Are we mad?

Packing up the house to leave and being ready in every way is producing temporary chaos. I hope it's all worth it, when I'm deep in newspaper and boxes. It's harder to maintain the big picture view when focused on the nitty-gritty detail of final arrangements and storing everything for 6 months.

It's counter-intuitive to pack up a house that, for me at least, was looking tidy and organised and I have that "if it isn't broken, why fix it?" sense of disrupting something unnnaturally that invades my sense of purpose at such times.

It also seems strange to be leaving the familiar behind for a relatively long period, even though I've done it before and more than once. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and "while a ship is safe in the harbour, that's not what ships are built for," as Mike likes to say. Thinking of ships, I remember Nepal is landlocked and that freshwater rivers and lakes, lush tropical vegetation and the" immodest green" as Arundhati Roy once described the rice terraces and padi of the subcontinent, will be our visual fare soon. Doesn't sound too bad, actually.