All Over the Place

With Pascoe in Edinburgh

“That’s a rubbish pentacle you’re drawing,” commented Nigel.

“It’s not a pentacle – I’m plotting my half term journeys on a map of the UK.”

It could be more complicated.  But, since we saw Carenza in Oxford last weekend and Nigel is visiting the Northumberland grandparents next month, all I had to do was visit Pascoe in Edinburgh, my parents and brother in Cornwall and Perran in Bristol.

That’s fine then.

Bristol and Cornwall are by car, and Edinburgh was supposed to be by train, but since the plane was both cheaper and quicker, Nigel and I guiltily broke our own rules and arrived in Edinburgh reeling not from jet-lag but from severe cognitive dissonance.

Some teachers are probably having a rest and a catch up with those bits of domestic admin that never seem to get done, but it appears I’m not, although of course I did mean to. 

The idea of parallel universes came as no surprise to me as I regularly plan several different versions of how I will spend my time without fully acknowledging that I will be forced to choose between them.

My main worry this week is that as I go south west on the motorway, I will peer into a car in the opposite carriageway returning north east, and my own face will look out at me.  I will finally have “met myself coming back”.