Contact

It's 5am and I am, if not wide, then at least awake and have been for the last two hours.  I flew back from the UK yesterday - at least, I think it was yesterday but it may have been the day before, it gets so hard to tell with the travel - and I'm suffering from jet lag as my body tries to accommodate the change in time zones.

With me, jet lag manifests itself in two ways.  Firstly, I fall asleep instantly and without notice; last night, S and I decided to watch an episode of I'm Alan Partridge.  When I started the programme, I was wide awake... I don't remember seeing the end of the opening credits.  Something in my body threw a switch and I was instantly asleep.  Secondly, I find myself waking up at 3am, thinking it's much later and that it's time to get up which makes no sense at all because 3am here is only 8pm in the UK... but here I am. Awake, staring up into the dark; tired but knowing that sleep won't come for a while yet.

So I got up and listened to this week's episode of This American Life which, if you haven't heard it, was a tribute to the writer David Rakoff, who died recently and was a regular contributor to the show.  I was listening to the voice of a dead man, talking about his life, about things that had happened to him and what he thought about them; about moments big and small, told with wit and precision and honesty. Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

One of the stories included was a brilliant tale, told in rhyming couplets, of a man asked to give a speech at the wedding of an ex-girlfriend and his best friend, for whom she left him.  In the speech, the man recounts the story of the turtle and the scorpion in which, for those who don't know it, the scorpion kills the turtle even though, by doing so, he condemns himself to death.  It is, the scorpion pleads, in his nature; he can't help it.  The lesson the man draws from this is that we, as people, strive for contact; we can't help it, even though that contact might do no good or can sometimes even hurt us.  It's beautifully told and I do it no justice here - you should listen to it for yourself.

Just as this part of the programme was coming to an end, S woke up and found me on the sofa.  Half asleep herself, she wanted me to come back to bed so that she could scratch my back and we could go back to sleep.  I lay there looking at her, knowing that it probably wouldn't make any difference.  I thought of all the times when people had made offers of help that I knew wouldn't; I thought of all the times that I'd declined offers; I thought of all the times when I had known better and gone my own way.  I thought of a dead man's voice on the radio and of reaching out for contact, even if it doesn't always help.  And I said yes.

I'm not saying that this is a great story or that I tell it particularly well but it's something that happened - a moment of contact and I'm sharing it with you, another moment of contact.  At the start of this piece, I said that with me, jet lag manifests itself in two ways. It might manifest itself that way with everybody but I don't know, because I've never been anyone else.  By making contact, by telling the story of your life to millions of people on the radio or in small ways, to a couple of dozen people on this website, we learn more about what it's like to be someone else and, perhaps, more of what it's like to be ourselves.