Light at the end ...

The end of many things comes as an unwillingly-greeted guest: the end of summer, the end of a holiday, the end of a visit ... there are more, aren't there, that I don't need to enumerate. Today felt like more than one of the above: we woke to dull weather that turned to wet gloom by the late afternoon; we came to the end of our visit to the boys (and their parents, and their cats ...); it felt like the end of summer. 

It's a strange thing, a holiday/visit/stay anywhere that isn't home: you take time to find your bearings, you start to feel settled - and then you leave it all and return to your own place. Despite the fact that my family are in the throes of the busiest time of life, with work and school and cats and carefully-planned free time, and therefore are hardly in a position to entertain the aged rellies, nonetheless I'd just begun to feel that this was our life, fitting into the gaps and occasionally providing cover or giving the gardener a key to the gate or taking in the milk or accepting a parcel at the door. And just as I found I now knew where the plates were kept in this kitchen (there have been several kitchens recently) it was time to leave.

So we took a last opportunity to shop in Sainsbury's after packing the car, cursing because you need tokens or old pound coins in their trolleys (Morrison's here gave up bothering ages ago) and we had none. We lugged a couple of baskets round and only bought necessities. The drive home along the M8 was terrifying in that it felt like a continuous band of steel moving at a more or less steady pace across the country, pollution causing me to keep shutting off the air vents in the car with which we too were poisoning the globe. Back home, we staggered down the path through rain and the drooping wetness of our border - it was upright and less troublous when we left - and found the house so chilly that in fact the heating switched itself on for a bit.

It was during dinner that we saw the glow of the sky and realised the weather was changing again - I abandoned serving the curry to rush out and take tonight's blip. It felt like a sign of hope. Heaven knows we need all the hope we can get - not only do we have more incompetents being thrust into positions of political power, we also have unbelievable news stories about the French ambassador to the USA and the sudden relaxation of travel restrictions into England. 

No more tonight - I've added an extra of the boys at breakfast time, and tomorrow we get to see the other family for a couple of hours. Light at the end after all.