It's been a 'head under the doona' day. I'm fretting about the lack of time to do what I think I should be doing, and have to be doing, and don't want to be doing but must. And the amount of travel coming up which is suddenly not very appealing cos gosh darn how can I manage with just the one of me and my brain exploding with worries?
Answer?
Do it anyway. That's what I did last time, and the travel was great. Not always, I had doona days, blob days, sitting in cafes and watching the crowd days. But I did go to many amazing places, and I got to hold M's hand a lot, and that was a very fine thing. I'm trying to concentrate on the things which really stuck in my mind as highlights - snippets of time and snaps of places and things and peoples... like the green macaw in the reception room in our Venice hotel, who said, very lugubriously "Ciiaaaoooo" when we passed. And the incredibly neat gardens and tombstones of the cemetery where Smetana and Dvorak are buried, in Prague. The friar who rushed past me into St Steven's church in Salzburg, saying as he went 'Gruss gott' - god be with you, I believe.
The clear water running through the specially made gutters in Freiburg um Breisgau, which help to cool the city in the summer. The pout on my niece Leah's face when she didn't get her way that day. The dinner when Ruedi made three huge courses, and then presented me with a special, second (rich, amazing, killing) dessert. Their very old cat Missy, who loved her mohair blanky and wouldn't move even for me.
Cooking a fiery vegetarian curry in Leeds for our hosts, and watching Greta's eyes widen as I tipped in handfuls of spices instead of neat little English quarter-teaspoonsful.
And madder, badder memories, like the Roman taxi driver who changed into 5th gear at 100kph, then lit a cigarette and made a mobile call whilst weaving in and out of 4 lanes at 160kph! The German doctor who tried to 'chiropract' my back but it wouldn't crack, so she shot me full of 6 syringes of lignocaine instead (it worked). The disaster of our first week on Beijing, when for 3 non-concurrent days each we lived very close to the bathroom, and missed all the time we had for visiting the university and district where we lived in 1998. The jack-booted border guards on the night train from Prague to Salzburg, who KICKED the doors open looking for stowaways.
The car crash in Virginia Waters, at the end of a loooong, hot, frustrating day. It would have been funny except that our hosts were unpleasant about 'you Orstralians' the minute we arrived, not long after it.
Oh God, and the fried cheese in Budapest.
Ok, so now I have some purrspective. I can apply that to a coffee, a shower, and a huge squirt of my fave new purrfume (Salvatore Ferragamo 'Pour Femme').
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