Six weeks is a very long time to spend anywhere, but I've been back in the UK long enough now that America seems like a bizarre fairy-tale rather than a memory, as if my brain can't allow both places, both homes, to exist at the same time. Our house, our street, the stores and schools in Houston, have all become faded, sun-bleached images during my stay, just as, when I am in Texas, Britain seems faint and distant, reduced to radio and telephone voices from behind a curtain of grey drizzle inside the mind.
On Monday we'll be climbing back through the wardrobe and swapping realities once more. I'm keen to get back now. It's been wonderful being in Britain, renewing memories not just of friends and family, but of the land itself - but this has clearly been a visit, a rapid-fire series of blissful Hellos and bitter-sweet Goodbyes. Normal, the day-to-day calm of Nothing Much and This and That, is now in Houston and that's where we need to return - for a rest as much as anything else.
Whilst we've been here we've covered as much ground as possible, racing about by train and car. We've been up mountains and down mines, hugged the cliffs and beaches and tramped about the very middle; we've soaked up the museums of London and got soaked in country fields. Everywhere we've mixed hugs and handshakes, laughed and talked, restoring and renewing connections and relationships.
Today, on my back from our last stop, our last visit, the rain cleared and the plain old familiar M4 got splashed with late afternoon sunshine. The trees, the yellow-green of the fields, glittered, flicking past on either side; the road itself shone silver. Everything shone, wet with light, and I wanted suddenly to miss the exit, to keep on and drive into the never-darkening summer sky.
There's just packing left now, and then back to normal.
