Goodbye, Glasgow in All Good Things

It's 2am. My train leaves at 9.30, so I need to check out in about six hours. I should sleep.

I don't want to leave. It's been magical. Over and over again.

I've come to Glasgow for work a number of times in the past few years. Over there is the hotel with the amazingly comfortable beds but the windows looking straight into the cardio section of the 24-hour gym. Around the corner is the Italian place we used to go to for dinner. Down this hill is the arbitration centre with the ancient stone facade left up in the middle of the atrium foyer of glass. Behind the station is the river along which I used to walk home in the evening overwhelmed by agonised wrists and shoulders, just trying to breathe. Over there's the theatre where I did that bizarre job for the orchestra that one time. Across the road is the shop where I bought the map to go hiking on Rannoch Moor. That's where Borders used to be, back in the days bookshops still existed. There's the ghastly Burger King that was the only place air-conditioned during that intense heatwave when I was heading up to the Highlands and had to wait an hour between trains.

Each trip here has been vastly different to the others, but they always had one thing in common: work. It's surreal being here for pleasure. Especially surrounded by all the ghosts of work.

But I leave tomorrow. Return south. Then there's a week. Then my dad comes and I take him to Oxford and I go to Bradford and then he meets me there and then we return to London. Then there's another week, during which I go to Leeds for a day, and just maybe Nottingham if I can force myself to make a phone call. And then it's Woking and Annette back from Dubai, and then Southampton, and then India.

Right now I cannot even contemplate those three days in New Delhi. Working. Luckily they're not until April, so I don't have to. Not yet.

Other than those eight or nine days in Dubai in December and the two weeks in Nigeria in late October, I haven't worked properly since September. That's five months. I don't miss it remotely.