Journal

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Home, not Alone. (Also Planes and Automobiles but no trains.)

I'm home. I'm back with my family, a mere 32 hours after I left England.

This is a good thing.

I got out of Atlanta at some point yesterday evening.

I spent the night in a Detroit airport hotel. ("The night" in this case is extremely loosely defined as that period between 2:00am, when the hotel was able to get their computer system up and running and find out where the empty rooms were, and give me a room, and 5:20am when the alarm call came in so I could get up and get the 5:40 am shuttle bus to the airport. There was, it turned out, no 5:40 am shuttle bus to the airport, because of the snow.)

Eventually I got, by plane, from Detroit to Minneapolis St Paul Airport, and when, a little while after I'd landed, I discovered that my luggage was no-one-knows-where I did not even blink an eye, because I still had my computer bag and my iPod and my cellphone, and the now rather battered carrier bag with all the little Christmas presents I'd bought in Gatwick, and anyway, I wasn't in transit any longer. Besides, I'd written about 20 pages of Anansi Boys on various planes and sitting at the gates of sundry airports, so I have nothing really to complain about. (Oh, authors are very simple creatures, really. When the words are flowing everything else can go hang.)

And Maddy was pleased to see me, and Mike has grown a beard, and the cats were bigger, and Holly's getting in on a plane tonight after her own Odyssey. Holly and I saw Mary Poppins in London (much better and more powerful than I'd expected, although it felt like there was at one point a much better script that had been relentlessly cut to get the running time down to about 3 hours), and I will take the family to see Spamalot in Chicago next week. So all is well. And I'm home.