grahambinns.com

Back from a pleasant if wind-blown weekend in Edinburgh. Much to catch up on, including eight days worth of Three Hundred and Sixty-odd Days posts (narrowly avoiding FAIL there, I think), not to mention the scribbling that I haven't been doing.

Still, some things are looking up. The break has recharged my writing brain juices at least.

Well, here we go. I'm now making last-minute preparations for to ship off to Boston for next week's Canonical Company Conference and for the last two days of UDS, where I'll be in meetings about Launchpad.

This will be the third (count them) time that I've flown anywhere, and although I'm no longer in the dark about what it feels like to hurl yourself into the sky in a slim aluminium tube I still haven't got to the point where I consider such behaviour at all natural. Metal, as a rule, does not fly on its own. One can't help feeling that making it do so is staggeringly unwise.

I should be landing in Boston at about 19:40 Eastern time, which is about 23:40 GMT at the moment. Here's not not sleeping much for the next 18 hours... 

My writing mojo appears to have deserted me. Which, whilst not being the first time it's happened, true, and whilst it certainly won't be the last, is disconcerting nonetheless.

A couple of weeks ago I was flying with novel-the-second (which has now taken on the title of After Life, though I'm not sure that that really fits) and I was churning out a respectable though not huge amount of words a day. This last week, though, I've been struggling, though it's more about the struggle to get started than it is about the struggle to write once the pen finally hits the paper.

Perhaps I'm just short on ye-olde brain-juice. It's been a while since I took a break from work, writing and all the rest, and whilst I don't feel like I need to escape from work (another first for Canonical; usually it takes about a month for me to start feeling tired) I am finding it hard to negotiate the after-work bits of the day, which includes writing time.

Which perhaps makes this rather good timing after all, because on Monday Sarah and I are off to Dublin for a few days of rest, relaxation, music, walking, photography and Guinness.

I've only been to Dublin once before, and then only for a day when we were in Wales and decided that at a tenner each a ferry ticket wasn't a bad buy, but it seems like one of those really vibrant cities where even the quiet bits have a bubbling current of liveliness running beneath the surface. I wonder if we'll find any stories there; I'm absolutely certain we'll at least find plenty of characters, which is half the battle.

I've bought one of the Dublin Moleskine city notebooks for our trip. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily a good buy - yet another notebook to fill with my mindless drivel when I've got plenty of them already, plus a blog, plus, well, just about any conversation I happen to come into contact with - and I don't know that our few days away will make for a particularly interesting travel journal but I'm willing to give it a shot at least. And it's kinda sweet, I think, to record the holiday on paper. Not that I won't be taking tons of photographs, but I often wish when I look back on old holiday snaps that I could recall the other bits, the thoughts I had when I crested that particular rise in the sand dunes on Wales and saw the cargo container that had been washed up on the beach, the feelings I had when I first saw Edingburgh from the castle, that sort of thing.

For all that I've said that I'm struggling for inspiration, though, I have got a story buzzing round in my head. Well, it's not a story so much as a title and a few paragraphs that don't as yet really go anywhere. Perhaps I'll work on Jenny Greenteeth's Birthday Cake instead of After Life for a bit.

Sounds like a plan.

I'm writing this from the concourse at London Euston, where I'm perched atop my luggage waiting for my train home to Lancaster. I wouldn't have been perched atop what is, let me tell you, a damn uncomfortable bag were it not for the fact that I rather over-prepared for the lack of a Victoria Line service this morning and in so doing managed to arrive an hour and a half before my train left. Still, at least I'm not going to be dashing around at the last minute, which is a bonus.

This week, I have mostly been sprinting on Launchpad things with part of the team here in London. This is the view we have from the office (did I mention that I love my job?). One of the great things about working where I do when I'm in London, for there are several, is that you get to see the weather coming from miles away. On Tuesday we got to watch a rainstorm sweeping its way from North to South across London. When I've fixed up the pictures and removed the reflections of strip lights from them (because there's not much call on the 27th floor for the windows to open) I'll post them up to Flickr for your enjoyment and edification.

The train back's going to take at least five hours to get to Lancaster (coming down took nearly eight hours due to a broken down train at Preston, so I'm not holding out too much hope), so I'm left wondering what to do with myself on the journey. On the way down I read Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein, which is hilarious but which you wouldn't lend to your mother, and now I'm reading Spook Country by William Gibson. I've also got the latest LUGRadio episode on my Zen, so the more I think about it, the more I think I'll manage. I might even get some hacking done if the fancy takes me.

There's a lot of this going on today, so there's a possibility that I may not make it home this afternoon. Virgin trains and the National Rail web service both tell me that trains to Lancaster are running but "subject to delays due to diversions and speed restrictions." I'll quite happily sit on a train for eight hours if it means that I'll get home before the end of Saturday; my only request is that, unlike on the train down to London, the air conditioning work in my carriage, please?

It's times like this (specifically when I'm trying to get anywhere and am not sure I can, I'm ashamed to say) that I am given to be thankful for this series of tubes (it's not a truck). Quite apart from the fact that its existence keeps me in work year after year it also means that I can sit here, safe an secure in my hotel room, and find out whether or not it's worth my bother going out to Euston this morning, which as far as I'm concerned must rank pretty highly on the scale of useful things the interweb can do for me.