The moon which shone last night as we drove back from the airport was a little past full, a slight flattening along one edge if you looked carefully, as though someone had taken a knife and nicked off a little of the silver, not enough to notice in the everyday rough and tumble of trade. But it was the same moon I saw slipping behind the pink dawn clouds that morning, the same moon which a few hours earlier had crept round the edge of Istvan’s weekend house as we sat on the terrace wrapped in blankets and watched the distant lights of Budapest outshine the few stars which put in an appearance. (Was that really Jupiter, as he claimed, or just a satellite, as I, ever the cynic, ever the pessimist, believed?) The same moon which shone on Friday night over a bonfire in a camp in the woods, and through a thunderstorm the night before when rain beat on the roof of the log cabin while I crouched over the laptop on the spare bed, and the Doors played through the camp PA system. The same moon which must, last night, have been shining over other parts of the world as well as the M1 between Luton and Bedford.
So now I’m back here again, and it looks like a nice morning. The study is a mess, and there is too much to do, too many things which have been put off, not thought about till I was back again, including website work which will be fun and exciting, as well as minutes to write and correspondence to sort out and emails to check, and invoices to pay. And meals to cook and the house to clean and washing to do.
But later today I’ll see my daughter, and some of those messages will be ones I’ll want to read (I hope).
So, here I am, and I’m grateful for having had such a wonderful time and being able to bring home such memories (and photos – god knows how many – I kept uploading them onto Gabriella’s laptop and then my pendrive every night, and I filled the memory stick again yesterday, though it’s only a 128meg one because it’s an old camera.) But I don’t have time today for pruning, editing and gloating over photos, too much to do, too much to sort out.
So, I’m not resentful that real life has to reassert itself, I’m glad to be able to keep busy, even though I know that much of what I have to do will be frustrating and soul-destroying, it doesn’t have to be that way always, there will always be something. They have asked us to go back again next year and be included on the official programme, rather than just being squeezed in at the last minute as we were, and although I have some doubts about whether it will happen, the joke I had with Gabriella and Istvan yesterday was ‘next time’ – every time we had to make a choice about where to go and what to do and what to eat, we said, ‘we’ll do that next time’.