Tuesday August 28th

I lay on the sofa and waited for the job offers to roll in. Somehow, in the middle of all this excitement I must have dropped off to sleep because the next thing I knew, I found myself in an airport, waving goodbye to Dylan.

Everyone was smiling sympathetically at me. The airline staff allowed me go right up the door of the Airbus A320 but a sudden shove from behind and I suddenly found myself on the plane and Dylan, Sophie and Stuart were waving me goodbye. I staggered to my seat and watched the flight attendant perform her flight-safety demonstration although the plane was somehow already up in the air but then I looked more closely and saw that the flight attendant was actually Liz and she was grinning at me, and the plane began to nosedive and my seatbelt was missing and I reached underneath for my life vest but it wasn’t there, and then the door of the cockpit flew open and there was the pilot and it was Toby Salt, and he and Liz both started to laugh hysterically beneath their oxygen masks, and then I woke up.

I looked it up in my Dream Dictionary but as it’s an old edition it only references the Airbus A319 and so I was none the wiser. What on earth can it all mean?

Wednesday August 29th

Aura Boringalis

an admission:

my aura is beset

with grey emissions

I have such drab

and dreary

energy fields,

my inner dullness

is revealed.

i fear my chakras

have congealed.

Mrs McNulty’s sawing has reached new levels. Whereas once it was restricted to the daytime (as laid down in the Daylight Sawing Time Act (DST) that we’d agreed three years ago), forming a not unpleasing accompaniment to my household chores, she is now to be heard woodworking away into the small hours of the morning. I’ve long given up asking her what exactly it is that she’s making as she just cackles in response to any enquiry.

I went around to complain. As she opened her door to me, she recoiled backwards unsteadily.

‘Your aura!’ she hissed. ‘It’s black!’

I wasn’t altogether certain of what an aura was but I had a sudden flashback to old Ready Brek television commercials. I looked at my sleeves, my jeans, my shoes.

‘Mrs McNulty, I’m dressed all in black. Are you sure you’re not confusing my aura with my clothes?’

‘Don’t you see? This means it will happen soon!’

‘What will?’ I wondered whether she was referring to the annual street party, flyers for which had been posted diurnally through my letter box, and which I’d been doing my best to ignore.

‘You have so much negative energy.’

I found it hard to disagree. The street party was nothing but a nuisance.

‘Your energy fields have turned black! That can only mean one thing: death is coming!’