Julia and I spent an evening scheming and planning and comparing notes in the common room of the Surprise Backpacker, our base for the past few days.
The mix of travel scenery, people we’ve been meeting, tools we’ve been learning and machines bumping all mixing into the evening sounds of London as I drifted into a very solid sleep.
In my dream, the sound and rhythm of a Monotype composition caster clacking and bumping. But the machine wasn’t putting out type in a shiny solid row of letters one by one.
There were instead rectangles of the Cotswolds misty in their limestone yellow and green rolling hills alive and moving past as we road the train to John Randle’s Whittington Press. There was an enormous density of pin jaw tongs akin to bramble and undergrowth clacking and sliding some unknown die case forward along rows and along columns. There was a collection of engraved punches stored in an old cabinet like my great grand parents might have had out on the plains of North Dakota; the letters shining and unique at the end of their steel.
The sound of the machine, the tapping of rod tongs, the hiss of the air flowing through to the pistons, the whump and bump of the piston driving metal from the pot into the mould–this was constant and not changing. But the images flowing from the caster changed one by one, line by line.
A windy and cold bike ride along a dike separating Belgium from the Netherlands. Some building in Lille in the middle of the night as the bus stopped along our travel to take on more passengers. The gentle roll of the ferry crossing from Calais. The London Tube with it’s warren of up and down and crossways pathways. The top of a double decker gliding through King’s Cross on our return from dinner with James Mosely and Gillian.
Without warning the machine stopped and it was morning. I’d put a solid night of sleep behind me. Ready to meet some of our new friends for breakfast before moving on to our next location for a few more days.