Excuses and slight return

Bit of an absence - the allotment required me to put in some spade-time and the garden likewise, with an array of pruners, loppers and saws to boot. Major mutilation of any mammalian life-forms (especially self and wife) mercifully avoided. In there somewhere were some anxious days while we waited to see whether my daughter's flight to Iceland (yes, I know!) would take off last Monday and whether she'd arrive in a smoking wasteland, there to be stuck until some other mishap of biblical proportions finished off this hapless island. Luckily the flight was cancelled and (I speak as a Scot and a father) almost all the holiday money recouped. Meantime in the pub I'm surrounded by wistful folk who should be in Cuba or Thailand or the Czech Republic - and are ever more depressed to discover, going back to work, that there's so much to do they shouldn't have contemplated taking a holiday in the first place...

I've decided that armchair travelling is best for the next few weeks. I'm working my way, rather slowly it must be said, through Colin Thubron's Shadow of the Silk Road - slowly, because of the descriptive richness of the prose and the precision and acuity of the insights. A kind of melancholy, the rootless sadness of the inveterate traveller, hangs over the whole thing too. He's just coming to the bit of the road I've travelled on, between Tashkent and Khiva, through Samarkand and Bukhara. I wonder if he'll pause at what one of our party labelled Cafe Dunny, a stop by the desert highway with good shashliks and, at a distance, a wooden privy of what was judged to be - and we were all seasoned travellers in the lands of the former Soviet Union - unparalleled noisomeness. It was there that we picked up the receipt for the meal, written on a cigarette packet, that was later accepted by the EU for project accounting purposes...