I Say, This Saddle, It Looks Familiar

A journey has been completed. The first season of 'Supergirl' has been watched. A corner of the first part of the woodwork project has been readied. 'The Hollow Man' has been read in its entirety, and Freud's 'Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious' has finally been finished. Both will be read again. Many things have happened. Were any of them real...?

Reality is the great philosophical bugbear. Are our experiences real, or are they interpreted versions of reality. Is there a colour blue, or is it just a neural phenomenon? Is anything actually there, or are we all butterflies dreaming that we're people, who are thinking that we're maybe really butterflies? It goes on forever, and forever, and forever... These are the things that might jump to mind on a long coach journey.

There were no ponderings on reality, or the lack or reality, on the last two coach journeys, though. Instead, much reading was done. A lot of reading in fact. In addition to the two texts already noted, there was also a complete reading of 'The Ascent Of Rum Doodle', which was wonderful. Books are wonderful things, aren't they? It's so easy to believe that paper is still one of the most stable formats for storing information ever devised. Given the right conditions, it can last for centuries, long after your hard drives, DVDs and cloud storage have all disintegrated into complete nonsense. Go, analogue power, go!

It was a nice trip. There was gardening, ceiling painting, much playing of 'Thunderbirds' and 'Schotten Totten', and of course the inevitable misadventures in food land. It happens on every trip to every location. This occasion, it was mostly due to a developing cold making everything taste of nothing. Has there ever been a less lucky traveller? Oh, there have been many, many, innumerable less lucky travellers. Let's get things in context here. Everyone who has ever been robbed, or injured, or caught the wrong bus, or missed a connection, or been caught up in a disaster is a less lucky traveller. Developing a cold is nothing! What will happen on the next occasion, at the end of month, when you are all subjected to another barrage of pre-written reviews? We can only wait and see...

Yes, the Quirky Muffin is live once again. This was not pre-recorded, and the studio audience was real.

O.