Going back through old blogs – as I have been doing – is a strange experience. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Yet I can see that I am very different from two years ago in many ways. I have more opportunities now, even though I’m still not clear where they are leading. Reading my initial qualms about applying to the first conference in Oxford was quite amusing. It is the curve balls that life throws you which cause the most seismic shifts. Yet reading my comments on my novel was depressing. I seem to be no closer to completing it than I was then, and now I have less chance of doing so because I have less time.

Sometimes time passes frantically, like water swirling down the plughole, and at others it seeps out, drip, drip, drip through the cracks, but wherever it goes and however it goes, it goes. Managing time is something I always wrestle with. My mind is on a different time line from the rest of the world, it lives in a place where everything is in the now and it loops and coils back on itself, while linear time forges on around me with grim determination to get from the start of each day to the end and then start again. This has only really become apparent because of writing a journal and going back through it. But it becomes obsessive, repetitive, another way of chewing up the time and spitting it out again.

I had to go into town yesterday to the bank to transfer money between two of the parish council accounts before the end of the financial year. I had a couple of other errands to do too, but I didn’t expect it to take me over an hour, as it did. Time spent standing in queues, time spent wandering from a to b, trying to remember if there was anything else I needed while I was there, going into shops just in case the perfect pair of boots was sitting there waiting for me... and all this while I know that I have so much to do and should be getting on with it. Yet somehow I have managed to meet my deadlines, even if it is only by forcing myself out of necessity.

I also reflected on how strange it is, really, to have spent so much of my life, over half of it, on and off, living in and around such a nondescript place, a place I have no real feeling for or attachment to. I can’t say I’ve ever felt I belonged to it, there again, I’ve lived in villages rather than the town itself. When I lived in Dallas, I was homesick for England, and for my own house, but not specifically for Bedford. Why did I ever end up here, the place I came to for my first job, to still be here over 30 years later? Married a local man, that’s what I did. But somehow I never thought this was where my life would be spent.

Anyway, one good thing I did yesterday, I booked my hotel room in Paris