Monday 27 March 2023
It is good to be back in the middle of nowhere. Neither a positive nor a negative, it feels like we were away for much longer than a week. I wonder if, the more time we spend in our quiet and more solitary and less frenetic life in Scotland, the bigger the contrast to London will seem and the more it will feel like two separate places rather than what we sort of see as being extensions of our sense of home. That is unlikely to make sense. I think we connect the two places because they are both home. However, I think they are so different, both the surroundings and the homes themselves, that over time their differences will feel more pronounced.
I wonder if my inability to express myself well this morning is a reflection of how today will work out.
Mitch worked his way through our To Do list yesterday. Chris and I felt obliged to keep busy. Chris worked in his office, I did various things around the house, from tidying the kitchen surfaces to starting painting the staircase spindles. As with last time Mitch was busy at the house, Chris and I amazed ourselves with our own productivity. We had driven home the day before, Saturday (stopping three times, once, for quite a long time, at a great antique warehouse, Antiques at the Mill in Cullingworth, near Bradford, an impromptu stop at an OMG cheese shop, The Courtyard Dairy on the A65 near Settle, and one service station). We got up at 05:30 but didn’t leave until just gone 07:30, having had to load the car in the morning, and arrived at Scottish home at around 17:30 (and I didn’t just round those times up to look neat, it really was pretty much exactly ten hours later that we arrived in Scottish Borders). By having gone a different route (only a few chunks of traffic/delays), A1 only as far as M62, then onto A65 to get back onto the M6, and having stopped off at somewhere planned, the antique place, it kind of felt like more than just a travel day. But then having to unload the car, losing an hour’s sleep due to clocks going forward and Mitch starting at 08:00-which-was-really-07:00, we were absolutely shattered Saturday and Sunday.
Oh well, if this area were much closer to London, far more people would probably want to live here and it’d be a totally different kind of place. But it is a tiring journey, even if you don’t take detours and stop off at shops as well as service stations and cheese shops.
I am so not alert this morning and neither has any kind of flow been forthcoming. I will proceed to apply my meh-ness to other things.