Home Thoughts from a Beard

In some sort of ironic weathery wossname, yesterday was the first true day of spring in my area of the Midwest. The sun shone, the snow all melted, snowdrops came up, winter was finally done, and so Maddy and I waved it goodbye and went to England where the first thing I heard as I walked through the hotel room door was a nice man on the radio saying that blizzards are expected in Scotland this week. I go up to Scotland on Tuesday.

Waiting for me in the hotel was a very impressive video camera which I'm meant to use over the next few weeks to record a sort of Stardusty Video Diary of things like Going to Pinewood, and Watching the Director Looking at Locations in the Highlands and Islands. I tried recording a sort of test burble-to-camera in the hotel room, played it back and discovered that my beard now looks like half a badger stuck to the lower half of my face, I could really do with a haircut, and that after a nice long transatlantic flight and not much sleep my eyes are mostly rather scary looking bags, in addition to which the white of my left eye seems to have turned a deeply disturbing shade of bad-horror-movie red.

I'm at that stage where all I want to do is sleep, but it's late afternoon, so I'd better keep going until tonight.

(A brief test showed that the Slingbox worked perfectly, which shouldn't have surprised me but it did. The realisation that I was using my computer to watch TV and control a TIVO 4,000 miles away is somehow much more science fictional than anything else that's happened this week.)