Cheshire. Two years this week and I have been trying to work out what to say about it that is not a speech.
The truthful summary is that this has become a fact about my Wednesdays and nothing more. I would put it somewhere between paying the water bill and putting the bins out in terms of the space it occupies in my head. That is an astonishing sentence to be able to write, given that in the summer of 2024 it occupied roughly all of the space.
Things that turned out to matter more than I expected. Having one person who knows — mine is my sister, who asks once a month and would notice if I stopped answering. Having a repair plan for the weeks that go wrong, because there have been about six of those, mostly travel or illness or one memorable fortnight where I simply forgot and then panicked. And the reviews, which I very nearly let slide last autumn on the grounds that nothing was wrong.
Things that turned out to matter less than I expected. Almost everything I worried about in month two. Whether people could tell. Whether I was doing it in the optimal way. What the exact day of the week was.
The one thing I did not expect at all: I am slightly bored of the subject. I still come here, because people arriving in month two need somebody who is bored of it to tell them boredom exists. But I no longer read anything about it. I am not researching. Two years ago I had eleven tabs open.
103