Six months ago I wrote that I'd be taking a break for a while, and it seems like barely a night has transpired and my time is up.
Suddenly we are sitting in some sort of drab prison, waiting for yet another aeroplane.
Our time in Australia has disappeared so quickly that we feel as though we have just landed, that we are on one of those "Border Police" reality shows, and have just been turned around to be sent back from whence we came. We are noticing for the first time just how unhappy the colours in the Brisbane International terminal are, and that does nothing to set our mind at rest as we try to review our list of things unfinished.
This sense of having done nothing is an illusion of course and we realise that even though we are not in Singapore, we are in some other branch of the Restaurant at The End of the Universe, replaying parts of our lives to stow them in neat little boxes in our mind where they can be stored safely to await our return.
This afternoon we will be back in Singapore, that place which for the past five years has been our half-way interlude en route, but we have decided not to push on. We will wait for a night or two, hopefully gathering sleep like squirrels gather nuts, so that when we arrive on the other side of the world we will be better at remembering respectively who and where we are than perhaps we have in the past.
When we think about it, we have not been terribly idle during the past six months. It is fair to say that our grandchildren certainly remember us between visits, that we made it to the bottom of Cape York in time to view the eclipse, we've seen fire and we've seen rain, lots of rain, managed to make a little progress on the house until the rain got really serious and we were forced to visit South Australia for a time to help us remember what dry soil looked like. Perhaps the most disruptive of all happened as we were making plans for our absence. We had barely started to tidy up the loose ends when we received the surprising news that yours truly was perhaps in less fine condition than we had imagined.
This news thankfully turned out to be entirely without foundation, but after several weeks of observation and the best endeavours of those whose job it is to know about this stuff, I was pronounced fit and well with nought but a scar marking the spot where the probe was inserted to remind me that it was not a dream.
Or was it? Perhaps it wasn't the lights in an operating theatre I was staring at. Perhaps I was abducted by aliens. That would seem to better explain the speed with which our time has passed!
Eventually our airport confinement ends, and we are back on the "bus" scanning the entertainment menu, planning our day.
1 comment
Gosh, I was at the airport that day having taken my daughter to catch her plane back to the US. She could have got a lift with you!!
;-)
Unfortunately, or fortunately, I ended up in Toowoomba at the granddaughters' school musical , not Singapore!!
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