THREE WEEKS LATER...

I appreciate that it's taken me three weeks of postings to write about a holiday that lasted less than two weeks, and I'm really very sorry if I've gone on and on about it, but that was the only way of telling the story of what happened on our holidays that I could think of and, well, it seems that we actually did rather a lot.

No wonder I've been so knackered ever since...

But, heck... We really needed to have a proper holiday after everything that happened over the past two years, and I'm not at all sorry for going on about it, if it helps it to sink in to my memory.

Since then, it's been one long sequence of jet lag recovery, blisters, family gatherings, bulb replacement, hard work, deadlines, the awful realisation that Christmas is far more imminent than I'd realised, shopping, catching up and, unfortunately, dealing with an outbreak of S.U.R.A. (Sudden Unexpected Rodent Activity) which we recently discovered in our little house, and which has totally freaked me out!!!

Calm… calm… calm...

Anyway, I hoping that thirty-odd bits of blurb about my holidays hasn't quite managed to bore everybody I know to death, because I'm fully aware of just how tedious the whole "other people's holidays", much like "other people's kids", can be, and how it can all get very tired very quickly, but I hope that it was not too dull for all of you who used to come here and read my nonsense.

Looking back on our holiday, it's now almost impossible to believe that it ever really happened at all, and certainly not to us, and, whilst I do have the occasional vivid flash of memory of something or other, it's hard not to imagine that this was all some kind of story that I made up, such is my sense of detachment from the whole thing.

So, that was money well spent, eh...?

Of course, since we left, America has seen dreadful snowfalls and urban unrest on a huge scale, so maybe, just maybe, just for once we might actually have picked almost the perfect moment to go.

Perhaps…

Meanwhile, the icy cold has finally descended at home, leading to some spectacularly clear and virtually cloud-free skies as the sun sets over Manchester behind me as I drive towards home of an evening.

Of course, they have to be cloud-free for us to get the icy coldness, because the clouds are what give us that layer of insulation - like a great big fluffy, intangible duvet - to keep the warm in overnight. At this time of year, it's always quite satisfying to hear the raindrops blatting against the windows overnight because you at least then know that you won't be scraping any ice off the car in the morning.

Silver linings, and all that...

Anyway, I'm currently suffering from almost monumental levels of exhaustion, mostly from not sleeping because of some of the issues I mentioned earlier, which has left me wondering, after all of those feverish tales from California, whether I actually have anything left to write about as the year plummets towards its quiet and unloved demise in the lift-shaft of eternity.

"The tank" (as they say) "is dry..."

Although that hasn't stopped me from wittering on endlessly about nothing in particular before, has it...?