I have been off work for the last two days attempting to defeat a cold that has been hanging around for a couple of weeks. The self imposed exile from the world has afforded time to think. To ponder.
Over the course of the last year my life has either been swallowed by software development work, or by hours each day stood on trains extending the limits to which my patience might be pushed.
You find a strange rhythm. Work, home, work, home, and so it continues until you reach the weekend and collapse in a heap. Every week becomes filled with another deadline, another race, another source of pressure.
Despite the best efforts of your partner to lighten the load, your old life slowly dies. You have not seen old friends for months. You didn’t make it to that birthday party. You couldn’t make it to that meal.
Despite the world and it’s dog’s best intentions to dump on you from a great height, in the midst of the mayhem a stolen weekend sometimes appears - and so it was last weekend that a friend and her daughters travelled half the way across the country to spend time with us.
I find it hard to put words together in any shape or form that adequately describes the memories of the weekend.
After experiencing inevitable travel chaos on the way home, I finally arrive at about 8pm, and am greated by excited shouts and the thunder of little feet as two young girls who have waited hours for my arrival finally hear me call out after stepping inside the front door.
I am wrestled to the ground by two very determined displays of affection that catch me completely off guard. They hold my hands and tow me into the lounge to greet their Mum - along with a huge grin, and a long awaited “Hello!”.
The weekend fills with the reading of bedtime stories, the making of witches hats, the riding on rollercoasters, the playing of video games, and staying up late into the night to catch up, to repair the ties of the grown up world we had neglected.
Making the time to spend with close friends reminded us how valuable we are to each other - and how our bonds, our relationships and our “being there” makes the inanities of the real world suddenly far less significant than they can sometimes appear.
Saying goodbye at the end of the weekend was difficult - more so for the grown ups than the children. After being pitched head long into a house full of noise, activity, fun, laughter, conversation, singing, and of course the occasional fight, the journey back to our normality was an abrupt one.
A final car door slammed shut, little hands waved goodbye and the silence ripped through the house as the front door closed.
The phone rang on my desk at work. “It’s very quiet.”