The lead bat of Ipswich fiasco
I slept fitfully last night. I think I dreamt of quite a lot of odd stuff - which is quite a rarity for me these days - but the only dream I can properly remember is one in which I’d gone to a London rail terminal (no idea which one, possibly Kings Cross) to meet with some friends* and go on a journey to Ipswich**. We were meant to be meeting on platform nineteen, but I couldn’t find it because the platforms were strangely all numbered out of sequence, and I kept running into other random other people such as flower sellers, work colleagues and people I know from Slimelight. I also kept trying to purchase snacks from vending machines that didn’t work.
Just as the train was about to depart and the guards were blowing their whistles, I found platform nineteen and made a run for it. I presumed my school friends must have missed me at the station and boarded the train without me, so I tried walking down the length of it to search for them. I was hindered in this by:
Outside the lead man’s house, his wife and daughters had set up an elaborate market stall, peddling a variety of strange, shiny objects. I remember they all looked more like silver than lead, but perhaps they were a tin alloy of some kind? Most strikingly, there was a hand made of this shiny metal, with detachable fingers, with a £300 price tag. We explained to the man’s wife that we wanted a bat and she went off to arrange for this to be made. While we waited for her to come back, I sat down on a milk crate and looked at the front of another house on this street, where squirrels, ferrets and small birds were running and flying around in a labyrinth of old vacuum cleaner and washing machine tubes. Somebody explained that the owner of this house had succeeded in making the perfect artificial mini-eco system within these pipes.
Just as the lead bat was about to be presented to us, I was woken by my alarm. So I’ll never know it was any good, or not…
* These friends were all not-particularly-close school acquaintances who in reality I’ve not seen or heard from in about twelve years.
** I think I maybe went there twice, while I was a student, and can hardly remember anything about the place.
Just as the train was about to depart and the guards were blowing their whistles, I found platform nineteen and made a run for it. I presumed my school friends must have missed me at the station and boarded the train without me, so I tried walking down the length of it to search for them. I was hindered in this by:
- A huge canvas rucksack I was carrying, which had inexplicably grown bigger when I got on the train.
- The train, which had looked like a fairly normal, modern one when I got on board it, was actually a mixture of modern Southern Rail carriages and old Victorian-era wooden ones.
- Several of the carriages were saloon bars and were crowded full of drunken Wild West-type characters who kept trying to distract me and steal my huge bag.
Outside the lead man’s house, his wife and daughters had set up an elaborate market stall, peddling a variety of strange, shiny objects. I remember they all looked more like silver than lead, but perhaps they were a tin alloy of some kind? Most strikingly, there was a hand made of this shiny metal, with detachable fingers, with a £300 price tag. We explained to the man’s wife that we wanted a bat and she went off to arrange for this to be made. While we waited for her to come back, I sat down on a milk crate and looked at the front of another house on this street, where squirrels, ferrets and small birds were running and flying around in a labyrinth of old vacuum cleaner and washing machine tubes. Somebody explained that the owner of this house had succeeded in making the perfect artificial mini-eco system within these pipes.
Just as the lead bat was about to be presented to us, I was woken by my alarm. So I’ll never know it was any good, or not…
* These friends were all not-particularly-close school acquaintances who in reality I’ve not seen or heard from in about twelve years.
** I think I maybe went there twice, while I was a student, and can hardly remember anything about the place.