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27th May 2014 - 8.20am - kitchen, house 14, with coffee.
Light streaming through the window, a few housemates pottering around. Most surreal dream last night, I’ll tell Mila in a minute. He’s in here too but hasn’t tried to speak. My housemates know not to try and use words with me before my first coffee. At least. The dream actually has him in it. It was a really sunny day and I was standing with him and an American guy Tom, on bright green perfectly manicured grass with Mila telling us the history of the village that used to be there but had been completely erased early in the second word war and all the villagers killed. It was strongly allied with Stoke-on-Trent. He showed us mass graves and was doing a kind of tour but there wasn’t anyone else - I think it was a Sunday morning. Tom was a fit guy who I might have been dating, I’m not sure. I think he might have been nomadic. Mila met us in Prague, in a red car with ‘Memorial’ written on it. He drove us to a gallery near the airport and was wearing a suit with shoes so new they squeaked. Hang on, there’s more - I’d met Tom in Corfu trying to go to Albania but the ferry was broken and no-one was bothered as it was off peak. I was desperate to get back and see friends and was going to miss my flight, we were the only people there and got a car ferry to Greece, we walked over the border to Albania and I thought people avoiding the checkpoint were going for photos from a good viewpoint and Tom was like er- I don’t think so. But we are in Czech, not Albania or Cofu and I’d drawn Tom on the journey then printed it on a t-shirt, which he wore in Prague. I’d been living in Albania during some kind of virus where pretty much everyone in the world had to avoid each other. Then we went to a gallery Mila was curating and he was telling us how all the artworks had been gifted by artists, globally, who had a connection with refugees, or were refugees, so they understood and it was solidarity. He had like, Peter Blake, Joseph Buoys, Mona Hatoum! It was just me and Tom in the gallery, which would usually be closed, getting this private tour from Mila, then he took us into a house and there was a whole street of houses built for the village, but not where the village was because they kept the empty space (where we had been standing) as a memorial. He drove along pointing at them and then we went in one that had been given back and reminded me of my nan’s house in a UK home county. I told Mila and he was like oh yes some streets in Czech look just like the UK! Then suddenly we were back at home in Prague, Mila went to a meeting and Tomeand I went and ate Belgium food, drank Aperol Spritz and Hoegarden. I told Tom how I’d had this thought standing on the grass in the sun in front of the only monument to dead children, ever, that I could be dreaming and in the morning I’d be sitting at the kitchen in the coop Mila and I had lived in having a coffee and telling him about this wild dream I’d had and that would be more believable than the current reality. He laughed a bit and then we went and watched a national ice hockey match of Czech against Switzerland, I kept calling it rugby and football. Czech won and people were going for it but it morphed between festival / protest/ royal wedding. I said I might write it up but didn’t tell Mila as I might not get around to it and maybe I’d use the dream thing, but that might be a bit cliche. Going to get another coffee and - oh - he’s gone out now. Well, dreams are always more interesting for the person who had them than the person hearing about them. There was a childrens’ art thing too.. he’d made a floor dedicated to childrens’ art and I’d been sharing a link from my sister?! Oh and Tom and I had been going round all these libraries that were like something out of a fairy tale and had loads of astronomical equipment, fossils and dead butterlfies alongside the books. Crikey. Well, better get to work. I’ll have another coffee on the way lol --- The above was written the night I arrived back from Prague. It has been edited to this blog post: www.lee-simmons.blog/reviewds/lidice-memorial-and-museum-and-other-things |
