[aka I've landed now and at least I've got internet]

“Are you excited?”
*nods*
“It’s all gone very smoothly, hasn’t it?”
*nods*
“And it’s only eleven more hours”
*nods*
“And when we land, we’ll be home”
“What?”
“When we land, we’ll be home”
“No, we’ll be in San Francisco”
“Which is where we live. Which makes it …”
*splutters*
“.. home”
“Well now, don’t let get hasty, we haven’t bloody taken off yet. Wah. What? I mean, that’s just silly-talk. Home? What? Can I get off please?”

And just then, the plane sped up and tipped back, and headed off into the unknown.

____________

Or rather ‘the sky’ which isn’t really that unknown. Not to, like, physicists and stuff. Do physicists do ‘sky’? Or is that geographers? Is it not too ‘uppy’ for geographers? Geographers are more ‘downny’ in their area of expertise, are they not? Well, you know, scientists anyway. They know.
So it is not unknown to them. To the unknown scientists, whichever scientists those may be.

And also pilots. Hopefully. Really, seriously hopefully, because if they don’t know about it I’m going to start panicking, because we’ve still an hour till we land and if the pilots are sitting up there in the cab going
‘wow, what’s all this unknown outside the windscreen?’
‘yeah, I dunno graham, but if it’s unknown we should totally just crash before it bites us or something’
‘yeah, tony, totally.’
then I’m not sure I’m quite so happy about being on this flight anymore.

I’m quite bored.

Not by the time you read this. Bored, I mean. I’ll be in my new flat that I’ve never seen by the time you read this, so that will be quite an exciting time. Though also, arguably by the time you read this you’ll be asleep, so it won’t make that much difference. Or it might be a different time. Because by the time you read this I’ll be asleep so I won’t be bored, but it won’t be that exciting either.

Anyway: point being, by the time you read this, I won’t be on the flight anymore, because they haven’t installed in-flight blogging. Yet. They’ve installed inflight seat-to-seat text messages on a little infuriating handset - I managed to message my Beloved saying: HELLO I LOVE YOU THIS THING IS COCKING RUBBISH WE ARE MOVING TO CALIFORNIA HOW EXCITING IS THAT I AM PLANE-GASSY IT DOESN’T SMELL THOUGH which was testament to how bored I was at that point in the flight already, because it took me 40 minutes and an awful lot of frustration to type that. And because he was sitting right next to me.
And he already knew about the gas thing because I kept tapping him on the shoulder and doing mini-burps for his entertainment (his in-flight entertainment system had broken down so it was the least I could do).

I watched some films - In Bruges I loved an awful lot, I must say, some dreck with Helen Hunt I didn’t so much. There were other films I had wanted to see, but then thought I could save them for the way back, but then I remembered I wasn’t coming back, and then freaked out, quietly.

Someone’s going to come along in a minute and ask me to shut my laptop. Outside the window there are patchworks of fields around rivers, and stretches of drier-looking land stretching toward mountains. Soon we’ll land, and pick up the bags that weigh half a tonne each (though only a few millikilos under their allowed weight, which was a fucking miracle, frankly) we’ll get a cab, because anything else would be arm-breaking insanity, we’ll go and pick up keys and then … well, then excitement. Excitement and a bunch of trying to work out if we can improvise a bed, because otherwise we haven’t *strictly* got one. But we do have jetlag. So that’s almost as good. I know I was going to tell you about dinner last night - I just need to upload those photos first and oh

The seatbelt light’s just gone on, and there’s a stern looking woman in uniform walking toward me. I have to

transmission ends

Day! One day! That was what I meant!

One day to go until we fly. Twelve hours. I’ve already checked in.

The house is packed up (into one little storage box, weee!) the cats went off, mewing and confused, but in good and capable hands.

And now I sit here in a hotel bedroom after perhaps the most comical dining experience I’ve had in at least a while (I’ll upload the photos in a bit, well, perhaps a few days) trying to work, but failing because I’m too excited.

So yes. Tomorrow, we fly.

I just wanted you to knkow everything’s going fabulously, and I have only cried 8 times in the last 24 hours. But they were only little cries. And tinged with happy excitement.

See you on the other side.

It’s not even Sunday anymore. It’s Monday. And Monday is one day until we fly.

