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perfect description. As a child that wasn’t good because I couldn’t control it at all, it happened all the time, and it meant I was labelled as spaced-out, difficult, gormless, not all there. I would wander around in shades of grey and disappear for ages. I’d be sent out to the shops to pick something up for my mum and not return for hours. When I did I’d be astonished at the panic and worry I had caused – time just seemed to disappear and I would have ended up hanging out with some random stranger or going somewhere entirely different from where I had meant to go.
    Or today I will be chatting to my best friend and discussing, in detail, his plans for Christmas when five minutes later I’ll say ‘So what are your plans for Christmas?’ Not that chatting with a pal aboutmundane shit is threatening in any real sense of the word, but it has become so in-built, such a part of me, that I often disappear, without even realising it, at even the barest hint of a threat. Like potentially having to commit to seeing someone at Christmas when it’s only November and I may be dead, on holiday, busy, wanting to be alone and safe instead.
    Key moments in my life are missing because of this. I look at my passport and know that I’ve been to certain places. I meet people who claim to know me, sometimes know me quite well. I go to restaurants where I’m welcomed back, tell people stories they gently remind me I’ve told them before or were there with me when it happened, and nothing . . . No fucking clue.
    On the plus side it means I can watch the same movie and TV show several times without realising it; on the minus side I come across as rude, inconsiderate, a bit stupid. And it is fucking annoying not being able to remember almost everything to the point that it takes me several minutes to figure out what I had for breakfast, why I left the house, what day, month and year it is.
    All the more weird that I can remember over 100,000 notes in a piano recital. All the more amazing that sat in front of a piano is one of the few places I am truly grounded.
    I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. As a kid dissociation was the only way the world could be vaguely manageable. If you don’t remember you can’t be terrorised by the past. Our psyches are fucking brilliant – designed to deal with any and all eventualities, at least until they are overloaded and break in two. And yet, even then there is often a way back to something approaching a working state.And my closest friends are aware of it and they don’t get upset when I ask them the same question twice in forty-five seconds or have no recollection of a holiday we took a few months or years ago. Which is exactly why they’re my closest friends and why I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

TRACK FOUR
    Bach-Busoni, Chaconne
    James Rhodes, Piano
    (shut up, I’m proud of this one)
    Bach wrote several groups of pieces in sixes – six partitas for keyboard, six for violin, six cello suites, six Brandenburg Concertos and many more. Musicians are weird like that.
    There was a piece of music that Bach wrote around 1720 which was described by Yehudi Menuhin as ‘the greatest structure for solo violin that exists’. I’d go much further than that. If Goethe was right and architecture is frozen music (what a quote!), this piece is a magical combination of the Taj Mahal, the Louvre and St Paul’s Cathedral. It is the final and longest movement of his second (of six, of course) partita for violin. It is a set of variations (sixty-four of them, I counted) on a theme that drags us through every emotion known to man and a few bonus ones too. In this case, the subject is love with her attendant madness, majesty and mania.
    Brahms said it best in a letter to Schumann’s wife: ‘On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most