Two weeks

Two weeks to go now, and things are starting to hot up (not least because today’s forecast is 36 degrees). T minus two weeks is when you realise that you’re seeing your friends for the last time before going away, so you have to say “well, see you in two years then” and make light of it while your insides are churning and you’re thinking: I’m going to miss all this. Maybe we should just stay after all. Why are we leaving again?

And the weird thing is that quite a few people are going away soon after Christmas and won’t be back before I leave in early January. So I end up doing the big goodbye even though I’m still around for two weeks. It has all the finality of going through the sliding doors into customs and yet… I’m still very much here. We could still chat on the phone. It seems somehow duplicitous to be hanging around like this.

To top it all off, that “why are we leaving” feeling is eerily familiar because that’s how I felt when we were preparing to drag ourselves reluctantly away from Italy back in 2004. I’ve been through all this before. It was sad then. Why are we doing it again?

Just remember: adventures and challenges are good for personal development. (Try telling that to the kids.)

On the other hand, I’ve been looking forward to Two Weeks for a while now, because the phrase “two weeks” always reminds me of that bit in Total Recall where the portly lady keeps saying “Two weeks!” at the spaceport terminal and then her head peels off and she turns into the Governor of California and her head’s a bomb and…. no I am not making this up.

At least it focuses the mind with respect to packing. Now I can finally throw out all those grotty clothes I kept for gardening purposes. I seem to recall from our time in Tokyo that the Japanese are fairly conservative in the dressing department so there is no place for Australian grotty-casual T-shirts and stubbies. In any case Japan has great clothes shops and I intend to spend a good deal of time over the next two years assembling a funky new wardrobe as befits a 45-year-old greying father of two.