It Had All Been a Dream!

One of the mixed blessings of living alone - certainly the way I do - is the balance between fitting in all the demands of running the household and satisfying a variety of social commitments and obligations on the one hand, and carving out chunks of time for specific pleasures or necessary 'big jobs' on the other.

Occasionally at work (my voluntary commitment to the hospice warehouse), I come across the odd twin-cassette recording.  These are now quite unusual, having been replaced by talking book CDs and online downloads over the years and, I suppose, must be between twenty and thirty years old ... or more!  Unless the subject is of particular interest, there is no demand for them, and they go for scrap.

I found one the other week; it was a radio broadcast, a dramatisation of a Len Deighton book, called simply 'Bomber'.  Intrigued, I brought it home and converted it to an MP3 file on my computer.  The four sides total over four-and-a-quarter hours of listening, so I imagine that, whenever it was originally broadcast, it would have been as a serial rather than a one-off radio play.

I decided that the ideal time to listen to this would be Boxing Day.  There would be no need to go out at all, no domestic chores that couldn't be deferred and, as it happened, there was a particular job that I wanted to do, which would require a few hours and couldn't really be sub-divided.  What better than to combine the two?

After the limited sleep following the midnight service at church, with the need to be up at a normal time on Christmas Day to ring bells in a similar timescale to a Sunday, it was little surprise that, with the alarm switched off, I was late getting up on Boxing Day.  Once breakfast was over, though, I settled down to the job of filleting the contents of a filing cabinet drawer with 'Bomber' playing in the background.  A brief interval after about three hours to make a snack for lunch was the only break and I really felt at one with the story.

I've never read the book, but it was clearly skilfully written ... or else had been very cleverly dramatised.  It told the story of a Lancaster Bomber's final operation, as part of a 500- or 600-bomber raid on Germany's industrial areas in February, 1943.  It included the intricate personal and professional lives of some of the crew members and others in the squadron and at national level as the target was chosen, the planes prepared, the crews identified and so on.  However, it also explored in the same depth the affairs of the citizens of a small town in Germany, whose lives were about to be curtailed by a disastrous sequence of accidental occurrences.

At times, the excitement was so intense that I had to abandon what was going on on my dining table and just sit mesmerised, until that phase of the action had passed.  As my mother would have said had it been a TV drama in her day, "Don't they play their parts well!"  For all it being sound only, it was as if I were in the plane with them!  At the end, I was glad that my physical task had also been completed, and I was on the point of noting the details of the places involved, in order to research later just how closely, if at all what I'd just heard resembled the actual facts.  I was spared this new challenge, however, as the announcer explained that there was no airfield of that name in England, and the German town that must have been virtually obliterated was also fictitious.

And today ... life is virtually back to normal and I'm wondering what excitements next week will bring!