Tractors

I've just remembered how much I dislike tractors.

Yesterday I took the back way down to Oxford (and it appears to have been the right choice, given that the M40 was dealing with invasion of cows and diesel). This would have been fine, except for the tractor. There's always one.

It's bad enough that there are variable speed limits to slow me down. 50, 30, 50, 30, 30, speed cameras here there and everywhere... This tractor was particularly annoying because it was being followed by a car transporter and several other vehicles, and then in front of me was a car who seemed incapable of making up the 50m gap between itself and the car in front. To top it all I was being followed by a dark green Ford Focus driven by what looked like Cruella de Vil herself, complete with black driving gloves (only minus the fur!).

Cruella was possibly more irritated than I was at the hold up and moved menacingly towards me at certain points on the road. I did expect her to overtake me dangerously on the road out of Woodstock (a place my Father chooses to forget owing to an incident with an overzealous speed camera many years ago), and I almost willed her to risk her life and get out of mine. See, even Christians have bad thoughts sometimes... ;-) However, she may have looked evil, but was in fact patient enough to wait until the duel carriageway before zooming past...

And then the relief of finally making it the Oxford Park and Ride, and a short trip in to meet Nats, who had made the most of my delays by eyeing up most of Debenhams home dept. I would have been quicker to meet her had I not got confused when I got off the bus and marched half-way across Oxford to meet her only to discover that where I thought Debenhams was, it was in fact BHS.

Gutted.

But I refused to look like a tourist so I had to run around looking for a map in order to educate myself as to the real whereabouts of Debenhams.

It was, as predicted, opposite the bus stop where I had previously alighted...

Reverse Culture shock

You can only truly appreciate the weirdness of 'reverse culture shock' (hereafter referred to as RCS) when you go through it. For me, this is possibly my 4th time of having the 'temporary disease' having already moved back here from France (twice), Italy and now South Africa.

For some reason one of my major triggers is Tesco. Just walking into my (formerly) local tesco in Warwick on Saturday afternoon gave me a shock. RCS is weird because it's not uniform, you just react strangely to things or feel weird. For me, wearing my snuggly furry jacket, not real, which reminded me of the Zulu traditional skins (which are real fur), wandering into Tesco to buy some food for dinner became suddenly unpleasant when I realised that in the 18 months when my life was being transformed, NOTHING HAD CHANGED AT ALL in Tesco. I tested it and everything was indeed in exactly the same place... It shouldn't depress me but it did.

See, I told you RCS was weird. What do I care about shelving and food rotation?

But it's not really that, that is the trigger for then a whole process of thinking about the fact that Tesco hasn't changed and what else hasn't changed in life around me? And then my brain started aching and I had to sit down for a while.

A long while, in fact most of Sunday.

But I feel better now.

The main thing is to remember that the feelings are usually irrational, temporary and will pass. It takes half as long to get over being in a country so I'm on track for being 'normal' in about October time.

In the meantime, expect weirdness...

And we're back...

So a month ago I left South Africa and moved back to live in the United Kingdom, which was good.

And then I finished off my 'adventures in South Africa' blog. But I still want to write. I know that 'blogging' has kind of fallen from fashion and most people have moved to facebook or the like, but seriously, facebook leaves no room for personal creative expression and I want to write...

So I'm back.

Follow my stories of re-adapting back to life in the Northern Hemisphere if you like, or don't. It's a free country and I'm going to use this as a means of self-expression and modern-day social commentary. You might not agree with everything, you might think it's wonderful and urge me to publish my memoirs...

In any case, I'm editing the other blog in preparation for possible publishing, so if you were a fan of that stay tuned!