A Walking Nightmare.

While I was walking along Mill Lane tonight, I looked up at Polaris and projected my mind in that direction. Off it went swifter than the wind, along the Pennines, over the Western Highlands, and up to the northern isles where it left the land behind and skimmed the foam-flecked swell of the dark, mighty and inscrutable northern ocean. Eventually it came to rest on the virgin whiteness of the Arctic ice.

At that point I decided I’m definitely not a north person. I think I’d prefer to go the other way, there to laze languidly in the ever-accommodating sunshine either side of siestas, and spend the wee small hours engaged in meaningful conversation with sultry senoritas. Problem, though. It seems to me that the warm places are full of bad guys and big spiders, and I doubt I’d like tequila.

I wonder what it’s like in Casablanca these days. Maybe I could open a bar and import my own scotch. I could hire a pianist to play As Time Goes By, and then I might spot an ex-girlfriend sitting quietly in the corner. ‘Hi, Jeff,’ she’d say, and I’d reply ‘Bloody hell! You’ve aged.’ And she’d come back with ‘So have you. Never mind; we’ll always have Barnsley.’

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I had a dream once in which I was sailing a small, fragile boat past the northern tip of the northern isles and out into the foam-flecked swell of the dark, mighty and inscrutable northern ocean. It frightened the bloody life out of me.