This week I transferred a day off I'd not been able to use, and headed up to Derbyshire for a couple of days with an old friend from uni. MC and her partner have recently moved from dear little house to very beatiful bigger Art Nouveau house. As they are both childless and currently petless, their home tends to be calm, ordered and all the things that Privet Drive never ever manages to be. Just crossing the threshold is a treat, leaving aside the pleasure of being with an old friend with whom I've shared so much.
Their home is in one of the most beautiful parts of England, so time spent there usually involves long walks across the Peaks. MC is a Serious Walker, who climbed Kilimanjaro and ran the Pennine Way during a recent gap year. This sounds alarming, but she is very tolerant of her tortoise friend, who simply can't do hills without turning gently blue, so I was looking forward to getting out onto some new paths, but the rain set in on the first evening and that was that. One brief foray on Thursday established without doubt that the jacket that seems waterproof in the gentler climate of Charlton Kings doesn't even attempt to stem the kind of rain we were getting...drenched to my undies within 5 minutes, I agreed that discretion was the better part of valour, and we spent a wonderful day sitting by her fire and catching up on 2 years of happenings. It was kind of frustrating, though, when periodically the mist cleared enough to see how much beauty was around us, just out of reach thanks to the prevailing conditions.

Something of the same sort seems to be going on for me as I try to ready myself emotionally for India...there are so many storms about the place that actually getting the space and opportunity to think properly is all but impossible,- but the drive north and home again was a wonderful bubble of calm in which some things did become momentarily clearer, as the mist swirled around me.
I suspect that emotional and irrational may be the flavours of the coming month, - so I beg your patience here and now. Might just take a blog break, to spare you. We'll see what happens.