I was staying for a few days in the Georgian townhouse in Paris where my friend Alan, who generously set up this weblog as an annexe of his website, was living. We were sitting at a table in his kitchen, talking about the dinner that he had to make for all of the other people who lived in the house (apparently, they all took turns to cook for each other). He was thinking of making mushroom crepes.
I had seen the dining room and thought that it might be too small to seat the number of people who would be eating, so I asked Alan, who had his laptop open in front of him, if he could do anything to make the room bigger. He said that he thought he might be able to, and opened various set-up screens and options windows until he found one that he reckoned might be helpful. He said, "If I adjust the figures in this window, that'll probably do it, but all the sockets in the dining room have been wired in and I don't know how that will affect it."
He entered the new figures and we went through to see if the room had got any larger. On entering the dining room, however, we discovered that everybody had arrived earlier and were just about finished eating.
Notes for Freudian analysis:
The first time I ever used a computer properly was in my first job as a technical author for a computer company. It was based in a Georgian townhouse and I rarely had the faintest idea what anybody was talking about or working on.
The day before I had the dream, I had gone through the templates that Alan had set up for this blog, marvelling at how complex all the HTML looked. I wondered if I dared change any of the numbers and decided that I didn't. I then visited the main section of Alan's website and was baffled by the technical conversations that had been posted there.
My brother just got back from Paris.
Alan can't bear mushrooms.