w/e 2022-06-12

I’m currently in a very breezy Edinburgh visiting my sister, and enjoying the busy-ness of a big city. Today I walked 16km (10 miles) across it in search of secondhand bookshops that opened on a Sunday, via a large Full Scottish Breakfast. It’s a tough life. I also met up with Tom which, after breakfast with Dan in Hereford last week, makes for two welcome catch-ups with friends from my previous London life.

Earlier this week we had a friend and her family from Germany staying with us, the first overnight guests of “my” friends, and that all went well. We didn’t run out of food, anyway, given I’m not used to calculating quantities for six people.

We first met over 30 years ago and have only seen each other in person a handful of times since, which makes the passage of time somehow more of a marvel. It’s like the difference between visiting a once-familiar city after a long time away, compared to seeing it every day. Whole lives have passed by in the long gaps. All the things that happened to the people those 20-year-old were: partners, children, careers, homes, hobbies, travel. And then here we were, after so much has happened, briefly in the same place again.

That’s all this week. What an unusually sociable time.