Stabmental

I had one of those 'romantic' dreams which  haunt me from time-to-time, about a girl I once knew at Lodgehill School a long time ago called Marion Rutkowski (or something similar). My dreams are very vivid. Why should she (never a friend of mine) come into my dreams all these years later?

In the morning Dad and I took Andrew’s boxed up records and record player to the parcel department at the station: they cost £21.30 to send.

We then drove up to Hancock’s pet shop for some daphnia and blood worm and then on to another pet shop in Crossley, amid a vast warren of terraced back-to-backs and dingy corner shops.

We parked alongside Lane Close Mills (the date above the archway said 1835). The pet shop was overflowing with animals and foodstuffs and in the corner a monkey paced its dark filthy cage restlessly, twittering every so often in frustration, pausing now and then to lick jam from a piece of bread in the bottom of the cage or leap to and fro in anger. In the middle of the shop were rows of lizard and snake tanks and a couple of green immobile praying mantises which regarded me with their pinprick black pupils as they hung from the top of their plastic prisons. Mice and rats were priced at £1.00 each.

Later, Mr. Tillotson from across the street turned up with a trunk after Dad had mentioned that I was after one. It was a fibreglass, wood and metal affair dating from the early ‘30s, covered in stickers announcing that the fare from Jersey to Whincliffe was 3/- (the airfare 5/-). He hasn’t used it in years, and at teatime he tottered back across with keys he’d dug up from some forgotten corner.

I read four fanzines I borrowed from Grant last night; two issues of Vox from Ireland, plus Stabmental and Chainsaw, while Dad listened to a record of Prince Charles’s wedding ceremony, complete with the vows. Where is the enjoyment in that!? Jeremy phoned from Purswell; he comes back on Friday.

I stayed up to listen to John Peel and Mum and Dad were in bed by 11.