[caption id=“attachment_7965” align=“alignnone” width=“2200”] A beach at Hugh Town[/caption]

Honestly, sometimes I just don’t understand why I haven’t been back.

I’ve been taking a little time out this evening to edit (finally) some photos from a trip to the Isles of Scilly seven years back.

Click to embiggen:

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I’m in New York again, doing some training. It’s another 48 hour quick jaunt - so this evening was my only proper evening in the city. I grabbed my camera, and took a more scenic walk back to my hotel.

God, this is a lovely city…

[caption id=“attachment_1133” align=“alignnone” width=“800”] Breakfast at Hector’s Shed[/caption]

It comes to something when missing a train feels like a treat. Earlier on the week, I missed my train by under a minute. I hit the platform just as the train started moving. Too late. It was bad luck, sure, caught on the hop by the level crossing being shut, the parking machine being out of order, and one of the ticket collection machines being down. Too much bad luck for one journey to stand.

I live far enough into the sticks that my next useful train was 30 minutes away, so I did what I always do when things throw me off in Shoreham - I went for a coffee and toast in a local café. As before, I picked Hector’s Shed.

Toast. Coffee. And half an hour to sit reading. I don’t do that enough. Since I switched to a freelance consultancy career, I’ve struggled with the urge that I should be doing something to further my career at all times - and I mean doing. Reflecting, thinking and reading never seem to be active enough, and so they fall by the wayside. This has just got worse since Hazel was born, and the remainder of my free time was eaten alive by the bumdle of cuteness that is my daughter.

But an accident, an unseen confluence of inconvenience, gave me premission to chill. And chill I did, with coffee, and toast, and some reading on my iPad. A simple pleasure, but right now life is teaching me that simple pleasures are often the best.

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[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nURHLyw8ZJY]) 

Just to remind myself that calmness is out there.

In the last few days of my holiday. Should be back and posting soon…

I seem to spend my life perpetually playing catch-up with the photographs I take. I've finally got around to working on my Florida photos from the early part of this year, when we spent New Year and the first half of January in Fort Lauderdale. 

One day, I felt the need for a little time by myself, so I headed down to the Las Olas Riverwalk, and spent the afternoon wondering along the riverfront, grabbing whatever caught my eye. And late in the afternoon, I came across a couple getting married. It was a quiet, beautful suprise, a brief moment to join in with a community's happiness (and grab a few photos):

The blessing being read was the Apache Blessing, as far as I could tell. 

Friday night was a HellCommute. Terrible traffic from Sutton to the M25, explained by the closure of the slip road onto the M25. After that? A 90 minute or so diversion around Crawley and Horsham before I finally joined the A23 and made my way home. I never got around to finding out what happened, until I read this on Kat Arney's blog this morning:

Unfortunately Chris and Mary never made it. They’d got stuck in the worst traffic jam on the M25 for years, and ended up motionless for four or five hours.

The worst traffic jam on the M25? Ah-ha:

The M25 in Surrey has reopened in both directions after being shut for more than 24 hours following a crash in which a lorry hit the central reservation and collided with a car.
Three people were badly hurt in the crash, between junctions seven with the M23 and eight with the A217, on Friday.

Mystery solved. The internet: bringing me the things I forgot to look up.

Had a rough weekend for reasons I'll blog about when I can bring myself to do so. In the meantime, here's some backlog blogging from my trip to Germany a few weeks ago.

Spotted this in a German bookshop in Kassel. It was the special British section of the bookshop: tea, shortcakes and the royals. Really? That's how they see us? Gosh. That would be like us stereotyping them with beer, suasages and lederhosen. And that never happens, right?

Spotted outside a mobile phone ("handy" to the Germans - a word they think comes from us) shop. Classy stuff, huh? :-)

Oh, and I was rather jealous of these little screens they have on their trains (which really do run on time).  They were a significantly more pleasurable experience to travel on than their British counterparts - possibly because virtually no-one seems to use them…