Saturday 29th December

We tumbled into our house just after 11 on Thursday night, quite exhausted and soon to bed.  Yesterday morning we got up and blear-eyed walked around the town.  And amazingly it is still all here.  Exactly the same as we left it.  I almost had a fear that it had all been a dream and we would wake up to find whole streets demolished or that the house wasn’t ours.  The town is still delightful even in a somewhat damp but very mild winter.  All the shops have decorated their windows for Christmas and there are fairy lights in the square.  Everything is just as it was, and a wave of familiar contentment came over us as we realised that this is indeed our home.

So, the horrendous journey was worth it, though I wasn’t so sure at the time.  The place just seems so comforting and reassuring to me.  I sometimes seem to have lived my entire life on the run, dashing from work to shops to home, remembering birthdays and trying to keep everyone happy and everything on some sort of financial steady course that I don’t seem to have spent any time relaxing.  But here I do feel relaxed, and contented.  It is almost as if the physical distance means that even when I get an urgent e-mail from work to deal with I am far enough away that it doesn’t really matter.  What are they going to do, sack me?  If only.

So yes it was all worth it, even if I never found the glasses, but given the choice in future I might well decide to fly.