... and the underwater dream

I never got round to completing the write up of this dream. It involved a big chest of treasure as well, I think.

It was a few nights ago now, but very vivid in the colours and the play of light and shadow. We were about 20m down although everything was bright as if we were no deeper than a few feet and the sand was as reflective as that at the beach on Elaphonnesus. I was there with a bunch of people, including Nikos and Kom, not sure why I was there, but I was enjoying it. At some point my bottle came off my back, but caused no distress to my breathing - I just had to hold the bottle so the tubes wouldn't run away.

There were no fish, only arthropods and that struck me as weird - as did the lack of plant material in the sea.

That'll learn me to write up the dreams closer to when they actually happen.

NRH rexit...

NRH regit, he would say. Or perhaps we said it, or wrote it. It stands, whoever said it. NRH taught me Latin - for better or for worse, my first year of Latin - my first formalised taste of the grammar of an inflected language and much more came at his hands.

Of course, he did more than teach Latin - he was headmaster - "Norman Foreman". And he was famously in charge of discipline and corporal punnishment - only a plimsole in my day but stories of earlier generations made the plimsole seem a treat.

Longest serving head master in the UK apparently. Such things don't excite me. What does is that I could translate into and out of Latin at O-Level standard when I was still 12. What does excite me is that I can still hear his voice declining the adjective "Ingens" (which as veryone knows is the model for present participles).

I guess the loss is felt equally because he was a teacher and because he is an influential memory from a bygone time when everything was different.

Anyway - ave atque vale