Here we are, back in one of our many spiritual homes, the Irish countryside. (Other spiritual homes? Paris specifically and Spain generally.) We went out for dinner with our owners on night 1 and they are now off on their holidays whilst we start our travelling lifestyle again. We didn't need to prove our vaccination status at all during our 3 days in Dublin, which felt very weird indeed - as did the lack of QR checkins. Definitely relaxing and nice, but stil...

The big day finally dawned - 26 October 2021 - the first day of the rest of our lives. The length of the 'to do' list thus far should surely have meant a lazy, hazy day of flipping coins for the last few items to make the cut into the overstuffed bags (it seems we've lost the knack of travelling heavy and have moved to travelling severely overloaded). But no. No lazy and certainly no hazy. Aside from anything else we spent the morning nipping up and down from t...

We started August with a sense of deja-vu. It was the same old outbreak all over again. We read some words of wisdom which stuck with us - Lockdown results in one of four outcomes (or sometimes a combination thereof) - You either become a chunk, a monk, a hunk or a drunk. Given that we'd been focussed on some weight loss from April, thankfully the chunk option wasn't an option - though had we not already been reducing it could have been a disaster. Every day bro...

And the beat goes on... and the beat goes on (and on and on and on). Once upon a time, in the before covid times, 2019BC, I often wrote every day. Sometimes every week or few. Rarely every month or so. But that was before. Times have changed and certainly become interesting - though less in the interesting sense and more so in the Confucian sense. So now I'm down to once in almost 3 months. Life returned to a semi-normal state for a while there. Given that w...

We took stock and decided to treat our involuntary sojourn in Sydney as the longest housesit on record... with the most comfortable bed and fabulous owners. Obviously we need to focus periodically on sorting, making space, offloading unnecessary stuff from our apartment (not something regularly done on a housesit), but essentially we're going to focus on outings, fun and pretending that very Parisienne Potts Point is, in fact, Paris. In the usual course of event...