The curate's ball gown/opera/ dream

Well, I had a very mixed day yesterday.  

I’d booked a day of annual leave, thinking it’s nice to have a midweek day off before Christmas to do any final bits of shopping and so on.  Also I had a ticket for “Robert le Diable” and that started at 6pm, so I was going to have to ask to leave work early at the least.  Since in the event I’d done all my Christmas shopping, I had a lazy morning and then went to the V&A to have a mooch and see the “Ball gowns” show (which closes in early Jan).  

It was a very odd show – the first half (mostly from the 50s and 60s, with a few more modern classics) was about 80% terrific, and the second half (contemporary designers’ red-carpet gowns) was about 80% terrible.  If it had been selected with the express purpose of demonstrating that the contemporary applied arts are just as desperate as the contemporary fine arts to be innovative at any and all cost, even if it means being crap, it couldn’t have made its point better (& I think it was meant to have demonstrated how damned hip and wonderful they are!).

 

And as for the opera; well, I actually left at the interval – only the second time in my life I’ve ever done that.  It STANK.  The music itself was uninspiring (alternately hammy-rumbly and sugary-tinkly), and the production was irredeemably bad.  It was “ironic”, and so heavy-handedly so as to be just plain embarrassing.  I’ve seldom seen anything so unrelentingly cheesy in my life.  

At least if one went to Disneyland the cheesiness would be sincere; this was all eye-rollingly superior.  I swear it was more self-consciously knowing than a Carry-on film, and without the redeeming silly humour.  It sucked.  My heart ached for the poor cast, who were bravely doing their best, with rubbish to sing and a director with his brain up his arse.  

You will gather I hated it.

I then went home, feeling rather cross, and got on with some typing, and the laptop got hiccoughs and wouldn’t save.  In the end I left it running, with its little error message saying something along the lines of “I can’t do this, why are you asking me to do this?” and went to bed.  I arranged a large book propped open to mask the light from the screen, and tried to ignore the constant chuntering-computer sound, but of course I couldn’t sleep with it purring away a few feet from me.  I got up at 1am and checked, and it was still jammed, and I thought “sod you, then” and switched it off at the wall...  So will probably go home tonight to an injured complaint of “you switched me off in a bad way, you’re a mean missy”.  I don’t know if the stuff I had typed (about two thousand words) will have been saved or not.  There’s supposed to be an automatic back-up-save every ten minutes, so in theory I shouldn’t have lost too much (cross fingers).  Poor old laptop, I think I do have to accept that it’s nearing the end of its useful life.  

At any rate, by the time I had relaxed enough to actually get to sleep after all that, I had less than six hours before my alarm went off.  I think I was still pretty stressed about the laptop, since I then had a really weird dream.  It was a glorious summer day, and my mum’s friend Ninetoes and Robert Downey Jnr. were helping me to move house.  I had bought a lovely big house with a garden, and as house-move-help goes, Ninetoes and RD Jnr. made a pretty great team (at least once she had stopped making eyes at him), so things weren’t all bad by any means.  The downsides were RD Jnr. insisting on playing just one song, over and over, on the stereo in the pantechnicon (I have nothing against Duffy, but “Beggin’ you for mercy” has fairly repetitive lyrics when you hear it just once, let alone six times in a row) and the bizarre house-warming gift I had been given from work; a urine-driven coffee-maker. 

My subconscious goes to some very strange places at night.  As new green energy concepts go, I think wee-power will take some beating.

The road you didn't take...

Do you ever wonder if there are alternative universes?  That wonderful staple of so much science fiction (albeit generally at the cheesy twaddle end of the spectrum), the alternative world where your life could have been different, where the entire history of humankind could have been different, where evolution itself could have been different...   Perhaps this is simply further evidence of my being a bit of a saddo, but I do wonder about it.  What if there really were numberless, infinite, endlessly variable alternative worlds?

I don’t wonder much about the perfect life I’m not leading (& that is probably pretty revealing, come to think of it!).  But I do wonder about all the universes in which I didn’t exist, or didn’t exist past the age of four, or fourteen, or twenty-two, or twenty-nine...  I could have been drowned, the first time I saw the sea (I threw myself into it headlong in my excitement, and was pulled out literally by my hair).  I had a mysterious fever when I was fourteen; it went away after a few days, but there could be universes where it didn’t...   It feels as though I am bending my brain and squashing it through a slot in a thick steel wall, when I try to imagine how I can imagine a world in which I am not there to imagine it.

I have jay-walked across so many busy roads in my life.  Every time I have ever taken a risk – whether jay-walking or something more serious - it could have worked out differently; and from each of those branching points, how many alternatives could have come? 

There are positive possibilities, as well as all this “I might not exist” stuff.  Things I look back on as horrible low points in my life could have been far worse, with the smallest twist of fate or shift of decision.  Several relationships that didn’t work out could instead have worked for longer, and then have failed far more dramatically and messily, than they did in this life.   We were pretty poor when I was a child, but we could have been far worse off.  My parents fought; but they could have fought far worse.  I hated school, but I could have had far more reason to do so.

If there are other universes, I’ll never know, anyway.  The song says “The roads you didn’t take run through rotten ground – don’t they?”  But I’ll never know.  My road has had its bumps, but by and large has run through good ground – or at least, through an interesting terrain.

There might be a universe somewhere in which I have always enjoyed perfect health and perfect self-confidence, a universe in which I got a great degree, made a wonderful marriage, had four lovely children, owned a beautiful home, was successful in every career choice and every pastime, and never had to lose anyone I loved.  Would that blessed lotus-eater me have been bored rigid, though? -  maybe even have been dissatisfied with her lot?  She might not have been aware that it was perfect, after all. 

And would she have wondered about alternative universes, in which she and her perfect happy life had never existed at all?