Sky High

"I want to die like my father, peacefully in his sleep, not screaming and terrified, like his passengers."

So said the late Bob Monkhouse, and this song reminds me of the one time I felt like I was going to meet my maker in just such a way.

Nowadays frequent, freak, flash, flooding appears to be par for the course, but in 1994 it was something of a rarity.

I'd been and played indoor cricket (if you're American and don't understand the conventional version of this terribly English game then I'm afraid you've as much hope of me being able to explain the indoor version as you have of explaining to me why in the Southern States it's necessary to have quite so many firework supermarkets...) and decided that as it was just down the road from my friend Mark's house, that I would go and visit.

He lived at the end of the fantastically named Limmer Lane, a road which was full of water, so much so that at one point as I drove along it at all of 2mph the headlights of Mum's Nissan Micra disappeared underwater.

Anxious to ensure that my feet didn't slip off the clutch, thus sucking water into the engine and leaving me stranded in Bognor Regis (a fate I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy) I eventually made it to my destination, tired, stressed and worried about the journey home.

We sat and chatted for a bit and then I decided I best pootle home. By way of a reward Mark gave me this fantastic tape to listen to en route.

Now I've never taken drugs, but driving home in the dark, listening to this turned up loud was pretty much what I expect it to be like. The songs sound trippy enough at the best of times, but mix in fatigue, heavy rain, extended versions of each tune and the constant conveyor belt of car headlights coming towards me and the whole effect was deeply deeply hypnotic.

If the Orb had fancied putting some subliminal messages into their music on that album then I'd have been powerless to resist, such was the suggestive state of mind it put me in. Who knows if I hadn't  have got home when I did I would probably have ended up moving to Arizona for the skies, either that or killing Rickie Lee Jones on account of her annoying voice.

I'll let you decide which would have been the better option.