Journal

After starting the week feeling totally washed-out and very anti-social, I seem to be getting back to humanity now. I could still do with more sleep and less heat though!

I realised yesterday that, after a lifetime of handling everything the world can throw at me, I have now got an allergy. For several weeks I’ve been sneezing lots and had a very runny nose, but no other cold symptoms have appeared. I was also noticing that I tended to sneeze whenever the atmosphere around me changed; for example on entering or leaving a building or car. Yesterday I picked up some hay-fever medication from the local chemist and took a dose and, sure enough, within a couple of hours the sneezing had stopped and hasn’t come back. I guess maybe I am human after all.

Jim left for home yesterday; Brett took him down to Gatwick for his flight in good time. However this evening we got a call from Brett’s mum saying she’d got a message his flight was cancelled, so we spent an hour or so trying to track him down to find out what had happened. Typically we were calling just after the airlines’ customer service desks had all closed for the night and there wasn’t even anyone at the airport who could be much help. Brett was fretting quite a bit (and being somewhat overprotective I think) about his dad being alone at the airport. Jim is a pretty quiet guy, but he also knows how to take care of himself so I wasn’t especially worried. We eventually discovered that the airline had re-booked him on a flight tomorrow and put everyone up in the airport hotels overnight – although there was no record of who was where, even at the hotels themselves! So we let his mum know the new flight details and then called it a night.