Sunday 29 January 2023
I am sitting at my small (but I love it) desk in London, which I have just photographed. It’s fair to say that, no, we haven’t transported our office areas to Scotland (mainly books and, well, stuff). The view and the surroundings couldn’t really be much different to those at home in Scotland.
We’ve been home in Lewisham for three full days now and I have indeed met up with some friends, popped into various shops, been to a café, used buses and walked far more than I usually do in Scotland. I have even walked to an IKEA (North Greenwich) to pick up another curtain pole (somehow I managed to buy five pairs of curtains and four pairs of curtain poles the other week) and stocked up on some non-regular-supermarket Asian ingredients from a wholesale shop in North Greenwich.
Today, I have some bits of shopping to do ahead of a work trip to India tomorrow. I am not getting my hopes up that it will go ahead (it has been on and off over the past few days) but, as it’s tomorrow, I have now committed to packing and sorting. So now, I’m packing stuff to take to India (work clothes have been in a bag under the bed since spring 2020 and are as gloomy and tired as I thought they were in 2020; ditto my warm-weather, hot-country-designated clothes) and packing stuff for Chris to take in the car back to Scotland. So long as I don’t get my packing mixed up, it should be fine, but double-packing is fairly stressful.
In India, I am desperately hopeful of being able to buy a few things for the house in Scotland. Fortunately, I’ve been to Delhi so many times that I know exactly where I need to go for the kinds of things I want. I am excited about this trip, but I am also apprehensive about tiredness (not done a long haul trip since February 2020, five hours is the very maximum time difference I can sort of absorb; it’s currently five and a half hours’ time difference and, truly, that extra half hour completely throws me. I also haven’t stenoed for more than one consecutive day for over nine months and my hands and wrists are still not really any better than they were – long story).
One of the many things I miss about travel (mainly for work) is that I don’t have regular stress pauses. There comes a point somewhere between baggage-checking and being called to the departure gate that all my everyday stresses and worries recede and, for the duration of my time away, my focus is much more on wherever I am. It’s liberating. I will be interested to discover where I think about when I think about home while I’m away. I am increasingly thinking it will be a mash-up of the two. Being in busy, noisy, polluted Delhi, I am fairly sure I will think a lot about the fresh air of Scottish Borders and the trees, hills and rivers. But thinking of the familiar stuff of home around me, that’s more likely to be Lewisham. But is it because that’s where the vast majority of my stuff is or because it feels more like home? That, I really don’t know. Maybe days and nights spent far away will give me an unexpected perspective. Either way, I am so, so hoping this trip goes ahead and I at least have some time to go shopping and eat as much proper Indian food as possible.