The Morning After....

Slept like the dead last night or "at the bottom of the ocean" as we say in our family. Last night my laptop was still on Hungarian time (i.e., one hour ahead) so as I was finishing up the blog posting and struggling to keep my eyes open, I glanced at the time shown at the bottom right hand corner of the screen which read '10.50pm' - "No wonder I'm tired," I thought, "it's nearly 11". After bathing, crawling gratefully into bed and starting to drift off when the 'bing-bing' of my phone indicated an arriving text message. 'Twas from TLH who is currently on business in eastern coastal Sweden. As I picked up the phone I noticed that it said '10.10pm' - took a moment for my fuzzy, exhausted brain to realise that I'd actually gone to bed at 9.50pm. That makes me look a bit of a lightweight but I really needed it.

The cats were very funny last night, you could almost see them thinking, "Hmm, this human is somehow familiar and she does seem to know what she's doing so we'll just go along with it from a distance...." but I woke up this morning with one stretched out on the bed next to me and the other on the windowsill behind my head so I think it must have finally dawned on them who I am.

I've been away far too long, though. As I got into the kitchen I was opening the wrong cupboard doors to get a mug and then I couldn't remember which of the buttons on my kettle make it switch on! Bizarre!

It's much colder here than in Hungary so I was quite keen to put the heating on when I got up. We had CNN out there and, of course, I had my laptop so we were able to keep abreast of the appalling weather that's been battering Britain but I was surprised by the view of my garden this morning (it was dark when I got in last night). When I left 3 weeks ago, it was fairly warm, some flowers were still in bloom and the majority of the leaves were still on the trees. Not so now, eh? Looks like 'proper' November out there. I have huge bamboos in pots on each side of my patio and one on each side have been blown over- TLH had informed me at the time and I'd advised to just leave them there as the weather forecast was still predicting blowy weather and at least they were fine on the ground. I'll need to put them back up and tie them to the fence again.

I stood at the back door surveying the beaten-up garden when the semi-tame Robin that I can handfeed spotted me from its perch on the shed at the end of the garden. It came swooping over and landed on the handrail of the bridge that leads to the back door and sat there, bobbing away at me. Unfortunately I was only in my dressing gown so couldn't go out and feed it, but I was delighted to see that it had recognised me.

As if I haven't spent enough time in airports over the last 24 hours, mid-afternoon today will see me heading off to Terminal 3 of Heathrow to go and collect TLH. I've not seen him for 19 days and it's the longest we've ever been apart in15 years. While we were away we communicated mainly via Skype which was brilliant and, best of all, completely free to use, so we would either speak on our phones or do live chat messaging through our laptops for hours at a time. I would definitely recommend using it.

Right, that's enough blather from me, need to get dressed now and go feed a hungry Robin.