Send more medicine. The maps are wrong.

I do odd things when there's no one else at home. I read books in the bath and leave the bathroom door open so I can listen to Mahler or Ella Fitzgerald. I adopt habits from movies - such as drinking milk out of wine glasses, actually that's the only one I can think of at the moment - and I stay up until four so I can finish the book I'm reading.

I don't think these things make for a healthy and sustainable lifestyle.

Good job then that I'm not left alone too often.

Anyway, the book I was reading was Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. There's this particularly marvelous bit when one of the main characters is writing to friends and family, not having anything positive to write to them. He thinks,

"He has been traveling blindly, whether forward he cannot say, without learning anything except that he has not yet learned anything, unless he counts the extent of his own ignorance; like those who have searched fruitlessly for the Nile. Like them, he must take into account the possibility of defeat. Hopeless dispatches, scrawled on pieces of bark, sent out in cleft sticks from the swallowing jungle. Suffering from malaria. Bitten by snake. Send more medicine. The maps are wrong."

Meanwhile, I laughed and thought that all anyone has told me of where they've been and travelled to has either been in celebratory approval or dismal failure. (Except of course for my parents - "So how was England, dad?" "Oh, you know, ok. I nearly got arrested in the Tower of London. Nothing much happened.") There's not much middle ground, you can't really spend the huge amounts of money that it takes to go overseas and then not be so very excited about it. And while I hope not to be lost in the wilds, prayer for no hopeless dispatches would be nice.