Spending time in my home country has become a rather fraught affair in the last couple of years – because I don’t live here, and my family and most of my friends still do, any visit back to British shores becomes a mad rush around all the various corners of the UK that people I know have spread themselves around into. Since I arrived almost three weeks ago, I’ve been to Colchester, Reading, Sheffield, and Edinburgh, as well as taking a number of trips into London (where I managed to meet Bob*, and share a pint or three with GrrlScientist and a constantly inebriated Professor Steve Steve. I’m now in Southampton for a few days, where things look like they’re going to settle down a bit – lab work, paper corrections and (hopefully, finally) a bit of blogging.
The problem comes when I realise that all this mad dashing around, fun as it is, has basically been my holiday. I’m not bemoaning the fact that I didn’t get to veg out on a beach – in such situations I’m normally climbing the walls within a day – but it does feel weird that I’ve spent all my free time, and more than a little of my meagre salary, visiting a place where in many ways I still feel more at home than my current, actual home.
Anyway, the good news for you people is that the “holiday” is over, and thus normal(ish) service is about to resume.
*I would point out that although Bob claims to have won Mornington Crescent, he forgot to turn 3 times widdershins before re-occupying Piccadilly Circus, which as everyone knows is automatic disqualification.

Sorry for the sparse posting over the past few days – I’m about to depart on a trip back to my homeland, and because it’s not just a holiday this time – I’m doing some lab work – I had some preparatory work to get through. Cutting lots of rock samples down into teeny tiny cubes so they’ll fit in the machine I’m going to be using was a little bit fiddly and time-consuming, as it turned out.
Once I’ve set up back in the UK, I shall return with geopuzzly answers and other rambling. Stay tuned.