Dream Thievery and Good Coffee

The Vernacular Curate is now back to normal service levels. Hold on to your hat, your hair and your extremities.

Many of you, like me, are barely alive until the fourth or fifth litre of coffee has landed mouth-side. To be honest, I can't even aspire to the vertical until after the third full mug. I would have an intravenous drip fitted, but it would mean re-working the cuffs on my cassock, and that just won't do. 

Despite my very youthful age (have I ever mentioned that I am rather young), I can still remember a world without the Golden-Arch Corporation. Yes, kids, I can still see a picture of a McDonald's free world where fast food was offered simply by Wimpy on beige plates. Life was good, simple, and sepia back then. Then Ronald McDonald exploded over the entire world and we now all eat too fast out of paper and polystyrene. But then something else happened, after that.

Almost by stealth, in the dark of a November night, every former Spar shop (or Londis if you are from that part of the world) turned into the nut-grinding empire of a highly trained and eminently skilled barista. Everywhere you turn, you will see a coffee-shop. Try going out of doors to buy a darning mushroom or a fish-knife these days, and you will surely fail. Need a sewing machine or a cravat? Pah. Not a chance, mate. For ye shall rejoice with coffee, my friend. In fact, so bad has this become, that I toddle back into a Macky-Dees just for a little nostalgia, a view of life in the halogen days of yore. 

But, dear readers, there is a price. This socio-caffeinated development has an insidious side, oh yes it does. You want aluminium-table java emporia? There is a price to pay. 

Last week, I noticed how much more I had been dreaming in my sleep (as distinct from during my awakedness, for they are different dreams). Every night, I had had nice fluffy dreams that I could remember in the morning. It was like being alive again, not just a blinded hitchhiker through the dark of night in my flabby body. Then I discovered the awful truth. The wife, none other than the fragrant Mrs Acular, had replaced our normal ground coffee with (and I can barely type it without falling into spasm) decaffeinated ground coffee. N'ere a drop of life-giver passed my lips for a whole stinking week, for I had been unwittingly detoxificated.

I can disclose, therefore, that full-fat full power coffee robs you of your dreams. You heard it here first. 

Too Much of A Good Thing

The Full English Breakfast is to me a work of culinary art. It is moorish comfort food and the prospect delights me. 

There are times when such a prospect emerges on life's horizon, and such a prospect every day for a week or so. Hurrah! Nom nom nom!

Something unforseen happened when I was walking the West Highland Way for a week once; by Thursday, I couldn't bear another bite of such a grease-feast. The same thing happened when we were away a few weeks ago - by the end of the week I just had no more capacity for a fried breakfast.

It is not just food that works in me like this. I was once offered a fancy car for a weekend by a friend, as a favour. You may know that this is for me a wonderful thing, and this Mercedes was the mutts nuts. I took mum and dad out in it, The Wife too, and I drove and drove - until in the end it just felt like any other car. I couldn't believe it! 

This probably connects with my views on not achieving all our dreams. It seems that when we get what we think we want, very quickly we get used to it and in the end we realise that perhaps we didn't really want it at all. Sometimes, the idea is better than the thing itself. 

The exception to this is the miraculous in life; the love of one's children, the joy of seeing the person you love most in the world every day, a good experience of prayer, the soaring melody of a piece of music - those things can be soaked up to excess and never lose their valency. Perhaps the exception to this is in the non-material ...

Don't Live all Your Dreams

In recent weeks, I have had cause to use the term 'living the dream' on a number of occasions. Preaching at the first Mass of a new priest is an obvious example, but in a curacy - if all goes as it should - we can readily describe ourselves as living our dream. 

In all good ways, of course, we are. Most ordained people have been labouring under the particular burden of their calling for years, and whilst it as often as difficult burden, in the end, it forms our dreams. Those dreams are realised at ordination. 

On a different tack, I once heard a lottery winner state that all their dreams had come true, that they could now fulfill every ambition and dream. That sounded marvellous, but only for a moment. 

In the cerebral world that is Coronation Street, one of its older characters stated that she still had her dreams, that she knew that they would never come true, but that they were still worth holding on to. This gave me cause to ponder over my Gin and Tonic and think how life really would be if we had no more dreams to chase after. It sounds perfectly awful to me.

Our dreams, aspirations and ambitions colour in the person that we are. We are clearly a product of 'past', and fact of the 'present' - but it is all of those things that give us our 'future' dimension. I number many people who (if they but did the thing) would give most lottery winnings away for fear that all the little (or not-so-little) things that we dream of would all ocme true and there would be no dreams left. Without our 'future' aspect, we are nothing, except flesh-bones-and-memories. 

Witnessing the ordinations of friends was bitter-sweet for me. It was sweet to see a much loved friend recieve God's Grace and Charism and to become that which they were born to be. It was slightly poignant then to realise that in fact, it is good to look forward to something (maybe or maybe not) happening. Ordination for me is now past - so now what ...?

For me, my dreams project upon my children now. I want for them and not so much for me, though I am still a man who harbours ambitions and dreams. The 'biggies' (family, priesthood) are real now, so they need to be replaced with other things. I once heard a story which I am reminded of now ...

There was once a man who loved to go fishing. He loved to fish and he dreamed of the  time when he could sit in his boat and fish all day. Eventually, his dream came true, and as he was rather a good fisherman, was quickly overwhelmed by his catch. He asked a friend to join him and they fished together. They too were very successful and other friends joined them. There were so many fish that they couldn't eat them or give them away as they had done so before, so they bought a little shop and sold their catch their. So popular was this fish that the man and his friends needed bigger and better boats, and then trawlers which needed a yard which needed staff which needed a bigger shop, and another and another. The man's fish business soon became the most successful and the most profitable and he and his friends became rich beyond their wildest dreams. Time passed and the man became stressed with the burdens of his business and became ill. When he went to his doctor, he was told that he needed a little hobby; something that could help him relax and reflect on the wonderful life he had. Being a man who took the advice of his doctor, he thought hard about how he could unwind after a hard day at his Corporation's Head Office.

So he went fishing on his little boat ....