… day yesterday, I crashed out on the bed at about 22:30 leaving half a mug of coffee behind, the laptop running and everything.
And I was off on my travels too, about a horse race that was taking place.
For no apparently good reason at all I was wide awake at 01:30 and so not being able to go back to sleep I spent an hour catching up on some more work that needed to be done.
Once I’d gone back to sleep I was off on my travels yet again, this time to an office where I used to work. It was office party time and there were quite a few married couples having rather too much fun underneath desks and the like. And when I say “married couples”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they were married to each other either. I disturbed one couple having fun underneath a desk, and they asked me a question about it. My tart response was that surely they didn’t think that they were the only people at it. There were three different offices in this building, one of which had a connection with Scotland. And at a certain moment a young girl, blonde pony tail and in a white lab coat, talking in a Scots accent (the girl, not the coat), appeared on our floor to bring some work down. I was quite interested in finding out more about her so I started to climb the stairs in the fire escape to see if I could find her office. On the way, I was intercepted by someone who asked if my answer to a certain question on a form was definitive. I couldn’t even remember the question, never mind my answer!
By 04:30 I was wide awake again so I restarted what I had been doing earlier. That took me round to the medication and a nice hot shower with clean clothes for my journey home.
Next stop was the supermarket in the Gare du Midi for bread to make my butties. An enormous queue at the tills which is hardly surprising seeing as it’s morning rush hour and people are picking up their lunch. And I also picked up some or the raisin buns that I like so as to have something for breakfast, along with another coffee.
Once the butties had been made, and breakfast eaten and coffee drunk, I staggered (and I DO mean staggered because my luggage seems to have gained the weight that I had lost) down to the station and my train.
The TGV was ontime too, which is always good news because I don’t have time to hang around in Paris.
And it was packed to the gunwhales too. There didn’t seem to be a spare seat on board.
And several people seemed to have been late bookings because although they were wedged into individual seats all down the carriage alongside other people, they spent most of the trip standing in the aisle leaning over everyone else to see what was on the laptop of the leader of the pack, blocking the aisle, to the inconvenience of everyone else.
We pulled into Paris Gare du Nord bang-on time and I then had to negotiate my way to Gare Montparnasse dragging my heavy load and wondering just how I had managed to end up with so much stuff.
It was quite a struggle up and down the stairs and onto the train in the metro with all of my stuff but eventually I made it into the concourse at Montparnasse and could withdraw my ticket to Granville from the machine.
With having been an hour earlier on the TGV I had plenty of time to wait at Vaugirard. I sat next to a mother and her daughter who were also travelling to Granville and we had something of a chat while I ate my cheese and tomato butties.
On the train I had a very charming travelling companion but the train was quite empty so she moved to the seats on her own in front of me and spread herself out.
I did likewise and spend the journey alternating between sleeping and reading my copy of Arthur Reeves’ “The Finding of Wineland the Good” that I had downloaded off the internet. It’s an interesting book because although it’s very well-researched, he dismisses a great deal of work that had been done previously by people like Carl Rafn on grounds that may well have been logical at the time that Reeves was writing, but have since been found to be erroneous.
There was a 40-minute wait for the bus – I had no intention of walking home today. And we had some excitement on the journey back when the bus driver clipped another vehicle and pulled the rear bumper off the bus.
It’s good to be back home. I’ll tell you that. It smells of dust and so on, but it’s home all the same and I’ll open the windows tomorrow to let some fresh air.
I didn’t do too much – just relaxed for a while and then made myself a plate of pasta, olive oil and vegetables for tea.
Later I tried to start the back-up of files from the travelling laptop onto the home machine, but I gave up after an hour or so. Only 22:00 but I was gone.
And this is how I’m going to stay for a while because I’ve switched off all of the alarms.
