followed up by waking to a medley of dreams.
First, I was some kind of middle ranking European civil servant, with lots to do but with no very clear idea of how I fitted in. Certainly nothing like a job description. I seemed to be working for the boss of a sub-directorate of something. Occasionally I got to talk to him and my hope was that he would throw out enough clues that I would be able to locate him in the giant directory describing the operation as a whole. Government departments in this country used to have such things: impressive, expensive and usually out of date, certainly in the lower reaches. One job was oversight of some kind of a newspaper directed at lower ranks in the army. Another was worrying about standards. Should I be promoting standards for written work - minutes, reports, submissions and so forth - for the sub-directorate or should I be trying to make use of those already floating around - if not much used - in the wider organisation? I seemed to be trying to sort all this out in the course of a train journey, not otherwise specified, with the help of a a lower grade personal computer.
Then I was in some kind of markets area. The sort of shops you used to get in big indoor markets, but these ones were outdoors. Lots of small shops crammed into modest premises. But there was a wide street, presumably sometimes full of stalls and people, but on this occasion empty and scattered with broken glass. The sort of broken glass you get from the wind screens of cars. A sense that all this was just south of some large river, a river which I was trying to get to for some reason or other. Just one of the larger shops was still open, trying to sell all kinds of fresh produce. A queue of customers. An older man trying to explain to the shopkeeper that all the shops were supposed to be out on strike of some sort. Explaining in what was becoming a threatening way. Maybe he was from the IRA or the UDA. The shopkeeper was protesting that he had to sell his fresh goods. They didn't keep.
From there I drifted off to an area full of butcher's shops, the sort that mostly catered to caterers and other big buyers, but did allow a bit of retail trade. A bit rough and ready, cleanliness not great. I occasionally bought pieces of beef from one or other of them. Probably starting to wake up, puzzled that I could not work out whether these shops had once existed somewhere outside of dreams. Somewhere in some part of North London we once frequented? Still can't work out.
There was another strand, presently missing. Perhaps it will come back to me.
PS: the snap above was turned up by Street View, in or near Wapping. An odd looking building, but not the right one. Perhaps it is time I paid the area a visit. Was the last time really back in 2008, as noticed at reference 1 below?
References
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2008/02/nostalgia-fest.html.
Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2012/06/visits.html.
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