This morning I fell back to sleep and had a dream and remembered (some of) it.
I was living on my own but not here, in a house I didn’t recognise. A man came to my door, someone I knew from the past, a fellow student when I was doing my PhD, around twenty-five years ago. The last time I saw him must have been in 1998. He had changed, but he didn’t look older so much as smarter. He was wearing a suit, had a tidy hair-cut and was clean shaven, though when I knew him he used to shave his head and had a straggly bear. But I knew it was him because, of course, this was a dream. Sorry, I just read that back and realised I said he had a ‘straggly bear’. I know you realise I meant ‘beard’, but I’m not going to change it because I know you know that, and I like the idea of a straggly bear – and if anyone was going to have one following around, it was him – more likely than being clean shaven with nice hair and wearing a suit, anyway.
I asked him why he had tracked me down and he said: ‘because I remember you were beautiful’, which put me off my stride because I had to think he must be confusing me with someone else.
We were starting to get reacquainted when I realised there was a strange woman with a small child in my room, and I asked her what she thought she was doing in my house, and she was rude as though it was none of my business who was in my own home. Then I went into another room and there were more strangers, and I got really angry with them and told them they had to leave. Then I looked out of the window and realised the land was flooded and my house was the only one still dry, and I felt ashamed of myself for not wanting to take in these poor people. We all went out into my back garden and there was a terrace which was a wide, flat boat, which we all got into and sailed over the countryside. I realised then that we weren’t on the coast but in the Cambridgeshire Fens, where I lived eight years ago before I went to Prague, in a flat at the top of a Victorian flour mill. It was flooded at this time of year when I lived there, but not high enough to come to my fifth-floor windows. Still, I remember making jokes about my plans to move to the seaside (which finally happened two years later,) and saying maybe I should just stay where I was and wait for the seaside to come to me.
I took some photographs of the floods at the time, I thought I couldn’t share them because they’re on my old old laptop, then remembered they were in an old blog post.