I always take the same way home:
Straight up University Avenue, then right on Byres Road
And at the top I turn onto Observatory, then down the lane and home
I don't even think about it anymore
I just start walking and twenty minutes later I'll find myself there
But one night I found myself lost -
I looked up and I was on Sydenham Road
And I'd no idea how I'd got there
I waited for a while to see if anything was going to happen;
To see if I'd come there for any reason -
But there was nobody about, and everything was quiet
And I walked home round Kensington Gate
And I forgot about it
But since then more and more stuff like that has started happening
More things I used to do without thinking about them
Have started coming out differently
And I've started spending hours doing things I've got no interest in -
With no idea why I'm doing them
But unable to stop
I catch myself listening to bands I've always hated before
Listening to their records over and over
And sometimes when I'm typing
A whole different bunch of words appear on the page
From the ones I had in my head
A few nights ago I went into Barrats to buy the newspaper I always buy -
But when I got outside, I realized I'd bought something entirely different
I was holding a magazine I'd never seen before
Something about Science and Nature
I started reading it on the way home, and there was this article in there
About a wasp that lays its eggs in the body of a spider
The wasp stings the spider, and a short while after the eggs have been laid
The spider starts to weave a new kind of web -
A kind of web it's never woven before -
Without knowing why it's doing it
But when the spider dies, it turns out that what it's woven
Is a cocoon for the baby wasps
A place for them to hatch from
And they grow safely in there, while they feed on the spider's body
I threw the magazine away, and made sure I took the right streets home
And I tried to remember if maybe I'd been stung by that kind of wasp
And I started wondering how you would get rid of something like that...