Before you ask, I have to go to work tomorrow. Even if I go in and my line manager sends me straight home again, I have to go. That's how it is.
I arrived back and instantly collapsed into bed. Yes, my nice cold bedroom, where the air is delicious with frost and the icicles hang cheerily from the inside of the windows. They don't really of course, before you wonder whether that might have had something to do with me catching a cold in the first place. It is easier to sleep in an ice-box though than it is in the blistering heat of a small hotel guest room with a broken thermostat.
I haven't used my voice at all in the last two days. There's been no-one to speak to. As a result, when I tried, all that squeaked out was a kind of rasping sound. Thanks to my ear being blocked, the bass frequencies of my voice reverberated inside my head as though I were wearing a bucket.
"Sorry?" said the barista, looking straight at me. I repeated what I'd said in the middle of Costa. As someone with a quiet voice anyway, I've always hated this. Even before I've reached the end of what I'm saying, I know I'm not saying it loudly enough. Stopping and restarting adds confusion, so on we go to the end of the sentence when this person will look puzzled (look they're already starting to look puzzled) and then say, "Sorry?" as though I've just said something very very offensive and I will no doubt sigh internally and repeat as best as I can. It happens a lot. Yes, I could speak louder.
It occurs to me, now that I'm back home, that I ought to ask the question about whether I would like to go back to any of these capital cities any time soon. That might give me an instinctive feel about how I actually got on. I'm conscious that this weekend I've been coughing and spluttering and sneezing and wedging tissue in my ear while trying to enjoy Cardiff - and I may treat it unfairly in my memory.
I think I would go back to Edinburgh, maybe not for a while, but I would definitely go back. To return to Cardiff though, I would need a definite reason - a thing to be focused on while I'm there. It's not exactly a tourist city, though by golly it wants to be - and there is no shortage of things to do. However, to go there as a tourist on your own feels strange. Between the hen dos and the homeless, the city was quite empty really. The thing which made it for me, was of course, the castle, which was excellent.
And that's interesting isn't it, because actually it's the castle that made it what it was in the first place.
What worries me is that Belfast is next, and I'm not sure what kind of city that is at all. In fact, other than the Titanic dockyard, I'm not really sure what is there to see. Some research is required. Plus hopefully I won't be wandering around with bags under my eyes, sneezing into a handkerchief with tissue paper sticking out of my ear.
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