Strange Lights in the Sky (Part 1)

Opportunity sometimes comes from the most unlikely of sources.

I mean, if you are anything like me, you throw yourself one hundred and fifty percent into something, focus like a laser and smash down the walls of Jericho with a toffee hammer and spoon, until you have reached your goal in a blaze of triumphant tub-thumping and orgasmic waves of gristle.

But lo, what's this?

Whilst you were trebucheting yourself over the escarpment again and again and again, behind you, trying to get your attention is a very large billboard saying 'this way please'.

A few years ago in the late summer/ early autumn I was not a happy bunny. Everything that had been going right in terms of momentum, career etc, had suddenly started going kerwrong, because I had taken my eye off the ball etc etc (insert other trite metaphor here).

One day, it was a thursday or friday in September, I was walking up the top of Grays Inn Road in Kings Cross, London, where I was living at the time, seemingly the weight of the world on my shoulders, when a voice popped into my head.

'You should buy The Stage you know'.

The Stage for anyone wondering, is the leading 'theatrical' newspaper in the world and sometimes has a few 'Situations Vacant' jobs listed in it, in amongst the looky-likey Elvis impersonators and ads for strippers to go to Greece and Turkey.

Anyway I carried on walking down Euston Road pissed off, thinking too much, deep in self-immolation.

'You should buy the Stage you know' came the voice again.

I turned around and looked across the race track that is the Euston Road/ Pentonville Road dissolve, at the newstand where I always bought my magazines etc.

Should I bother? I mean there's never anything in it, that's why I haven't bought it for a couple of months, I mean really, what's the point?

(More in Part 2 that follows, sometime)