A new journey.

After spending yesterday pretending to be present while the family gathered round us, today we feigned partial recovery from jetlag, filled Matt and Ab's Monster Truck with daughters, babies and baggage and set out for home. Sitting between our Lil and Mr Four, both of whom had dropped off in quiet repose the instant the car was moving, I had to muster all my strength to avoid joining them in the land of nod. In the front, the three girls barely drew breath between sentences.

On arrival at the Home of the Biting Midge, Mr Four as is his way, ran straight into the workshop to make sure all was OK among the tools and half finished boats: "This shed is beautiful" he confirmed, "It's just perfect".

Our house and it's surrounds as it turns out, quite unsurprisingly are every bit as we remembered them.  Admittedly the lawn could do with a clip now that Don has moved, and despite naming it after the little beasts, we had forgotten quite how ferocious and numerous are the midges which share our domain.

With jetlag fading in and out for yours truly as the evening wore on, the other of us apparently immune from its effects while still deep in four months' worth of girl-chat in the kitchen, we boys decided to retire to bed at what amounted to quite a reasonable hour (for a four year old).

As the lights went out, it was the voice of Mr Four which once again neatly summarised our position in the household.

"We're a team Papa", he announced from his mattress at the foot of our bed, "you and me and Elliott". Well Elliott was being a bit of a stick in the mud, hanging out with the girls as it happened, but he's probably using his unborn status as an excuse, so I let that one slip.

In an instant we are back.

Everything that was familiar is slightly unfamiliar, our brains are spinning, searching for something to grasp while we steady ourselves. The toll on the Gateway Bridge has doubled. They say everything is green, but bah, that's not green, it's a sort of drab olive really. The jacarandas are in flower, surely it's too early for them. The sky is blue yet no one is sitting in the sun. We are wearing sunglasses but it's not yet seven am. Painted houses on stumps. Where are all the people? Yes, we really are back.

Everything is different, but nothing has changed. The babies are bigger, but Skype has kept them familiar.

We are in shorts and bare feet.

We are indeed disoriented.

Was the last four months a dream?

Have we really been away?

Shortest Day - Longest Night

Today has been the shortest day of the year for us.  Here we sit once again in our little corner of the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, having had breakfast at 8:30 this morning, two hours before arriving in Singapore in time to watch the sun set.  It's hard not to feel cheated somehow.  Perhaps there is a very strong argument for never heading east, but we shall have to see to that in future years, we aren't turning back now.

We both feel a little drunk of course, not the alcohol induced sort, but the sort that a glass of water must feel whilst being consumed.

A warm shower, a shave for moi a bit of a trot round the airport and we'll be nowhere near ready to start again.  

Never mind, chin up, upward and onward as they say, by lunchtime we won't even remember tonight.

A New World Awaits

I'm not sure if it's too early to bid farewell to the Northern Hemisphere, after all we'll be in it for all of tomorrow as well, but with just an hour or so before we fly we are sitting in the Airport lounge getting rid of all those jangly nerve feelings that one gets before the check-in process, and having some not needed practice for the long sit home. 

We've run around the flat, done a bit of last minute fixing and cleaning, eaten them out of house and home including a sumptuous chicken and coconut concoction that Julian just sort of whipped up when we weren't watching. We even managed a stroll down to Shell's office to do the bye bye thing, and although given her schedule today I wouldn't be surprised if we were home before she is.

I've mentioned it before but despite the description, it doesn't really feel like a homeward journey, it's really just another leg in our life's travels, but a leg in which we get to spend lots of time with our little people.

It's also a leg in which we will have to face up to some change. We need to find somewhere to live by April at the latest, I need to spend a good deal of time slaving over some more canvasses and I suppose we really should face up to some fiscal issues as well or the means to continue may be discontinued!

If only I could sleep for the 24 hours of night we are about to experience, I would wake up recharged and ready for the new world!

As it is, experience tells me that the new world will have to wait till next week.

Here comes the sun.

The time has come already, to end our brief holiday, and to move once again into travel mode.

This morning that meant the sadness of another farewell before heading south just after ten, and driving on the motorway for four hours into what appeared to be a perpetually setting sun. When we arrived at Heathrow to return the car, we discovered a procession of billboards informing all who wished to know that the sun was indeed elsewhere, and we smiled smugly to ourselves with the knowledge that after just one more sleep, we'll be in a place where minus four is part of a sum, not a weather report.

One more sleep, some washing up, more packing and another farewell followed by a whole night awake to be absolutely correct, but we are already starting to feel as though we are on our way.

Frank and Gil always seem to go out of their way to set an itinerary which involves castles and wildlife and tea and cake and dinner and a rollicking good time all rolled into a single day, and it was with assurances that the further west we travelled, the less bleak the day would be, that we rolled out beyond the border and into Wales itself.

Only yesterday we had remarked at how we feel quite attracted to travel in that country. We weren't sure whether it was because we'd been talking about our Welsh heritage or not, but we do rather like the bleakness of it all, and of course the spelling of words without vowels or syllables and with more double L's and W's than in my own middle name.

After crawling over Conwy Castle there's no doubt that our sympathies were with Llewellyn (after all I was named for him), and the English could rot in their stupid castle for all we cared. Perhaps when my UK passport is issued I shall run for the Welsh parliament and do my bit to support the succession push. That would be doing something for all my forebears perhaps.

Over still more tea and cake mid afternoon those thoughts began to fade just a little, and by the time we'd wandered along a few beaches with names that were improbable and dined in a pub named with what was left of the alphabet after the beaches were named, all thoughts of succession were lost for the time being at least.  Each time we wander through a building which can tell stories for six or seven centuries or more before Australia had been invented, we cannot escape a subsequent period of reflection.

Why is it, we wonder, that the sky actually looks as old as the buildings it hovers over.

After just two more sleeps and we'll be under a young sky once more, trying desperately to hold on to some of the memories of today.

Castles

When day breaks with a temperature of minus four (feels like two) there's nothing better to begin it with, we've just discovered, than a tall glass of hot, freshly crushed apple juice infused with heaps of ginger.

Bristol was still asleep even in the mid-morning as we began to retrace our guided tour of last evening,  I suspect many were at once recovering from hypothermia and nursing rather large hangovers.  When we arrived at the gallery we had marked to "visit in the morning" we discovered that it sleeps all day every Monday.   In a sense that was a good thing as we really did need to head north and not dilly dally in town for as long as the visit may have taken.

Unwilling to drive for hours on the motorway, we skirted the Welsh border all afternoon seemingly without a purpose, weaving ever northwards, stopping only for slow moving vehicles and tea and cake at Ludlow Castle before meandering up the "B" roads to Broxton.

When we arrived at Barnhill House, Frank and Gil had been waiting patiently for our arrival with tea and cake at the ready on a silver tray. 

We never cease to be amazed at the sense we get every time we are with them, that it has only been yesterday since last we visited. A sort of timeless pall descends when we arrive and our conversations begin where we had left off a year ago.

Tonight, if we finish talking before sunrise, we shall sleep, as tomorrow they have plans.