Sunday 8 February 2015

Dramatic Unlikenesses.

Peter Cheeseman CBE, the man who founded the theatre where I used to work, once told me that I was starting to look more and more like William Shakespeare. I assume he meant the one who looked like this, since my hair was much longer then and there is a passing resemblance:


...not this one, which I've never liked and therefore repudiate out of hand:


He definitely couldn't have meant this one, which is included in the returned images if you Google Images of William Shakespeare and doesn't look a bit like me. In fact, I doubt this is Shakespeare at all, which leads to the not unreasonable suspicion that it might be the Earl of Oxford:


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This morning I had an email from a once-precious person who I thought was lost forever. Tonight I had an uncharacteristically large piece of fruit cake after dinner, and subsequently fell asleep in consequence of an over-taxed digestive system. When I woke up I felt oddly convinced that the email had been the subject of a dream engendered by the fruit cake. Imagine what any of the Shakepeares might have made of that.

2 comments:

Madeline said...

As far as I know it was Dickens who had the most to say about the effects of diet on the content of dreams. To "cheese = ghosts" we might now add "fruitcake = emails." One day we might build an entire catalog of food-dream associations. Carl Jung obviously had it all wrong.

JJ said...

I thought it was underdone potato that equalled ghosts. Maybe it was both, and the different recollections reflect the differences in our relative upbringings. That sounds pretty Jungian to me.

I wonder what you have to eat to dream about the Earl of Oxford.