Well, so far on this voyage of discovery, I have learned that:

• Once you actually can have a lie-in, you no longer want one.
• There are still not enough hours in the day, but there are more than there were.
• Cambridge University Botanic Garden was founded in 1760, and moved to its present site in 1831. It will not suddenly cease to be if you don’t visit every day.

Wisteria at CUBG, May 2014

• The same applies to London, founded even earlier.

• If you feel half-dressed on leaving the house, it’s not (or not usually) because you are half-dressed, but because you do not have your work bag in your hand, and this is because you don’t go to work any more.

The work bag, and the Pavlovian cat

• It’s too late to reverse Max the Cat’s programming, which causes him to believe than anyone entering through the front door, at any hour, will feed him.
• An anthropological phenomenon: many daytime (as opposed to evening) supermarket shoppers seem to think that this purgatory is a leisurely, and even a social, event. Some even seem quite surprised when, at the checkout, they are required to pay, and have to turn from the slow filling of endless plastic bags to the location of their purse/wallet, while the queue behind (i.e. me) fidgets and grimaces. (Last week, I was behind a man who searched in eight (yes, eight!) separate pockets, eventually located his wallet, and then didn’t know whether he had a loyalty card or not and started looking for that. (Yes, ladies, I know I was a fool to get in a queue behind a man in the first place…))

Other people’s purchases are endlessly fascinating…

• And, of course, what retired friends have been saying for years: how did you ever manage to find time to work when you’re so busy not working?

Who knows what future weeks will bring? One moral problem on the horizon is that I’m going on holiday.

My holiday destination

Can one legitimately go on holiday if one isn’t working in the first place?

Caroline