A month in England

I arrived back in the UK on August 12th after smooth flights from Libreville to Heathrow via Frankfurt. The biggest challenge on the planes was getting my addled brain to speak in any one language coherently. As an English speaker who's spent the last three years mostly speaking French or Latege and on a German plane my brain suddenly seemed to get rather confused! The flight crew addressed me in any of the three (not including Latege!) at random and I rarely seemed to reply in the same one. Well, it was the middle of the night, and I probably didn't help myself by switching reading materials between the three at various points. Not that it mattered, I just don't recall having such difficulty switching between languages (or sticking to one) before.
Having survived my multi-lingual flights and thanks to the services of TrustVehicles who had bought a nice little Ford KA car on my behalf a few days earlier and even brought it to the airport for me, I was soon driving out onto the M25 - there's nothing like easing yourself slowly and gently back into British driving conditions! At least the morning rush hour had past.

I took a short detour via Aylesbury to pick up some belongings and then continued my journey north. By early afternoon staying awake was becoming a bit of a challenge but a brief stop at Keele service station helped to overcome that and I reached Bolton by early evening.

Since then life has been fairly quiet. I spent the rest of August just getting settled and sorted. I still haven't cracked registering with the Inland Revenue (and if you go into the tax enquiry office in Bolton to speak to someone for clarification they are wonderfully well trained to hand you a 'phone and tell you to call the Helpline!), but I have got an Internet connection, found a doctor and even a NHS dentist (though I can't have an appointment till October despite a thrice broken tooth). And I'm gradually arranging the rather limited space at my gran's so I can both sleep and work well.

My gran is doing well (amazing for her age) but happy to have me around to do various jobs and simply be here, especially at night.

After a heavy head cold that plagued me for the first fortnight here (presumably picked up on the plane over) I'm enjoying running again. For a standard 4-6 mile run my options are rather limited if I want to stay off the roads (i.e. I have to run along the canal tow-path and down into the nearby country park and back) so I miss the wider variety I have to choose from when in Léconi, but for longer runs I am thoroughly enjoying being back among the moors and fells. The scenery is wonderful when I get up there. However, if I thought running here would be easier than in the heat of Gabon and on the loose sand paths around Léconi, it only shows what a bad memory I have. The hills here are steep, or at least have very steep sections, and the footpaths are often rough and narrow, sometimes non-existent, up or down slopes covered with bracken or uneven clumpy grass which mean every step you have to lift your knees a few inches higher than when running on smooth roads. As a consequence, I paid for completing my first fell race since being back with thighs that felt like they would snap for the following three days! Embarrassingly the race was only 5 miles long, though it did climb over 1,500ft in the first half of that, and came back down the same amount in the second (the jury is out on which was harder but I definitely need to learn the skill(?!?) of downhill running. Having gained half a dozen or more places on the climb I promptly lost at least 20 on the descent!) and, since it was a race, I was pushing myself much harder than normal.

Since the beginning of September I'm picking up my work again - an eclectic mix of preparing talks and presentations, Latege linguistics, academic reading, trying to learn new computer software packages, tackling Hebrew and more. At least I don't lack variety (though perhaps focus).