Wherever I lay my rut, that’s my home

It’s very easy to fall into a routine, so that although to the outsider your life seems reasonably varied and possibly even glamorous, you are in fact just as trapped by it as any caricature housewife in a worthy novel. I think this is what’s happened to me.

The trouble is (“the trouble is, that I don’t know how to OAR”, as my nephew said to me, eyeing an inflatable dinghy with suspicion) that this way of living (flying somewhere to work, working, coming home) means that the basics take up so much time that you don’t get to do anything else, not unless you are possessed of superhuman organisation and discipline, which I’m not, or capable of managing on very little sleep, ditto. So the pinnacle of my achievements this week is likely to be if I can arrange to get a massage in the hotel, and perhaps even go swimming. Other than that – frankly, just carrying on breathing sometimes feels like an unreasonable imposition.

And I don’t like this. Temperamentally I need to be ticking things off on a list, and although I can do that at work, the things that I need to do behind the scenes are just too dull to count. Three loads of laundry done? Check. Haircut? Check. Catch up on sleep? Check. See what I mean?

Oh, and just to add to the gaiety of nations, BA managed to lose my luggage yesterday. It’s turned up now, but it’s amazing how discombobulated it makes you feel, like a refugee, trailing your emergency supply pack and desperately feeling the lack of your pyjamas.