I have been on an adventure and now I am home. Adventures are marvellous but home is also marvellous, which is nice. There was a time in the recent past when being home was not marvellous at all, but fraught with more peril than singlehandedly navigating the Amazon basin without supplies. That time has now passed. It was an actual delight to tumble back onto the boat on Sunday and fall into my own bed only to wake up and scarf down huge quantities of toast and marmite accompanied by several gallons of tea.
It was not quite as delightful to be wrangling with jet lag, which is one of the unavoidable perils of long haul travel. I often thank God I was never plucked from obscurity to be a famous pop star, spending my life incessantly jetting across the globe. I’d be a lunatic after a fortnight and that’s before you factor in the constant press intrusion and having to do the splits in a spangly leotard night after night.
My body is not keen on any kind of prolonged travelling. If I have to do more than two hours of driving I need at least an hour to recover while my mind catches up with my physical body. If I sit quietly enough I can sometimes feel the exact moment that my brain pulls up in the driveway. It’s quite eerie.
At this stage of jet lag my brain is somewhere over Dusseldorf while my body is firmly in Hackney. Three in the morning is the time my body decides it’s tired enough to go to bed and my eating patterns are all over the place. The cat is delighted with this turn of events. I am less thrilled, but am taking heart that at least my brain is in Europe again. I had been marooned in North America for some time in previous days. I have absolutely nothing against North America. Indeed, it’s where I voluntarily spent the previous fortnight, but it is a long way from home, when some of you is back already.
I have many holiday thoughts and a lot of therapy homework to write about, but this post is more of a small herald with a bugle and some fancy coloured tights proclaiming the news that I am back on my bullshit and as soon as my brain crosses the channel, real posts will follow.
So happy to have you back!
Welcome back! (well parts of you at least) 😊