I think of dreams as the cutting room floor of the mind, a more-or-less continuous but random series of outtakes, misprints, abandoned scenes, the flotsam of the day. I don’t expect them to make sense, but I enjoy the first waking moments where I lie, eyes still shut, watching my brain creating a narrative. This, apparently, is how the melody of Yesterday came to Paul McCartney, and why the verse has only seven bars. He was in Paris, the story goes, and he had been tinkering on the piano in his room. That morning he awoke and played the tune all the way through, unable to place it, asking people what it was… and it was only slowly, gradually, when enough people told him they had never heard it before, that he realised he had dreamed it. In doing so he had not only created the most-covered song of all time but had also unwittingly created the premise for a cute but ultimately limited film in which a man has a bike accident and when he comes to he finds he’s the author of the Beatles’ entire catalogue. In a knowing, fractal, self-referential touch, the film itself is called Yesterday.
This morning I had my own Yesterday moment. I do like a pun. I can’t help myself, and occasionally I’ll get locked into a pun-off with someone else. Good ones linger long in the memory. I was once in an Indian restaurant in Northampton and Michael Crawford was at the next table. I posted this on Facebook and almost immediately Vicky commented ‘Phantom of the Okra’, which is about as good as it gets.
I was putting on a sock, and the sock was inside out, so I turned it the right way around and it was still inside out. I was getting ready for something, something was about to happen, and I was with a man who was funny. A wisecrack. He was slightly irritating and it was all a bit forced but he was driven. We were preparing for an interview, or maybe an audition. We entered an office belonging to a big shot. The vibe was US chat show, mid-seventies. We were auditioning together for a spot on a show. We had to be funny. I wasn’t feeling remotely funny, and we had been handed these cards with words on, like prompts, as if maybe we were supposed to improvise jokes based on these words. One said ‘Iran’ but the handwriting was dreadful and I couldn’t make them out. I turned to my partner and mouthed, silently, “I can’t read any of these”. He evidently thought this was part of the improv, and he continued, loudly, saying “Say, are you okay?”
“Okay? Okay?” I was now gesticulating dramatically, “am I okay?” I had become the little Jewish comedian who lives quietly inside of me. “Am I okay? Let me tell you, I just got back from my holidays with my wife, it was terrible. Look at my skin”.
My partner was delighted. He stepped back, hands on hips, grinning, now that I was in full flow. “Your skin looks wonderful. It’s so soft. What happened?”
“What happened? You wanna know what happened? The sun, the wind, the salt water, terrible for the skin. Every day, the sun, the wind, the salt water, by the end of the week my skin is like leather. I said to my wife, ‘look at my skin,’ I said, ‘it’s like leather’. She says ‘don’t worry,’ she says, ‘don’t worry, I’ll take you to my beautician when we get back’. So we get back, we go to the beautician, the beautician looks at my skin, she says ‘look at your skin, your skin is like leather’. ‘I know,’ I say, ‘what can you do?’ She says, ‘well,’ she says, ‘I have a very fine wire brush, I could buff your skin a little, take away that hard shine, maybe. But I sense you’ll need convincing’.
‘Well’, I say, ‘I guess I could be swayed.’”
A thing of beauty