chess | Dreamness, #1

The church youthgroup met in the Wimpey, but it was so crowded that the staff were throwing people out when they'd finished. So we agreed to meet up in St Michaels' carpark when we finished. So some of us went down there and started kicking patterns in the gravel.

And somewhere along the lines it became an old warehouse, with a tin roof with peeling green and white paint, and whitewashed breeze-block walls, and metal shutter doors. The floor was smooth concrete, so we went through to the other room, which had oil spilt all over the floor. Then an oil tanker came through one of the metal shutter doors and a pipe attached to some pipe-ends at one end of the room, and another pipe tried to attach to the other side, but this hosething was too short and kept popping out and spilling oil everwhere. (source: the network cable coming out of Dr Stallard's laptop when we tried to plug it into the wall.) So we kept trying to hold it on, but couldn't. Then someone who owned the warehouse came along and we had to scatter.
Initially Naath and I ran out to the other room, but there were lots of small yellow steamrollers and forklifts and so forth whizzing around, so we found a different door. This led to a prefab-like chipboard-painted-white walled corridor, with offices leading off in all directions (source: the upstairs corridor of Jenway). We ran along the corridor, which changed from concrete-floored to rough-carpeted and whitewashed to wallpapered, and eventually led to a staircase down with institutional-carpeted steps and a wooden handrail (source: APU staircase up to the office for my 2nd Work Exp week).

This led to a wide school corridor, which I was sure I'd seen before (source: my jumbled memories of going in through the front door of our school on the 11+ day - when I finally came here, I never quite managed to integrate those memories with what I saw around the school). There was gold lettering on the side of a section of the ceiling that got lower above a ramp (there's such an arrangement here, too), which was directions to various places in the school. One of the phrases was definately 'lost weyrlings', which amongst 'cloakroom' 'hall' and other such mundane phrases was worth a second glance. There were three phrases with arrows each side of a 'centerpiece' thingamy.

We turned around and there were the doors out, so we went out (automatic sliding doors, source: MSX lobby) and towards a river bridge (source: the bridge by the Odean). It was dark out, but there were lots of white-pink streetlights, some filtering greenly through the trees. For some reason, 'King' Charles was there (in the middle of two river bridges), handing out silver and green 'coronation' coasters, as one 'prong' of a 4-pronged star design, with green midsection and silver outer lines, and gold edging, with cork showing unerneath. We took one each to stop him trying to talk to us, and hurried on.

Later that day, we visited that school, and I and my father and my mother got a coaster each. Much fuss was made about our 3-person family getting 4 coasters. I was afraid that a stunned secretary would recognise me.

The rest of the night was spent dreaming up interesting scenarios related to the fact that one sleeve of my powder blue fleece now smells of beer (well, yeast) but if it gets washed it won't be really soft and fluffy any more.