Getting round to things

I realised today that it was always part of going off on any kind of holiday to spend some time on tidying away the debris of departure and return before normal life resumed itself. So when I was a child there would be the massive unpacking job of the trunk and the hamper before the sheets and the dirty clothes were washed and returned to their rightful places, preferably but not at all reliably before we all went back to school; later in my life there would be suitcases to empty and put away, larders to restock and tidying of the packing-places (usually the spare bedroom). But in the last six weeks I've been away twice and not really found time to achieve normality, to the extent that the hall and the porch were all still full of plastic bags containing everything that came out of the pockets in the old car and my small case, from the Lewis trip, was still in the middle of the spare room floor.

Until today. Today we'd invited for dinner the friend who owns the Jag, who was so generous with his time and assistance when we were buying our new car and later when it was whisked off again for a checkup. And he'd not been in our house before ... and it was a tip. So today, once I'd surfaced from what turned out to be only a 4 hour sleep because I was still awake to hear 3am strike, we set about some tidying. The bags were put away, the carpets vacuumed,, the wooden floors swept, the kitchen units wiped down (don't know why that suddenly felt necessary) and surfaces generally relieved of their various burdens.

Now the house is a lot better-looking, the dinner has been cooked and consumed, and I'm hoping that sleep does not elude me tonight. Blipping the last sun on the Philadelphus, taken through the window as we ate our dinner.