I love going away to places because it is a big change from the normal four walls plus sitting in front of my computer. I think everyone needs all the colors of the rainbow and sometimes the work situation does not provide this. I don’t even have to consciously switch off my interests or my brain but just be in an environment which feeds me different information.

During the past few days I’ve had the privilege of speaking to many different types of people and hopefully cheering some of them up and encouraging them.  I saw someone on one of our walks who had the perfect hairstyle for her shape of face and her demeanor and I told her so. Okay so it was in front of her husband but so what. I actually bought a pair of shoes for myself – it’s something I very rarely do. I’m not a style person and I like to dress comfortably and hopefully to merge in with the background and not draw attention to myself.

We left an increasingly sunny Cardiff this morning at about 11 am, drove through the city and found the M4. Why is it that traffic slows inexplicably when there is no obvious reason for example a crash or lane closure. I reckon the M4 M5 interchange and all points west and southwest are one of the busiest places in the whole motorway network. I can’t speak about Birmingham and south of Manchester but I’m sure they’re very busy as well.

The very nice thing about our homeward trip is that it is short, a car journey taking less than two hours, and because we know in advance that journey is going to be simple, the worry does not back up to a couple of days before when you wonder if the plane is going to take off or the weather is going to cause bumpy flying or whether the taxi will arrive. It’s always a relief to open the front door and find that the places exactly as you left it albeit a little bit colder.

The first thing we do is to immediately unpack everything and put it in a pile that which needs to be washed. I then feed myself as necessary and gets straight on with writing my diary because I found that even after 24 hours, some of the details fade and the clarity tends to diminish.

Our next visit to a hotel where we’ve been before east of Birmingham takes place in about 4 weeks time.

I’m tempted to take a month off and go somewhere exotic.

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