Corporeal ghosts in All Good Things

Still in London, still having a good time.

It took a while to adjust to no more touring, but I'm really getting into being at home now. Annette went to India on a job yesterday and this morning sent us photos of her extremely fancy hotel....and I was just so happy that it wasn't me there. Yes, I could be having an amazing adventure with her in New Delhi right now.....but I have better, more interesting things to do.

Over the weekend, one of my friends graduated from English National Ballet School, so I went along to see their year-end performance and celebrate with him and his boyfriend. The show was at Wimbledon Theatre, the first time I've been back there since the beginning of May, when Annette and I first met Eva. That week in Wimbledon heralded a lot of changes in my life, and it felt so strange to be there by myself. Everywhere I looked I saw the ghosts of everyone, through restaurant windows, on street corners, along the station platforms....

To cheer myself up, I joined a group of dancers from the tour to watch The Red Shoes at the British Film Institute on the South Bank on Saturday afternoon. I hadn't seen any of them since Tel Aviv, so it was lovely to catch up. Exactly three months today we'll be in Singapore for the opening night. I can't wait.

In the meantime, I'm going to be ridiculously busy. Annette and I finally managed to have our annual trip to the North Downs on Sunday afternoon, skipping the Wimbledon final (despite it featuring two of our favourite players). We normally go out there in spring, but we missed out this year and if we didn't go on Sunday we weren't sure we'd ever get a chance. We sit high up on one of the hills in the sunshine, gazing out over the beauty of southern England, and reflect on where our lives are now, what's going on with us, how things have changed since last year, where we want to go next, etc.

While we were there, we discussed our plans for the near future and were shocked to realise just how busy we're going to be. How did we used to fit work into our lives? Oh, I know: we didn't have lives. We just had work. For years and years and years. Even though our work took us to all sorts of exotic destinations, most of the time we were too exhausted to be able to enjoy them or make the most of it. It's hard to have fun when you're stressed beyond breaking point and want nothing more than to crawl into bed and have everything just stop for a while.

Life without that constant repressive stress is astonishingly wonderful. I still marvel that every day I get to do whatever I want to do and don't have to do anything I don't want to. I haven't had that since - well, since I was eleven years old, the last time I remember totally loving life.

I am so excited about the next few weeks. Next few months. Entire rest of this year, in fact.

I'm so excited about this very moment that I'm living, sitting on the big comfortable sofa in my own livingroom amidst the treetops in London, listening to the blackbirds sing happily outside the wide-open windows while I write this entry and have a conversation with Annette via WhatsApp about serendipity and signs from the universe - at the time when normally I'd be incarcerated beneath the ground in a stifling, overcrowded tube train, panicking and claustrophobic, in agonising pain and mental exhaustion, fighting my way home from a hostile day in court...