Saturday 15 July 2023
What is it about travel days that I can rarely sleep properly the night before, a night when sleep really would be good? I drove from Scottish Borders to my mum’s in Kent on Thursday morning. I had largely been awake from 02:00; by 04:45, I gave up and got up. It was a beautiful morning, the kind of early summer morning that makes you think you should get up at that time every day. That thought was fleeting. However, I decided to walk up to the water tank. I’m so glad I did because not only was it full again, but everywhere looked and smelled amazing. The smell was from the dew on the ground.
I left home at 05:50 and made my first stop at Blyth Services in Nottinghamshire at 09:10. The first part of the journey was straightforward. The second half was also fine but I messed up with a service station stop and ended up, not at all ideal and won’t do that again, continuing all the way to a mere few miles away from my mum’s, where I stopped for a much-needed stretch and walk and to eat lunch. That was at 13:00, after leaving Blyth at 09:40 and ending up going via Blackwall Tunnel rather than Dartford Tunnel. Roughly four hundred miles. Once I got to my mum’s, I quickly petered out, but a forty-five-minute nap pretty much sorted me out. Well, it helped a bit. It’s Saturday and I’m still knackered though!
The reason I drove down was to see my mum, who hasn’t been particularly well and whose birthday it is tomorrow (when Chris and I are both driving home to Scotland). I stayed the night with my mum, which was good to be able to do, and had a walk with my friend Louise, who I hadn’t seen in ages, then visited another friend, Sarah. I headed to Lewisham late afternoon yesterday and stopped off to briefly see my friend Rachael to give her a belated birthday present and was back in Lewisham by 17:00. Then tomorrow morning, we’re off up north again.
The reason for my detailing more of my journey than might seem necessary is because journeys like that are a feature if you move a long way from family and friends, and I suppose more so for us because we still have our flat in London, which is also very much a part of our sense of home. For this trip, I had to drive because I was collecting an old lawnmower and a few garden tools from my mum, which I obviously couldn’t have taken on the train. I know there are also various train and strike issues ongoing. The drives are tiring and, even though I arrived at lunch time, that was only because I left early, leaving a sense of general day of the week and time confusion and a resulting feeling of slight jetlag coupled with ‘why does my body feel tired? Oh yeah, from sitting in a car all day’.
Regular, unplanned or even occasional drives (and the same applies to trains and other means of transport, though with emphasis on having to change modes of transport) up and down are tiring and there is a day either side which end up being a combination of travel day and tired day. So for this trip, I drove down Thursday (Chris had had to come back earlier, Tuesday, by train) and will be driving up again on Sunday, two full days here. I also think that the older you get, the longer your body takes to recover from being cooped up in a car, so I know that, basically, from Thursday to Monday, for three nights away, I will be more tired and achy than usual. But it’s worth it and I’m really glad I got to stay at my mum’s, which is something I rarely did when permanently living an hour’s drive away. Similarly, by her visiting Scotland last month, I got to spend four/five days with her, which hasn’t happened since I lived in Japan many years ago.
I’m now getting ready to meet my friend Duncan for a walk, hopefully some coffee and to see if a storm really is on its way to London and the southeast.
