So. I’ve managed to be in the southern hemisphere for my birthday this year. This has benefits and drawbacks. The benefit is that outside is beautiful - my birthday is in late spring rather than mid-autumn.
View from my window right now
This is lovely as you can see. Usually around this time of the year everyone is going crazy about putting matches to colourful TNT bombs and burning scarecrows - as if they don’t have a hard enough time already. It’s nice not to be anywhere close to such revelry for once.
On the downside I love and adore autumn and am missing the colours that it brings to the worlds paint palette at this time of year up north.
This morning I was woken with breakfast in bed along with presents which made me reminisce about the years gone as a school kid when I was utterly convinced that having my birthday meant I had a day off school. I didn’t like school that much, so was highly upset at having to go to my lessons anyway.
One of my presents was the welcome return of a Leatherman tool to my arsenal of equipment - I’ve missed it dearly. The other present was a bottle of wine, which I imagine will be enjoyed shortly. Notably it was wrapped in ‘olde worlde’ maps from around the globe. There was a map of the Americas, the world and various maps from Europe. Amazingly, the map below was also there. It’s good old home - well Cambridgeshire. The reproduction is small but if you enlarge the content of the blue circle (see the red circle) then you can make out Papworth and (I think) you can make out Caxton and Bourn (the latter in the green square). It’s not totally clear but it looks about right. What are the chances?!
Home sweet home
On another completely unrelated note, a friend of mine - David - called on Sunday and said that he wanted to fly out and see me for a few days. Clearly he has progressed from simple silliness to clinical insanity to make a journey around half the world to see me only days before I fly back home. Feeling the love :)