Back To Life

“The Lord is having little joke with me”, I thought to myself as I walked past the travel shop on Crown Street last night. I was on my way to dinner with friends, and was walking past a shop not far from Oxford Street which sells “travel goods”. The shop is full of “passport covers”, “toiletry bags” and so on; the kind of things you think you would need for travel, but don’t actually. As a result, I’ve never actually bought anything from the shop, though I do enjoy window shopping. As I looked in the shop window last night, the first thing that caught my eye were a number of travel books for, you guessed it, Stockholm.

In some ways it was a lovely reminder of, and book-end to my travel experiences of the last few months. A way to draw a line in the sand and return to my “normal life”. But as much as I love my job, I’ll admit it was a little difficult returning to work today.

After weeks of waking up WITHOUT the alarm clock, there was a slight shock to my system when it was the alarm which woke me up this morning. In the lead-up to it, I had my first work-related dream in a couple of months. In the dream, I was back and working as a rural radio reporter and struggling to find some interesting people to chat to.

By about eight o’clock, having consumed breakfast, I was really starting to feel anxious about returning to work. It was like that first day back at school after the long summer holidays I used to enjoy as a child. I knew I had to go, but didn’t really want to.

Everyone was very kind at work today. They’d all “been there, done that”. They knew returning to work after a 10-week break would be hard. “You should take an early mark”, a colleague suggested. In the end it wasn’t so bad after all. I really love my job, and I genuinely like most of the people I work with. Back to life, back to reality isn’t so bad after all.