overlap

Now, here's a funny thing. Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, a very young me went to see a band I remain very fond of to this day, and due to the circumstances of the time, I had the cash to buy either the t-shirt or the ep that was on sale, but not both. I bought the t-shirt, partly because I thought that the record was something I was more likely to encounter further down the line, and not least because I knew it was being stocked by a particular small shop in London. Several weeks later I happened to be making a trip to London, and managed to stop by the shop in question, but perhaps predictably for such a small production run item, it had already sold out. There followed many years of keeping an eye out for the ep, and I finally tracked down a copy on ebay a couple of years ago. On its own, that's some stroke of luck - I'm sure there can not be all that many intact copies left, nearly twenty years later. By the miracles of the internet, a couple of years ago I got to know someone who I was surprised enough to find knew of the band in question, and in fact had been at a couple of the same shows at which I had seen them. Which is how I come to have been offered not just another copy of the ep, but one which was bought, and autographed by the band (one of whom is long dead), at the very show when I would have got my own copy had I been richer by a fiver or something. That sort of freaky combination of coincidences makes it feel like some sort of stroke of rock destiny completing a circuit. Or just me being incredibly fortunate. Either way, I love the internet!