oh my goodness

I am sitting in the North Terminal at Gatwick, waiting for the check-in desk to open. I am simultaneously a bit weepy, after listening to melancholy folk songs on the bus about leaving your lover behind to go a-wandering, and breathlessly excited the way I used to be on Christmas Eve as a kid.

It's been a hectic but brilliant week. Thank you to everyone who dined and partied with me for my birthday and who came to the exhibition launch. (Myself aside, it all looks fantastic, by the way. Go check it out if you have a chance.) But at last all the sorting has been done - or most of it - and I am off. I haven't slept properly and I'm knackered, but my god do I feel alive.

Typing furiously till the credit runs out: I'll get to Lima in something like 21 hours from now and collapse into the airport hotel, which is called the Manhattan Inn and looks tacky but reasonably undodgy. The next day I have a local flight to Pucallpa, up in the Andes, and some time I don't know what to do with before that because mum has made me promise not to go into Lima itself. She has a friend who lives there and says it's a crime-ridden hellhole. "They'll pull the earrings off your ears," she says. Hmm.

But I'd better check in. And find coffee. And carbs.