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Sing a Song for Us Tonight is a segment where people choose a song that is special to them and explain why. Today’s guest is Ben. We’ve sat, we’ve waited and now all will be revealed…

*Oh let the sun beat down upon my face…*

Yes, the weary traveller felt his feet sink further into the scorching sand as he trudged onward, turning his face to the heavens and feeling Ra’s cruel gaze burning his eyes. All the fine jewels and carpets in the world could not avail him now. So he left behind his backpack containing all the fine jewels and carpets in the world, and walked on with less of a burden. It was only when he passed the Overpriced Bottled Water Shop that he had doubts about his own prudence.

*Stars to fill my dreams…*

It was at night, as he gazed at the bulging moon and the panoply of stars, lying exhausted with sand stretching away endlessly on every side, that he most keenly felt the loss. What drove him to keep wandering. Was it love? Perhaps, but a love distorted. A love turned inside out. And not in a good way, like a reversible jacket. In a bad way, like a rabbit.

*I am a traveller of both time and space, to be where I have been…*

How had he arrived here? One moment he was in Dr Aschmann’s lab laughing merrily about his latest experiments with faster-than-light travel and superconductors, and the next moment he was dying of thirst in a vast desert. Admittedly, in between those two moments had been several months of passport applications and organising of itineraries with travel agents, and careful planning of his walking holiday in Asia, but even so, it had come as something of a surprise. Just one of the side-effects of severe memory disorders, he supposed. Well, not so much a side-effect as the main effect, really. A side-effect would be something more like the hallucinations of giant honey-flavoured weasels biting him in the night.

What he really didn’t understand, though, was why he was dressed as King Arthur.

Oh, the drums, the drums! They pounded in his head, so precise, to full of foreboding and doom! He could not help but think, as he walked on through the burning desolation, that the pounding in his head, the only sound in a world of nothingness, was the kind of pounding that would, in other circumstances, make a young man say, “This frigging ROCKS!”

Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da…

Such a song he could sing…a song of heat and dust, of freezing nights and magical visions rearing from the sand like the beginning of Aladdin. He once had a friend called Aladdin. He had to kill him when he found out he was sleeping with his wife. His own wife, that is. His idiosyncratic moral code meant he was staunchly opposed to intra-marital sex, but not to unreasonable murder. They called him mad, but who was laughing now?

He was. Laughing and building sandcastles. Perhaps that kick to the head had affected him more than he’d realised. He knew the fight had been his fault; he shouldn’t have mouthed off about the camel’s sister. But still, it was an overreaction. He’d never realised before how potent a camel-toe can be.

*Oh, pilot of the storm who leaves no trace, like thoughts inside a dream Heed the path that led me to that place, yellow desert stream My Shangri-La beneath the summer moon, I will return again Sure as the dust that floats high in June, when movin’ through Kashmir. *

As he lay, suffocating on a mouthful of sand, skin blistering, world swimming before his eyes in a haze of heat and near-death, he smiled. He didn’t care. Because this frigging rocked. (Ben)