The rain falls, not heavily but thickly, as Dane Chromium stares out of the window. The mirrored lenses of his aviator shades reflect only the deep blue of the artificial light that filters through the glass.
Chromium’s face is impassive, his skin pale and smooth, not a muscle twitches. The only sound a repetitive hum that comes and goes, phasing in and out like a…
“You’re snoring,” my wife says, nudging me hard.
“No!” I say, deeply aggrieved. “I was having a really good dream. It had amazing characters in it, including one called… ‘Dane Chromium’.”
“Wow,” she seems almost impressed, “what were they doing?”
Now pressed on the details they seem far more vague than they did a moment or two ago, I hesitate…
“Well… it was a kind of futuristic world, I think there might have been robots.”
“Robots are only futuristic if you are still in the 80s,” she points out.
“And Dane Chromium was wearing mirror shades…”
“Mirror shades? Like in science fiction from the 80s?”
“Well, I think they wore them in the 90s too.”
A segment of science fiction, with which I had a brief, but intense, relationship, was very big on people with mirror shades. It was supposed to represent their machine like detachment from humanity - the process of becoming more machine like.
The future those books imagined, in which the internet was all knowing and a small group of elite billionaires had immense power over the rest of the world remains… unimaginable.
“So what was happening in the dream then?”
“I remember that it was raining, and quite dark,” I say, in the hope that indistinct dream memories will be resolve a little as I start to narrate the story. “And Dane Chromium was looking out of a window - and it was all bit dystopian.”
“It sounds like you were dreaming Blade Runner,” she says.
“I suppose there was a kind of Blade Runner type energy to it,” I admit.
I close my eyes, hoping to drift back to the dream and become immersed in my own version of Blade Runner once more, or just to remember a little more of the now almost entirely vanished story that had been unfolding in my mind.
Nothing.
“You know why this is, don’t you.” I say.
“What?”
“It’s because I had that drink.”
“It definitely isn’t.”
“I think it might be. It’s the only explanation.”
I’ve been teetotal all my life. “Teetotal and vegetarian, like Hitler,” as someone pointed out, unkindly.
Although I’ve sipped at various alcoholic drinks over the years I have found, without exception, them all to taste of an unpalatably disgusting medicine. This has been a great disappointment to me as I’ve long liked the idea of myself as someone who, with a sophisticated air, sips single malt whisky while gazing meaningfully out of a window. Unfortunately I’ve found single malt whisky to taste even more like disgusting medicine than all the other alcohol I’ve ever tried.
Recently though, change has been afoot. My children’s generation are, apparently, ‘sober curious’ (they need only refer themselves to me, I’m happy to explain) and as a result a new range of alcohol free drinks has been developed. I liken this to the way that vegetarian food slowly became mainstream during my life, when I became vegetarian it was hard to find vegetarian options when not at home - now it’s absolutely normal. Even steak houses offer veggie options.
Encouraged by this new wave of drink innovation I found and bought a bottle of non alcoholic rum. “We are living in the future,” I marvelled. The eldest was with me at the time. She wrinkled her nose, “isn’t that just expensive squash?” She asked.
Later that night I poured myself a measure.
“It tastes of vanilla, and, I think, burned caramel,” I told my wife as I sipped. “But it’s not too sweet, and the taste lingers in your mouth, with afternotes of...” She stifled a yawn.
“I think it must have been that drink - it clearly went to my head.”
“Right,” she replies.
“I expect I’ll feel terrible in the morning,” I say, rolling over happily.
“I expect so,” she agrees.
‘Saturday columns’ are short, sometimes (relatively) funny, basically true* stories of mundanity and mishaps from my life.
*Some names, locations and other details may have been changed to protect the guilty.