Fish in the sky

Hello! I am back and not dead. I'm in Dublin and I feel dislocated from everything. I keep almost saying 'arigato gozaimasu' to people in restaurants and shops, and falling suddenly asleep at 9pm as though I've been hit on the head with a cartoon hammer. I'm going to keep up the travel journal all the same, even though it's like those times when you write postcards, can't find a post office, accidentally bring them home and then post them from your home town with your own country's stamps on. Or is that just me?

Thank you very much, o kind person who bought me two more months of paid account time. I'd like to buy you a drink but you're anonymous. Maybe I'll pay it forward by doing something for some randomly chosen person instead, and who knows, by some weird coincidence it might turn out to be you?

Since Friday I've helped Ivan move house (he came home to a voicemail saying he had to be out by Saturday noon!) and been to Gaelcon, but thereby hangs another post. From tomorrow I'm doing Nanowrimo, but I'm cheating - most of the words will go to finish the current book-thing of which there's already 37,000 words written, and I'm counting anything fictional or potentially floggable/submittable towards the total. Good luck, anyway, to all you other frantic scribblers, who I'm sure are doing it properly.

It's probably all a distraction from sorting the next bit of life out, which is difficult because Japan has kidnapped my brain. But I hadn't even got to Japan in the journal yet, had I? We'd only just arrived in Shanghai...

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Pictures are here. (There’s more on the Great Wall gallery as well, if you’re interested.)

Oh, and happy Samhain, happy new year.