Chapter Three. Part I.

Chapter Three. Part I.

I was just back home from the USA having spent the last three to four weeks in Los Angeles writing and recording with John, an actor friend. John had recently hit the big-time quite suddenly, becoming extremely popular as a main character on a leading UK soap opera. We had worked together (musically) in the past, but now because of this new found popularity of his and the potential television exposure it made available to us, we decided to form a duo and take advantage of whatever opportunities were now available

   

Los Angeles is a place where I’d lived once-upon-a-time, and it had been great to see some old friends there - not to mention the welcome change a little sunshine made from these bleak winter months of England’s north-west.

Just weeks before I travelled to America, there had been a large earthquake in Southern California, the worst in a good few years, and they were still experiencing after-shocks.

During my first few days there, early one morning, I had the most interesting experience when I suddenly woke up for no apparent reason. Now it isn’t that I don't wake early from time to time, but it was more that I was suddenly wide awake, and I didn't know why. 

Then within twenty to thirty seconds the entire room, including the bed - with me in it, started to swing from side to side. 

I had, to some extent become used to this sort of thing from the eight years I'd lived in LA, but this time I was baffled as to why I awoke just moments before the after-shock began. 

On arriving back in England and reuniting with Carol, the next thing I wanted to do was to eat Indian food, open a bottle of wine, get the board out, and to ask about this early morning experience.

As I said earlier, I really had missed our sessions; it was all very new and exciting. 

There were more and more pressing questions I felt I needed to ask, and every time I had a response to one enquiry it would then seem to prompt further questions. Much of what came from the board I found to be thought-provoking and absorbing, and I took its words seriously. Yet paradoxically, at the same time, there was still a reluctance to see these words as the actual truth. Consequently I expended a good deal of energy trying to catch it out, or to get whomever we were speaking with to contradict themselves. 

I suppose my reasoning was that if I could succeed in this, then there would be some form of comfort found in proving my “rationale”–the one I was so well acquainted with–to be correct. On the one hand, there was a strange mixture of doubt, and on the other, a hunger to find out more. Yet, as already stated, I must’ve certainly been giving the glass at least a modicum of credence in the first place, or I wouldn’t have been doing this. 

It did take me some time to learn, but in the end it really didn’t matter who or what it was - more often than not it just was smarter (and much faster) than me, and if I actually was going to be smart about this I’d quit spending so much time trying to expose all the assumed fakery.

TBC ...