Never one to miss the opportunity proffered by a long weekend, I drag myself and my back pack in the wee hours of the morning of the 27th to the airport to catch two flights – first to Dubai and then to London. The third trip of the sort this year, it is my ongoing attempt to manage this year of distributed domestication, one in which S and L having returned to London for good I am left shuttling back and forth every few months. Unlike the last time, I do not run into anyone I know, for which I am thankful for the company of Ike Anya’s Small by Small. Beautifully short and deeply evocative of my own memories of growing up, I find myself going down mental rabbit holes, fleshing out the (typically) well written prose with my own experiences. Not being of a medical persuasion myself – engineering saved me from all that – the extensive overlap with friends and family does leave me with enough knowledge to appreciate his specific travails. with the memories of growing up on a university campus it drew in.

Dubai as always is a short pit stop. This time I manage to wolf down an overpriced chicken caesar wrap and a piping hot black coffee to soothe the rumblings of my stomach which had not received any sustenance due to having to wake up at an ungodly hour for the flights. Arriving at Heathrow, the flight lands as flawlessly as could be, which leaves me wondering when last I was part of a bumpy landing. Are the pilots getting better, or is it auto-pilots or just plain luck? I don’t know but a return to more than a few white knuckled landings of the past is most certainly not welcome. One particularly difficult one in which half the plan was pleading the blood of Jesus – of course it was landing in Lagos – comes to mind. The plan this time is to spend three weeks – hence three Fridays – two of which are already tied up with finalising essays for a course I took upon myself (somewhat unadvisedly). Two semi-formal chats around potential roles back in the UK have also been lined up for the three weeks as well as the small matter of F’s 40th birthday shindig up in Kent. Bags collected on the other side, I do not get the usual taxi guy; a small mercy I suppose given that my repertoire of white lies are just about exhausted, plus I am hardly in the mood for banal small talk.

Noon on Saturday finds me with the keys handed back for my designated driver role, and making our way through an M25 bogged down with traffic eastwards. Someone of the other drones on on the LBC, a state of affairs which would becomes the leitmotif for the three weeks. We must have wronged the traffic gods or something because on the way back, yet another accident causes long tailbacks – a helicopter is mobilised this time – with no movement at some stage for almost an hour an a half. The shindig itself delivers as all Nigerian shindigs do, plenty of pepper soup and old friends from the ‘Deen to catch up with and more than a few babies – L included – to pat and rub since I last saw some of these folks. Most of the days after that are filled with writing my essays and ferrying everyone around.

It might be all that LBC, but the unshakeable sense I come away with is that of the UK going to the dogs. All the talk on the radio is of a summer of discontent with strikes across multiple agencies – rail and the NHS included. Farage loses his bank account and instantly weaponizes that to shout about cancel culture from the roof tops. Immigrants – boats, care providers and what not – also fill the air waves. There is also the unfortunate tale of two boats, the potentially hubris inspired implosion of the Titan submersible and that of several hundred migrants on the Messenia which sparks a lot of editorialising of course. Most of the talk is about what it says of us, never mind that fact at us are largely unaffected by the loss and grief that the events cause for those directly impacted. Just Stop oil and their campaign of civil disobedience and disruption of high profile events only serves to add to that sense of a looming dystopian future.

Sequestered in the corner of the world where we are, the sense of privilege is one which one keenly feels, the luxury of being able to lose oneself in rich verdant countryside within a few minutes of walking being one which should not be taken for granted. Range Rovers, Teslas and the odd used Quashai (ours) dot the garages around, the neighbourly talk being of going away for the summer not surviving. On the five or six days it is reasonably dry and warm, the smell of some neighbour or the other’s barbecue filters through when the wind changes as is its wont. The habits of the past few years are hard to shake so I still wake up way before everyone else, which gives me the freedom of an hour to kill on a light jog and the 5K training plan which the Arabian summers had stalled. When I finally get some breathing space after my essays and exams are done we join the summer day out trail, one day at the Chobham Adventure Farm, two on the (miniature) Great Cockrow Railway line and one at Hobbledown Heath. L seems to like it all, and at the end seems to be getting quite used to the whole two parent thing. On the odd occasion I sit in the chair which S usually does, L screeches – Mummy seat – and points until I relocate myself. One suspects this business of distributed domestication is not much to her liking. Big decisions loom.