I had a weird experience this morning. I worked overnight, some fifteen hours straight from 3PM Sunday until 6AM this morning, mostly quite physical work for a change, and with just a brief half hour break. Suffice to say, when I left work for home today I was very tired indeed, wandering my way to the station in a complete daze, suffering from sleep deprivation, tiredness after a physical work-out and that come-down from the adrenalin high that had kept me going all night. When I boarded the train home it was with a coffee in one hand and a cheese and tomato croissant in the other, and in an attempt to stop the inevitable drift into sleep, a random selection from my iPod, which I think was the Nmperign/Lescalleet album Love me two times blasting at full volume in my ears.

Obviously I don’t remember falling asleep, and it really is a sign of how tired I was that I still managed to despite all of my best efforts otherwise, but when I woke up, some forty minutes later, it was with a track from Guillaums Viltard’s Running Away album playing loudly. Now, this was a really peculiar experience for a number of reasons. The first sensation that hit me was the change in music. Initially I was trying to remember which track on Love me two times including a bowed strings section. It took me actually looking at the iPod’s screen to know I had slept through the whole album and the iPod, which was set on shuffle play had chosen something else. The next thing that hit me was the sensation of a a damp leg, as I had poured some of the coffee onto my thigh. Fortunately the cup had been lukewarm even before I sat down on the train, and was now very cold. My trouser leg was very wet and also now relatively fragrant. The croissant had fared better, having fallen, still in my hand onto the empty seat beside me. A small piece of it though, amazingly seemed to remain in my mouth as I somehow seemed to have fallen asleep mid-chew. What is more, a small boy, probably aged about four or five stood looking over the back of the seat in front of me with a look of complete wonderment on his face at this disheveled mess in front of him. I’ve no idea what he thought but he looked utterly captivated, as if he had just seen a dead body come back to life, which all things considered wasn’t a million miles from the truth.

The most peculiar and very confusing part of all of this though is that I initially panicked, realising I had been asleep for quite some time on a train that I should have got off of just fifteen minutes after getting on. A look at the time confirmed I had been on the train for more than twice this time, but a look out of the window showed Didcot Power Station a little further up the line, indicating that we in fact had not reached Didcot yet, and I had not missed my stop. It probably took me a good five minutes to really get my head together, sort myself out, clean up my leg as best as possible and realise that in fact the train was not moving, and had in fact been stationary for half an hour, stuck behind a signal failure of some kind. Rather than feel suddenly very fortunate indeed though this all just seemed to be part of my morning, which was, shall we say, not one of my average ones. The train pulled into Didcot ten minutes later and I got a taxi home, for fear of falling asleep halfway through the walk…

So today I have slept for ten hours on and off. This morning, because a local postage strike ended yesterday quite a few envelopes of CDs arrived, and I played one of them, the new SLW release on the Organised Music from Thessaloniki label a few times. However I failed to actually listen to more than a few minutes of it on any of these occasions, drifting back into sleep on each occasion. So weirdly, today has felt like I spent the whole day listening to this album, but I didn’t actually listen to very much of it at all. As it happens I do know the music well already, but today I haven’t taken enough in to really share any thoughts on it, and quite frankly I am worried that if I actually did set out to write about it here now I might fall asleep before getting to