I am travelling on the tube. A friend jumps on carrying bundles of shopping, "I'm getting out at the next stop for the music shop," he tells me. The shop looks exciting but my friend accidently leaves his shopping behind. As the train departs I mime to him that I will get out at the following stop. Not sure he has understood. There is a huge bag of apples, a sack of other fruit, loads of paperwork and some body building powders. I only manage to drag half of it off. Will I have to pull the emergency cord? Is this a legitimate emergency? It seems so to me but I am not sure the authorities would agree.
We start in an English gentlemen's outfitters where all the upper crust men are wearing 1920's suits, climb up to the top floor, stumbling over an antique obstacle course to more modern exclusive menswear. From there through back streets of Talinn and Dubrovnik, on to a vast crater. There I nervously lie on my front and gaze over the edge at two boys somersaulting down at an alarming rate. The crater shrinks until it is just 10 metres across and tourists are invited to roll their own pasta croissants down its floury slopes.
Back in the sixties, Nixon is bombing Vietnam and I have been ordered to use a machine gun to control my class in the supermarket. I refuse. I notice various men being thrown out and beaten up in the alleyway outside. I go to offer my help (after the beating) to one man. He tells me he is OK, then grins flirtatiously and says he likes how I dress like Isaac Newton. I end up taking part in a violent demonstration against the government.
I thought we would have the store to ourselves but it is full of shop assistants dressed in Santa Claus outfits. "In preparation for the Christmas brochure," I explain to the nervous woman with me. I step into a lift with an acutely angled floor and head for the basement, realising too late that I have left her behind with all the Santas. I am carrying a pickaxe.
I am squeezing through tiny doorways in an old fashioned shopping complex in Newcastle. Endless dull rooms of womens' clothing. A short teenage girl is trying on some very tight ripped green shorts. "Excuse me," she asks me, " Do you think these fit ok?" "Are they comfortable?" I ask. "No." "Well I wouldn't buy them then." I am flattered a teenager should ask my opinion on fashion. Must be because my new black cord suit looks so good.
I know I am in a dream. I need to find some proof that dreams have a purpose. I see a CD in the window of a junk shop. (Junk shops are the only shops I seem to dream about.) I concentrate hard and push the glass firmly so it folds back allowing my hand to slip through and remove the CD. The shop assistant is powerless to stop me.
It's breakfast time. Nic and I are in a sweet shop in France. He picks up one of the expensive chocolates from the counter and bites into it. I am expecting him to pay for it but instead he blatantly replaces it in full gaze of the shop assistant.
I am in a small junk shop talking on the mobile phone to Mandy. There is not really anything of value on display. I am pretending to be one of those irritating people who walk around the supermarket getting instructions from someone at home telling them what to buy. Being deliberately loud I bellow, "Yes, what was it you said you needed?"
Aurora and I have squatted a massive building with two other young women. We have to fix the flimsy lock on our door. The squat morphs into a DIY shop, with anarchists calling in at all hours and hardly any of them paying for the goods. We plead with them saying we have to pay for this lot in the first place. The man who is now running the shop explains that he lets people take stuff if their situation is really desperate, which increasingly it usually is.
I have bought two horrible second hand dishes in a small shop near East Dulwich station. The shopkeeper is so friendly that I can't bring myself to point out the crack across one of the bowls. I ask her to wrap them for me. She produces a miniscule section of kitchen tissue which is not going to do anything. Once again I make no complaint because her manner is so amicable.
