A Voice from Afar...

My eyes are narrowed. I've cut myself off from everything around me and stand there, focused on a single point. My hands are sweating, and I clench my fingers slightly. The colours around me are fading: green drifts towards red, autumn's yellow towards black. I prick up my ears. It feels as though, if I lift my head a little, I could shut out every sound and filter in only the one I've missed, the one coming from far away. Faces blur and vanish; I've already dealt with the noise inside myself. I just want to hear. Only hear. I know I'm awake. The sound I've longed for comes from deep down, like Freddie Mercury's cries in 'The Show Must Go On'. The ground is trembling, slowly. I can feel the dance the earth is doing beneath my feet. If only I were barefoot, I think to myself. But there's no time. It's coming. I can feel it. I can't see it, but I feel it right in the pit of my stomach. It's coming... I know it. Not long now...

I'm someone who likes to live in the moment, and who dislikes making plans. I know the value and meaning of a single second. I always want to breathe that second, that moment, that minute right down to the bottom, soak it up and enjoy every last fragment of it, and I envy people who manage to be in the right place at the right time. I'm madly jealous of those who live it with the naked eye, with no filters, cameras, satellites or signals in between. I harbour feelings mixed with envy towards those who had the moment reflected in their pupils, who felt it in their ears. Being there during David Gilmour's solo in Comfortably Numb at the end of his Pulse concert, feeling all those decibels hammer against your chest. Experiencing that moment without knowing it would one day become legend. Sometimes I think I like the fact that time keeps flowing far more. You shouldn't have to go back and live it a second time. A Tour de France stage, a Marcel Marceau performance, the Queen Wembley concert. Things that only taste right when you see them live... Like at the Whitesnake concert in Turkey. David Coverdale coming back on stage at the end with a microphone in hand and singing Soldier of Fortune on his own, with no instruments. Thank goodness mobile phone cameras weren't as advanced and widespread back then as they are now, and nobody lived that moment with one arm in the air, just to share it here and there.

When it comes to motorsport, to which I owe my life, these feelings swell even more. The idea of meeting the monsters we'd always had to watch from afar, whose sound we'd always had to hear through the inadequate, soulless speakers of a television, warmed my heart. It was always a dream... The lucky ones got the chance to go and chase them, to see them, smell them, even touch them. I had to wait.

Then the news began to spread... They were coming... And they had to. I had to live 'that moment' too. I had to add a new one to everything I'd already lived. Just like being in the front row at a Mark Knopfler concert, with the touch of that magnificent thumb on the strings reaching my ear directly rather than through the PA. Just like watching Maria Sharapova with a racket in hand at the Istanbul Open.

We were in a rush, in a flurry. Bags were packed and the trip was planned. Still, nothing had quite sunk in. Not until I took my place in a hairpin to take photographs and saw the eyes of Colin McRae as he came sliding round; in that instant, my scattered mind suddenly took it in. I was watching the best in the world with my own eyes, just as it was meant to be. I could feel their wind, smell their scent, and feel their sound through my whole body. And then they were gone... We thought they wouldn't return. We were sad. As Aslı sings in her song, 'did they have to go so far away'...

Now we're buzzing inside. We're waiting. The sounds are quivering in the distance. I can feel it... Our heartbeats are rising. At the wooden desk, I look at the computer, and the computer looks at me.

Freddie Mercury in my ear...
Saying the show must go on...
And it will...
We're ready...