What Country Is This Anyway? Coming home.

It's a bizarre sensation, coming 'home' to somewhere that was where you thought you were going on your adventure to.  We got to the airport, and suddenly the check-in queue was full of Spaniards. I understood some of what was being said around me for the first time in a month.

Coming back the contrast was so marked that I felt more relaxed and comfortable here in Madrid than I ever did before going to Turkey.  Don't get me wrong, my Spanish hasn't magically advanced through disuse (quite the reverse), it's just I'm not so scared of using it now.

On the way home today I started to think about feeling lost, and endlessly displaced - wondering whether I fit even back home home (Sheffield, that is, at least for now.  It's not even where I'm originally from).  Geek that I am, I got stuck on the word displacement and started thinking very literally about the definition of the word in physics terms.  Turns out I do remember some of it.  Which is a relief given my profession.

Displacement is a vector, defined by both the distance travelled from a starting point and the direction. Velocity is then speed plus direction, the rate of change of displacement (the gradient on a graph of distance/time, or dx/dt) and acceleration the rate of change of velocity (the gradient on your velocity/time graph, or curvature of the distance/time one - dv/dt or d2x/dt2 respectively).  Bouncing between three countries, I'm like a conker on a string - always going at ridiculous speed but still somehow constantly accelerating (if you don't follow, ask, and I'll draw you a picture) - so it's no wonder I'm feeling dizzy.

Nothing is certain, constant and normal.  If you have no base to work from, what on earth do you say to anyone?  You talk about travel, yourself, or the extremely abstract.  Then everybody gets bored and wanders off.  Must work on that.

Speaking of conkers - Autumn is upon us.  The extreme summer heat has left Madrid and a comfortably temperate environment has supplanted it. As I crossed the park this evening it was starting to get dark and the clouds were bright pink against the fading blue, wispy bits stretching across the horizon like candy floss.  I don't have a picture for you though, sorry.