My books and indeed my bed, probably threfore the whole contents of my bedroom, were in the
garden, and my
desk was in the drive. A tatty, rickety yellow
formica-topped one, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve. Someone had been using it last night after I'd been there: there was an
ashtray on it with a couple of cigarettes in it. For some reason I felt I just had to leave those there.
It was a fresh, slightly wet morning. I had been working on inventing a good new language called Kirghiz, the only drawback of which was that I'd used the name of an existing language. I remembered (possibly from an earlier dream the same night) a number of other good words that I'd been playing with, any one of which could serve as the language name: Xawjiek, Xinzaib, something of that nature if I recall rightly.
I took down my five pages of writing on Kirghiz (I wish I could recall any of the detail: when I woke up after this I was very tempted to try it for real; fairly pointless if I had no idea of what felt so satisfying about it), and placed them on the desk. Unfortunately the surface was wet at the left, and I had to find somewhere to dry out the pages before continuing. This involved putting them out on the bedhead with books to hold them down. On one side were a couple of books on Old English, including a fragile dark green one which would break up if I moved it around too much. There was also a big brown paperback on, I forget what, possibly Maasai or something of that kind, or perhaps Kyrgyz itself, which had reminded me I was using the wrong name.
A small silver cat came along past me. At first I thought it was a siamese. I picked it up and it was happy to be cradled: it wasn't a siamese but had an extraordinarily tiny pointed head, like a kangaroo-rat, I thought.
I took it across to show my mother. My stepson was in the bushes and seemed interested, and I remembered he liked his own cat so I showed him the tiny-headed thing.