This week I'll be mostly on the train

"Leaving on the midnight train,
Leaving, never gonna come back again"
- Rossi/Young

It's been around 10 years since I last did a regular amount of commuting on the train.  Back in the early 90s I was getting the Brimsdown to Harlow for a couple of years.  It was a nice little half hour journey, and I didn't appreciate how good I had it.  By the mid 90s I was doing Broadstairs to Tonbridge, one and a half hours on a good day, two changes, one at Margate and one at Ashford.  It was a nightmare, but not quite as bad as driving.  By 2001 I was getting the 4:30 Margate to Victoria, which took two and a half hours to get into London, two and three quarters to get out.  When 9/11 happened and we all emptied out of London expecting to find planes flying into Canary Wharf or whatever, I had a carriage to myself.  The train at platform 5 was due out already and people were quite literally fighting to get on.  Me and handful of other people just went and sat on the later train on platform 7.  When our train left on time with a dozen passengers on it, the platform 5 was still bursting at the seams and the guards still couldn't get all the doors closed.  Since then, I've driven or flown to every place I've worked at.  But we digress.

This week I'll be mostly on the moor

And breathe.

Ah, that's better.

This week I'll be mostly locked in the lavatory

"Oh dear, what can the matter be"
- Trad.

(This isn't about leaving.  Who am I kidding, it totally is.)

I'm in the downstairs toilet, for what will be the last time.  Fortunately (for me), and unfortunately (for you), I have my phone on me.  It's a smart(ish) phone, so not only can I make a phone call, but I can also take a photo, and write some stuff...

This week I'll be mostly leaving the lilies to look after themselves

Thwop

(This is not about leaving.)

I'm not a gardener.  By any stretch of the imagination.

But here's the issue.  I spend the week sitting at a desk looking at words and numbers on a screen, and thinking about uninsured loss recovery, or mid-term adjustments, or catering for both pipe-delimited and comma-separated values, or secure transmission, or stream file integrity checking, or whatever.  So when I get home on the weekend, I walk through the front garden, I just happen to notice some nature that needs attending to, and a primeval instinct kicks in...