Craig Baxter
BAGA-award-winning playwright, dreamer, fully competent
- I had my first dream about Campus (which is an academic journal article tracking system). It was quite a dull dream actually
- Dream i’m washing up the dishes but in a sink that has four plugholes!
- It occurred to me during a Zoom call today that these days I look like John Nott in 1982 when he walked out of the tv studio after Robin Day called him a “here today, gone tomorrow politician”. It’s a good look!
- substack.com/@craigbaxter... Henry V part V (on stage directions)
- I just read a whole chapter of a James Bond novel and it was just him talking to a young woman and she was telling him about her tough childhood and stuff. It was nice
- Hard frost makes it an excellent day for collecting (nicely frozen) cat turds from the lawn. Same hard frost makes it a less excellent day for burying them
- I am the fattest, oldest, weakest, slowest, ugliest man in the gym. But also the best
- Dream/subconscious me has a sense of humour I hope you’ll agree: Dreamed I was controlling a drone helicopter in a corridor and got it to grip my cheek. Next I made a dramatic entry into a party and asked the gathered throng: “Do I have something on my face?” Hilarious!
- Dream I’m staying with a delightful German family but the passcode for their WiFi is so impossibly long that I feel my life is slipping away from me and I have to leave
- Dreamed my friend Steve dropped by to say goodbye (he’s going away) and show us the new dapper sleeveless coat he’d bought for £1 but I was quickly aware he wanted to spend a more lingering goodbye with our mutual friend Clare and that I should leave them to it
- Dream we are drinking our own urine in bed and it tastes of “mortgages”
- Is it insulting or a misogynistic micro-aggression to, as a chap, thank a lady for being a “gentleman” for holding a door open for you? I just did this and am now steeped in a vague feeling of shame and regret.
- Dream I’m retrieving a retiring police officer’s bicycle from Cambridge railway station lost property 30 years after he left it there (after passing his probation and qualifying for a police car). We roll back the tarpaulin but there’s no bike. Only a broken, stringless bass guitar
- Dream I’m sticking together with tape and glue the first half of my long poem. My plan (I’m excited) is to send it to Faber & Faber. Then I glance at the first lines and realise they are not good (or even poetry). I fold up my mess of scribbled over paper and tape and stuff it away in a drawer
- I never enjoy those dreams in which a man goes wild with a machete in a shopping centre. Anyway I had one of those and could not get back to sleep. The subconscious me is not one of those have-a-go heroes but rather a terrified runner away. I suspect the conscious me would be similar
- I dreamed I overheard a conversation between one of my bosses and their therapist in which they broke down in tears while expressing their overwhelming concern that they were letting me and the rest of the team down (moral: we must be more sympathetic to bosses; they have a tough job)
- I almost went to the gym today
- Back in with an “I’m driving and I can’t even drive” dream; I enter a white car through an opening in the roof (a ripped out sunroof); I’m having to drive it in dressing gown and ill-fitting slippers, avoiding numerous drifting pedestrians also in white dressing gowns and with towels on their heads
- I wasn’t sure whether I should or, if I did, how I should describe my dream in which I’m bleeding from my arsehole but, anyway, I’ve done it now
- These are probably all Christmas shopping anxiety dreams but in another I was struggling to unlock my bicycle from outside a Chinese supermarket which had just been robbed and trashed. The staff and investigating police officers were very smiley and relaxed considering
- Dreamed I found myself in a sewing shop (I had been looking for groceries). A camera team wanted me to - as a rare male in the shop - appear in the publicity shots they were taking. They told me I had a very “warm” persona, in contrast with the rather frosty… 1/2
- Irritating to sit through a bunch of adverts in the cinema this evening all trying to convince us that if we buy their Christmas shit it will lead inevitably to us making an affectionate connection with the members of our family.
- I’ve dreamed about Margaret Thatcher and George Osborne previously but my subconscious lurched even further to the right last night with the first appearance in my dreams of Nigel Farage. He and I were playing nicely together in a Lego play pit with a bunch of primary school children.
- Dreamed someone (can’t remember who) asked me why I wore deodorant. I replied it was just force of habit and I’d been doing it since 1974. My friend Ken defended me saying he thought there was nothing wrong with that
- Dreamed I attempted to release a geneticist from our local mental institution (I had been partially responsible years ago for his sectioning). Unfortunately I scraped the car in the institution’s car park and had to abort the operation
- I wrote another one: Henry V part 2 open.substack.com/pub/craigbax...
- I renounce my humanity
- I renounce my age (60), generation (X) and my star sign (Taurus the bull)
- I renounce my introversion and anxiety
- I renounce all my musical tribes and loose affiliations (heavy rockers, proggers, post-punks, New Romantics, fey indie boys, grungers, disco divas, math rockers, art poppers, minimalists, atonalists, etc)
- I renounce my nationality. It was an accident of birth and not even my accident
- I renounce the football team I supported as a child (who incidentally are winning 4-0 against Athletico Madrid in the Champions League as I type)
- I renounce my education, including my academic and professional qualifications: degrees, A and O levels, basic Lotus 1-2-3, grade 3 oboe
- (Alexander Douglas says “Love is the opposite of identity”)
- I renounce my identity as a heterosexual
- For a start I renounce my race and “white” ethnicity (both unhelpful social constructs for modern living)
- All next week I will be renouncing aspects of my identity
