Of Mice, Men and Jelly
I had a very long and complex dream last night - this account is barely going to scratch the surface of it, partly because I can’t remember how some bits fitted in.
I was on my way to a gig in Harringay and was telling someone how much I liked North London. Some yobs playing football some way off started taking the piss. Luckily by this point I’d entered the alleyway that led to the venue. The alleyway ended in a ladder up which I climbed to get to the venue. I knocked on the door; I was about half an hour early and the other members of the band weren’t even there yet. Eventually the door (more of a hatch really) was answered by a sleepy woman who asked me to come back in ten minutes.
Inside the venue - which was also a circus apparently - there were a number of people sitting on chairs as if in a hospital waiting room. These included a family, one of whom, a young man, was obsessed with the circus’s escapologist to the extent that he kept claiming to be him.
I was introduced to the controller of the circus who was fat, green and very old. The sleepy woman was his wife. She said she wanted to show me something, a cyborg squirrel that lived on a short section of rail track they had out back, alongside a train carriage that “refused” to run the squirrel over. The woman told me the story of how all this came to be; I experienced the story as if it was a film…
It starts in the nineteen thirties when two brothers, George and Lennie leave the circus in the pickup truck to go and collect something from the Big City. It’s thought that Steinbeck must have met the brothers on this occasion and got the idea from them for the characters in Of Mice and Men as George is smart and Lennie large and dull.
In the Big City the brothers see a pigeon steal a woman’s brooch. George directs Lennie to catch it with his “huge hamlike hands”, giving him precise directions as to where it is because Lennie lacks the confidence to catch it by himself. This is what originally gives him the idea for programing automata like the cyborg squirrel.
In the Melon Jelly Factory, George negotiates with the owner regarding a bulk purchase, whilst Lennie gets caught up in the mechanism and a one-eyed canning robot fills his head with jelly, turning him green and giving him a “beatific smile”.
Outside the factory a crowd gathers ready to smash it to pieces for what has been done to Lennie. As stones start flying through the windows, the brothers escape in their truck. On way home, George’s wife asks him who’s going to take over the circus when Pa dies, as they have other plans. George doesn’t know.
Music starts playing and George’s wife says she thought the radio was broken. George says it is. They look in the back and see that Lennie has fashioned a radio out of bits of wire and a tobacco tin. The jelly in his head has made him beyond smart.
This explains why in the present day the circus venue owner is bright green and invents things, including the remote-controlled cyborg squirrel.
There was a lot else besides, including me meeting Colin Baker and making a video about how to fold up maps properly. I also attempted to use a cashpoint to send the Tweet “Calm yourself Cuthbert” but I can’t work out how these pieces fitted into the whole.
