Thursday, 4 December 2025

SLEEPWALKING PERHAPS

On the train home, listening to a podcast. Do you ever wonder whether you missed something great by millimetres? I mean somehow you took a street too early and missed the carnival, or you got invited to a gig and turned it down, and then realised it was like, Paul McCartney or someone?


I feel like I’ve been largely sleepwalking. The podcast features a friend of mine, a musician I used to play with, and it seems, might have been a door to opportunities I didn’t realise at all were there.


Sigh.


I was in Oxford for the Christmas do today. For reasons only known to myself I decided to be in full-on provocative social philosophical mode. At one point I asked somebody where they thought human conscience came from and whether fairness was a construct or somehow embedded in nature. The other end of the table were quieter, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at them. Is it really always a choice between this (I screamed internally) and thoughtful silence? Are they really the only options?


My friend on the podcast is talking about a gig I was in with him, now. He remembers it differently to the way I do.


“Would you shoot for it again?” asks the podcast host.


“Yeah, maybe,” he hesitates. Perhaps he’s thinking about the way I messed up a track by playing the wrong rhythm live on stage. Perhaps not. It all seems so far away now. I had no idea how close it was.


The train’s cold. That’s the worst thing about sleepwalking: you always wake up in the cold.

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