The Reappearing Aria

Today has been generally wonderful – in fact, it’s been spectacularly good to be in my own four walls again, with my own rooms, my own smells, my own ass-print on my own couch.

But there was an element of musical madness in there, which I think it’s probably important to mention.

When you’re away from home, the temptation is to treat it like being on a holiday, and as an excuse to go a bit wild and crazy. Not having given in to that, with the perversity of nature you will by now have come to expect from me, I have a tendency to regard coming home like being on a holiday, and as an excuse to go a bit wild and crazy. I know, I know…basically I’m just looking for any damned excuse to go a bit wild and crazy.

I was in my familiar local Tesco store this morning, and felt things calling to me. Temptations. Mundane, pathetic, almost so untempting as to be ridiculous, but singing to my blood like virgins to vampires.

Of course the chocolate bars were there, giving a rich, warm, bass note to the Reappearing Aria. The gimmick-yoghurts full of chocolate and corn flakes and biscuit-bits were there, sawing like cellos across the craving of my nerve-endings.

Biscuit-Bits! Ach…the biscuit-aisle oompahed to me like a frog chorus of oats and wheat and caramel centres and double chocolate coating…beckoning me on like cannonfire…only to have the melody of need taken over on a merged note by the shivering-cold ice-cream aisle, which turned suddenly from ice-maiden percussion and piccolos to slamming saxophone and hipsway lust, beckoning me into their melted cores…

Did I ever mention it’s probably hell to go to the supermarket with me?

Normally of course, I am the master of my own musical destiny, iPod firmly plugged in and ready at a moment’s notice to distract myself from the music of the aisles with music of my own choosing. But now, with this wretched ear infection, I can’t plug in my own soundtrack any more.

So I had to create my own. I had to sing.

Not, as you might have been expecting, given my usual behaviour when out on walks, out loud, but just loud enough in my head to shut the Aria up, or shut it out. Seems to work – picked up the Paracetamols I’d gone in for and got the hell out again.

(shrugs). It’s really not easy being the Disappearing Man sometimes, you know. Demented, undoubtedly, but really not easy…