The One Where Planes Drop from the Sky and I’m Australian

So, I’m standing on a bridge…a very high bridge by the looks of it because when I look over the edge, the ground is about half a mile below me. The bridge spans a motorway and there’s a wide grass divide between the carriageways.

While I’m standing on this bridge, I notice a plane, an easyjet sort of size, making what those in the aviation industry might call its final approach and it’s flying quite low overhead. Then I notice another one close behind it and I start to think that something might be wrong. Then planes start appearing from all over the place, all heading in the same direction and seemingly jostling for position in the sky and all desperate to land. There are about a dozen of them now and the immediacy of their problems is made more apparent by the struggling noises that their engines are making. Then it happens; one of the planes just drops like a stone. I follow it’s descent and I have to look over the edge of the bridge to see it crash onto the grass divide between the carriageways below. It doesn’t crash as if it was an emergency landing, it lands ‘belly down’ as if it just dropped perfectly vertically. Then I look further along the motorway and three more planes do exactly the same, landing, or rather crashing to earth, on the grass divide, ‘belly first’.

Once I see this, I’m suddenly on board a fire engine and, for some reason, I’m Australian. We tear along a motorway, going down a steep incline and we stop to help other firefighters who are digging up the earth to the side of the road. They’re all covered in wet mud and the mud is only getting wetter and more slippery as they’ve managed to unearth a huge water-pipe and have smashed it to the point where water is now gushing out of it and pouring down the hill. I imagine that it’s destined for the site or sites of the plane crashes but this is never confirmed.

Then I’m standing next to the fire engine, which is now parked up alongside other fire engines in what I can only describe as a rural setting, like a village green and there are the odd bits of hay being blown across the street, as if there are bails of the stuff lining the street. Strangely, I’m seeing everything in a sepia colour. Anyway, the fire chief fella comes and tells us that one man has to take a fire engine to the crash scene and fight the fires by himself because he can’t afford to throw too many firefighters at this incident.

So, the best way to decide apparently is to play a game of football, the type I used to play as a kid. The game we used to call ‘Wembley’ and which involves one person playing in goal and everyone else playing for themselves. There are about a dozen of us firefighters, tackling each other, fighting for the ball and getting in our shots at goal in an effort to score and thus be eliminated from the round. Amazingly, although I don’t see how, I manage to score the first goal and I go and sit out the game, happy that I’m out of the running for the ‘certain death’ assignment. And then I wake up.

Planes, Australia, Firefighters, Motorways – none of these things can be connected to anything I’ve seen, read or done lately. Which just leaves me with nothing. Although I do now have the opinion that all Aussie firefighters are: a) bad at one-player ‘Wembley’; b) all too glad to send a brother firefighter to his death and: c) forever trapped in a sepia coloured rural world…in my head.