Sunday 10 February 2019

Getting home

I had a lot of trouble getting home this morning, but luckily I woke up before things got too bad. All a bit of a jumble now, but I report below some of the elements, probably not quite in the right order.

The home in question was our two-time home in Cambridge, firstly as a child and secondly as a young family, with the second stint coming getting on for twenty years after the first stint.

The getting home was from London and involved a train as I eventually got out at Cambridge Station.

Along the way, came off a hill onto a rather awkward bend in a road, where there were buses but no proper bus stops. Various buses go by, the wrong ones as it happens, without my being able to get any of them to stop.

On exit from the station, there was a queue for taxis, so I started to walk, the distance to home being around four miles. I had also acquired some modest luggage. That is: a box about the size of a shoe box, with a handle; a bag of filler, as in but not Polyfilla; and, a small saw, a very small thing with very fine teeth, perhaps eight inches long, a neater version of that illustrated. Once my father's, now in my tool box and used very occasionally.

Find myself in some kind of open building site, with lots of footings in place, which I try to cross, but find it very muddy and treacherous underfoot. Manage to fall over into the mud at one point, muddying my clothes and almost losing my luggage.

Work my way out of the mud, to find myself in some kind of builders' merchant, having lost the bag of polyfilla, Decide I had better sneak out the back unseen. But the back has some kind of perimeter fence and I fail to find a back door. Trains whizzing past outside, through very flashy and modern looking suburban stations.

Eventually get to the main road through Cambridge, with some bus stops, none of them advertising the bus in question. Starting to get tired and I wonder about whether I am going to make it at all. Anxious. I think I wake up at this point.

PS: Google turned up the image, Bing not being available on the laptop I am using today. Maybe a saw for cutting soft metal rather than wood. Maybe something to do with making sets of false teeth, something my father did for himself when he started out, although by the time I came along he got dental technicians to do the work. I feel sure that the saw had a name, which I cannot now recover, with Google Image Search thinking that it is something to do with magnets for some reason. And the various lists of ancient saws turned up not including this one. All rather irritating and I dare say I shall come back to it at various times during the day to come.

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