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Sport 39: 2011
THE KEITH OVENDEN DREAM
THE KEITH OVENDEN DREAM
I am in sole charge of a very large hotel kitchen: large work-benches, shining stainless steel, much equipment—but only a single small oven, in which there is a lone leg of lamb. Out through some swing doors is seated the full complement of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. The players are all dressed very formally—the men in frock coats, the women in ball-gowns. I am panicking in a pretty high level way. The only thing that saves me is that from time to time a waiter bursts through a set of swing-doors crying, ‘It’s all right: Keith Ovenden hasn’t finished speaking yet.’ I was telling my friend Kathryn about this dream, and explaining that I thought it was rather shrewd of me to choose a speaker who was renowned for his long, perfectly grammatical sentences—some of them a paragraph or so in length. But Kathryn has made a bit of a study of dreams and word play. ‘Oven,’ she says, ‘Ovenden. You punned your way to safety.’