i.

Specialty ice cream stand. A personal name, like Gino's or Tony's or something. Might well have been Tony's. He's known around the world and he's got his own flag; it's repeated ornamentally in a curve above his ice cream stand. It's supposed to be very good, looks rich and creamy in this hard wafer which is however cylindrical rather than conical.

I see other people getting theirs and it looks good, but how much value can there be in vanilla ice cream even if it is good? So I ask can I have it flavoured and he says sure. He takes down a container of flavouring, which is labelled PEU, which is the French for pear, though even in my dream I know it's not, so I'm wondering whether it means pea or something. So this pear flavouring is a deep magenta/crimson, and looks good, and he pours it over the ice cream.

But it's not a topping, it's a flavouring., so it has to be mixed in, so he starts doing that in the blender. But now I'm worried that it's all soft, not the firm treat I had been looking forward to.

ii.

One of these interminable dream bus journeys around big buildings, under arches and walkways, like di Chirico set around the Barbican. On a much larger scale than Edinburgh but they confirm I knew why the buildings there seemed familiar. Here's where I was expecting the Commonwealth Pool to be, if they were the same place.

I wish I could remember the connexion into the next part, but it was definitely the same story, unlike i. above. A plate glass window? Inside the office now. I throw the dregs of my hot tea at someone who won't stop yammering but half of it hits my supervisor next to her. No problem. Then I get back to my desk, which is actually more like a seat on a high communal dining table, and my packet of sweets is lying open: the two kinds I was especially looking forward to. Perhaps they had been open all the time and no-one else had helped themself to any, but I'm so cross now I don't want to risk it. I lose my rag and throw a blue-eyed pinky, hurling the offending sweets all across the room. More strike my supervisor. Good. Storm out.

She approaches me in a side office where I've holed up to calm down. She's been crying but she's angry at me too, because I keep complaining that the software doesn't work but whenever anything goes wrong I clear out the data and start again, so I might be at fault for not giving it a chance. I give her a piece of my mind.

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