Home thoughts from abroad

Tomorrow, I have to fly home. I amn't ready to do it. Three different ways, I amn't ready.

Partly (1), least importantly, it feels like the end of an extended vacation, and no one ever really wants that. You grow accustomed to a looser kind of life, and home seems all discipline and responsibility, laundry and vacuum, the greystuff and endurance. And, in my case, mess and confusion. Who would willingly trade California sunshine for English rain? (Apart from la_marquise_de_, that is, who is excused answering.) Company for solitude? Unhurried days for deadlines? (As it happens I have met three deadlines while here, written a hundred-odd pages of newstuff, checked a copy-edit and a proof; but we have also travelled - Portland! Pocatello! - and socialised, talked and walked and watched TV, gone to galleries and conventions and musea, done all the things that keep us busy when we say that we are idle. Feels like a holiday to me.)

Partly (2), of course I don't want to go home: we're engaged to be married, we have a life to build together. This last seven weeks has been barely a glimpse of the real thing. I want to stay and explore it properly.

Partly (3) and most importantly, I hate to leave Karen at a time like this. Next week brings serious newses, job interviews and test results; I ought to be here. If I were a different kind of man, or if either of our situations were otherwise, I'd just stay.

But seven weeks is too long already, to leave friends to carry the burdens of my life in England. (And no, I don't just mean the little fuzzy ones.) (But mostly, yes, of course.) There is loads of stuff I have to do, and I can't do it from five thousand miles away.

So. Home tomorrow. Well, leave tomorrow, home on Sunday. Ineluctably.