You may recall that on the 22d last, I wrote,
I awoke every two hours overnight worried about and for Nadine Dorries MP: rightly, as it transpires. As one of the few orthodox members of the C of E, I don’t believe in oneiromancy – and yet ... oneiromancy or not, on the night before MP expense scandal broke, I dreamt of escaped wild boars savaging the home farm, so.... Very odd.
Well, it’s happened again. Last night, I dreamt that I was somehow inveigled into doing something with Conference Pride http://www.torybear.com/2009/06/exclusive-message-from-eric-pickles.html and thus meeting with Iain Dale (whom I do not in fact, I remind you, actually know) in a Proppah Gay Pub to discuss arrangements, when Mrs T – and she was in the dream emphatically still Mrs T, at the peak of her powers and premiership, not the frail Lady Thatcher of today – came tripping in, waving and nodding to shocked regulars, to join us as a surprise and a treat. And of course now we learn that Lady Thatcher has had a fall and broken her arm, poor dear. I fervently wish her the best and speediest of recoveries.
These dreams must cease. I don’t care to dream of women in any case, but if, every time I dream of Tory women, it prefigures a disaster to them….
Let us turn to happier dreams. Ogbourne’s daughter (the half of Chloe-and-Olivia who works for the quango) has acquired, for the long vac., a SpAd-cum-intern-cum-experiencer-of-work in the form of an exquisite undergraduate. Keith, as I shall call him for reasons that may be rather obvious, is the son of a friend of ours, a Tory Radical long a lynchpin of the joinery between the police, the courts, the prosecution service, and the rights of victims. He is quite like Sir Keith Joseph, whom I am using for Our Keith’s eponym, and, like Sir Keith, Jewish. Whereby hangs a tale.
Our Keith is a brilliant lad. Fair enough. He is also dead fit, shy, sweet, and intolerably attractive. And he is attractive and fit in a very familiar fashion: I said to Chloe, shortly after the slight shock of (re-)introductions and after Keith had been sent off to do whatever it is that he does for her, ‘My dear, you’ve developed a type.’ She laughed and winked: ‘Not at all, darling: you have. I hired him for you.’ This is of course untrue, but she was not at all likely not to make a meal of that jest for several months, and so she has done. The fact, however, remains. Our Keith – that is to say, our delectable lamb of a British Jewish undergraduate – is a dead ringer for our little legal lamb of a British Pakistani solicitor, Amin Khan. Peas, as it were, in, if you will, a pod. Bar a few short years between them, they might well be twins; they certainly can pass for brothers. It is, actually, staggering (you must realise, of course, that although Our Keith is not an incomer, and I do know his pater somewhat, he has, after all, been away at school and then up at university for some years since last I saw him, and his matured self is all but wholly new to me, such that I am legitimately surprised by his astonishing resemblance to Amin Khan).
As I say: peas in a pod. Or, if one were incautious in speaking to Chloe Ogbourne, one might have varied that and said they were alike as two slices of bread. Chloe’s subsequent suggestions regarding sandwiches and a breaded-Wemyss filling do not bear repetition. O tempura, o hovis!
Tags: current events, essays, village life
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