So let’s just say it’s still Sunday.

It’s Sunday, and we’ve just got back from dinner at some dear lovely Brightonean friends’ flat after a day of hard packing and cleaning and forgetting to eat anything at all. And we’re back in a very empty house talking about how much we’ve felt at home here, and how little we expected to leave it any time soon.

We really didn’t. Both of us are big on itchy feet and getting up and moving just because new things are exciting - but when we moved here, we thought we might actually settle for quite a good long while; otherwise we wouldn’t have got the cats. But then things suddenly changed, and suddenly we’re off again.

And it’s brilliant, and it’s exciting, and I’m lucky, and it’s amazing and it’s everything I’ve ever wanted to do - but right now, the day before, or two days before or whatever; I can’t see that. I can only see this ENORMOUS WALL O’STUFF - from the pile of boxes in my living room to the piles of money that it’s costing for various things; to the friends I’m leaving behind in the city I’ve grown ridiculously fond of ridiculously fast; to the worry about leaving behind avenues of career to anxiety about how to create new ones; from the moment the first person arrives in the morning to the moment we step off the plane 36 hours later. It’s all just a huge WALL of STUFF.

But you know what? All fine. All going to be fine. Sorry, I forget:

DIARY:

Friday there were drinks, and they were magnificent, and I got drunk.

Saturday quite a lot of our furniture set sail into a sea of friends, and that was good, although did leave us watching Law’n'order on Saturday night cross-legged on the floor with pizza on our knees. Then there was pub. That was good.

Sunday my lovely sister and brotherinlaw came down with a car and took many many carloads to the recycly-dump. We cleaned a whole lot more (seriously, how much more cleaning can there be? But everytime we do something else, everything seems to grow dirt again)

Tomorrow there will be someone coming to pick up the cats. They’ll bring carry cases, but the convicts are allowed blankets, so we’ve set those aside ready to go. The cats, whose primary position when someone knocks at the door has been the same since everything in the house started changing, will need to be prised out from under the duvet in order to go. Except they won’t, because the duvet will be packed by then.

Tomorrow there will be someone coming to pick up a storage container worth of books and childhood and precious things.

Tomorrow we will throw away a bunch more stuff that hasn’t made the cut, and say goodbye to a good friend, and climb on a bus to Heathrow with a bunch of large bags barely half a mini-kilo less than they are allowed to be.

Tomorrow we will get to a hotel, then do a few hours work each that we both have left over to do, because we are stupid, then we will relax for a few hours. Then we will go to bed and the next day, the NEXT day we ….

Of course, I say all this, and it’s 1am. Today we will do all this.

I don’t want to say goodbye to this house. To the cats. To Brighton. To my friends. To my family. To all the things I know and love and hate but just KNOW.
I just don’t want to right now.

I want to go - don’t get me wrong. I want to live somewhere different. I want to appreciate things for the first time, to be the stranger and the outsider. I want to live somewhere with a different outlook on life, a different perspective. I want to appreciate the things I have at home, and understand why people like their lives that aren’t just like mine. I want to go. I want the opportuinity to reinvent myself a bit, be braver, bolder, more confident because I’m in a new environment with all new people. I want to see different scenery, wake up to unfamiliar smells and sounds in a new place and be different. I want it all. And I want to do it all with my Beloved. I really, really want to go.

But right now? Right now, this second, I don’t want any of it.
I want to wake up tomorrow and discover it’s all been a joke, that we can just settle back into life as we’ve made it for ourselves, and nothing has to be different.

But that wouldn’t be as much fun.

You’ll have to excuse me. I’m slightly overwineated and just am keeping typing because if I keep typing then I won’t have to go to sleep and then it won’t be tomorrow and then I won’t have to …

Oh all right.

Will check in tomorrow night.
Here, I mean. Not to the flight. I’ll check in to that in ten hours time (online, god bless the interwebnets). I’ll check in here.

Did I say this all was fun?
I was lying.

You know what else is a lie?
People who say you can never have too many socks. That’s balls. You CAN, and I know that for sure because we do. That is all.

My Beloved just let out a loud snore. I’m taking that as a protest against typing noises rather than a symptom of the very fierce head cold that is beginning to take both of us firmly in hand. That’s my cue.

Bed then.
Damn.