Bear With Me

I went to a pub quiz with a difference last night. Ella and I were in a team together in a pub we’d never been to before. It was kind of glitzy and the quizmaster really played up the razzmatazz. At the same time, there was a bit of a small-town atmosphere too.

It reminded me of some of the roadhouses we visited in Australia – a thriving community in the middle of nowhere. We felt like outsiders, but as long as we didn’t do anything stupid, we were sure we’d be ok.

The first round was karaoke, bizarrely, so Ella got up and sung “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”. The first couple of notes were a bit pitchy for me, but then she brought it home and it was, to be honest, the bomb.

The second round was even stranger than the first. It was my turn this time. It was one of those “Who am I?” type rounds in which I had to identify a celebrity.

I was expecting a photograph of the celebrity, but what I got instead was a dwarf. A real, live dwarf. He kind of wandered about in front of the teams for a bit and I had to go into the middle and tell him who I thought he was dressed up as.

He had bleached blond hair, but other than that he didn’t really look like anyone. I felt that I was going to struggle.

I was informed that I had three guesses.

Initially, I guessed that he was Patrick Swayze. This was a waste of a guess, really, as Patrick Swayze is not exactly renowned for having bleached blond hair.

Nor is he much of a celebrity anymore, unless you count a small part in Donnie Darko and lots of big parts in Hallmark movies.

He gave me a bit of a clue next by pulling up his jumper and revealing a Newcastle United football shirt. I think I must have been panicked into my next guess, because it was David James, who has never played for Newcastle. He has, however, bleached his hair blond.

As if things weren’t strange enough, with one guess left, I found myself sitting beside Ella again, with the dwarf standing next to me. It suddenly occurred to me that the dwarf looked a bit like Magnus Mills, one of my favourite novelists. Magnus Mills doesn’t have bleached blond hair, but I was beginning to think that maybe the hair was a red herring, even though it was the only effort he'd made to look different to how I imagined he usually looked. I told Ella that I thought he was Magnus Mills and the dwarf thought he overheard me. He whispered, as if trying to help me to get the answer right, that yes, he was Magnus Seamills. He wandered back into the middle of the pub for me to take my third guess. No one had seemed to notice this cheating going on.

Now, I’d never heard of Magnus Seamills but it was obvious to me that the dwarf was trying to help and that he'd misheard me. I got up excitedly, danced back over to him, and said in a loud voice, “It’s Magnus Seamills!” at which point, somehow, I managed to trip up the dwarf. Our feet - mine extremely long and his extremely short - managed to get tangled up and down he went.

All of a sudden, things turned a bit nasty. The dwarf couldn’t get up. He evidently had something seriously wrong with his leg and he started shouting, either in pain or in anger, I couldn’t tell which. As an outsider in this pub, I felt that Ella and I could now be in considerable danger because the locals would be outraged that I had tripped up their weekly celebrity-impersonating dwarf.

It was at this point that I woke up and realised that it had all been a dream. Even for a dream it's fairly unusual, but it's also very normal in its own way.

Does anyone fancy having a go at an interpretation?