Tonight I’m flying to London – I’ll be away from home for just under four days. I felt blue all day. Some of that was related to not getting much sleep (I was up at five getting ready to go for a run ay 6:30), some of it was due to the weather (which veered between drizzle and constant downpour all morning) but most of it was the thought of leaving wife and child behind while I go halfway round the world for a series of meetings and dead time in soulless hotel rooms.
Well, maybe not halfway round the world. More like a third of the way, I suppose.
I didn’t even begin to pack until this afternoon. That said, for three days in London you don’t need to pack much; I threw in a few t-shirts and a change of shoes and that already felt like exorbitant overpacking. I tried to adhere to our normal schedule. We went swimming at four, went grocery shopping after that, I almost fainted from hunger in the supermarket, we went home in a taxi and ordered in pizza, the usual sort of thing.
La Serpiente Aquatica Negra was very well behaved in her bath today. There was no excessive jumping, screaming or thrashing. When we put her to bed, however, we had a struggle. She spent more than an hour saying "daddy bye bye, mummy bye bye" but apparently that didn’t actually mean she wanted us to clear off, as the caterwauls when we left her room demonstrated.
My flight is at 10:45 so I had quite a lot of time, but not an infinite reserve. With a heavy heart I bade farewell to wife and child, then took the lift to the car park, where a taxi arrived to disgorge its passengers just as I walked out there. At least that went smoothly. I’m on an A380 back to London and I hope I can at least catch up on the sleep I haven’t had for the past months. There is something ti ne said for travel after all.
It’s been an odd day. After the run this morning I felt pretty dreadful, almost passing out with hunger or fatigue until we went to The Lokal, a (in my view) overrated cafe over the road from our flat. We also interviewed a potential domestic helper to come and live with us full time, which just feels like such a strange and bizarre notion that I’m still getting my head around it. And I paid an unfeasible amount of money for the family flights home this year today, leaving us with a red hot credit card. (Funnily enough, I think that means I’ve now accrued enough points for us all to fly home for free, not that it’s any help now.)
And so I rocket towards the airport in a silent taxi, and I worry about what I’m leaving behind, and hope I’m back before my wife gives birth. Plenty of crossing fingers for luck until Friday…