A new dream

Or to be more precise, a nearly new dream. I think I had a trailer for last night's dream at some point last week. No idea what might have brought it on.

The star of the dream was a brig on which it was intended that I should make a trip across to Ireland. The dream was very clear that the vessel in question was a brig, even though I never got a good look at it. I probably knew that a brig was a small, mainly square rigged sailing ship with two masts, the foremast being just slightly shorter than the mainmast. Which means, in some sense, that the brig in the dream was driven by the word rather than by the image.

Somehow, the brig was tied up just outside my childhood home in Cambridge, some way from punt navigable water, never mind brig navigable - although I believe quite substantial boats - or perhaps ships - used to make it up the Nene to Wisbech, a little way to the north.

At some point I was invited to buy a new bag for one of the foresails, which turned out to be substantial and expensive affairs. Received rather casually and there was no question of reimbursement. I don't think such things exist in real life.

At another point I took a closer look at the brig. Coming away with the impression that the gentleman running the trip - a real person, lately a regular at the Wetherspoon's in Tooting - was taking things much too casually. No clipboards and no checklists. While the Irish Sea could get very rough and was not a place to be taken casually. I might add that real people getting into my dreams - either people that I know in the flesh or people that I know about from the media - is fairly unusual. Real places yes, real people no.

I wondered whether he knew that I had no head for heights, and although I had some theoretical knowledge of such boats - largely derived from reading a lot of the Hornblower books when I was a child - and some practical knowledge of spars, ropes and knots, I was going to be no use at all aloft. Never mind in a storm at night.

I associate this morning to a chap in TB who, as an adult, went on a young person's cruise to the Bay of Biscay, I think on a substantial schooner. On his telling anyway, he was about the only person on board who could get aloft when the wind got up one night and sail needed to be shortened. The rest were too sick or too scared.

PS: all the brigs turned up by Bing seemed to be foreign, a lot of them from the US, this one from the Netherlands. This despite our own distinguished maritime history.