Why 'Life on the Half'?

Sometime in 2006...

I was sitting on the sofa in my living room at around 1’ o’clock in the afternoon thinking just how annoying my tinnitus was. I closed my eyes and began to focus on the noise, which to me sounds like I’m standing in a field full of chirping crickets. As I focussed on it, it got louder and louder and then I ‘awoke’ in another place altogether, staring at a circle of bright lights above my head. There was someone beside me and when I turned, it was my then partner, Stef.

I said “Where the fuck am I?” and she said “This is The Half. It’s like your universe but we exist at twice the speed”.

Because of the nature of the experience, moments seemed quite fragmented but I ascertained that she was a kind of alternative version of my own girlfriend and she definitely looked the same. After a bit of an exchange she offered to show me around a bit and I said that I wanted to see my alternative self’s apartment.

Apparently, he wasn’t home but when we turned up outside his building, it looked almost identical to mine. The same type of converted church, but with much nicer gardens and some kind of wood panelling on the exterior, which I thought really improved the look of the building.

The flat itself was pretty much identical, but when I peered into his office, I noticed that although his computer was in exactly the same place, the look of it was totally different to mine. By all accounts it was an Apple but it had bright yellow strips of plastic built into the design. For some reason ‘Stef’ left the room and as the machine was in sleep mode I thought I’d check it out and see what this guy was all about, but he’d password protected it and disappointingly I couldn’t gain access.

At this point I started to hear music getting louder and louder and then suddenly, I was back on my own sofa hearing the ambient tones of my mobile phone beside me. I picked it up and it was my own Stef calling.

I must have sounded odd because the first thing she said was “Are you alright? You sound really strange”. I mumbled that I’d call her back in a minute and hung up. I sat there completely disorientated and thought to myself that I had to get back to some kind of normality. I grabbed the remote for my CD player to put some music on and it then did something that it has never done before or since. It played at twice the speed!

Anyhow, these things seem to happen. Whether they are dreams, coincidence, parallel universes or whatever, they certainly are quite perplexing. However you look at it, it's a good enough name for a blog.