(Today's title comes to you courtesy of the late, great Douglas Adams and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

There's something rather freaky about coming back to the place you lived as a child and coming to realize, after only a short period of time, that you really don't fit in there so well any more. I am presently a guest in my parents' house and, though I guess I haven't moved out properly yet as a whole heap of my stuff is still in my bedroom and has yet to be shipped out/thrown away, it feels very odd to be back even for the weekend. It's a slightly strange feeling. Partly because almost everything left in that room is, with a few exceptions, stuff that I don't really know if I want to hang on to any more.

Kent feels much the same. It seems small, provincial, and indefinably shabby - rather like the clothes I've left in my wardrobe here, actually. A little restrictive, decidedly unadventurous, not really my style and gone at the knees.

Put simply, I've grown used to London and all its little ways. Not just fond of it, but used to it. I should hope so since I'll have been living there for two years this September. I guess it's just a sign that I feel I really belong there, and not the small town I come from (yes, I'm a small-town girl in the big city - how charmingly cliched of me). Consequently, Kent feels - well, how can I put this nicely? It feels parochial. Very undiverse. Pretty in places, but fundamentally rather, read very, boring.

I spent the day with my father in Frightening Folkestone, a bog-standard seaside town on the English Channel groaning under the yoke of the tyrant Michael Howard. The seafront - the aim of the day, as I have a very real passion for marking time by large bodies of water and positively adore the sea, though I have never been able to satisfactorily explain why - was pretty enough, and largely quiet at this time of year, which was nice. Once we got to it, that is. We seem to have spent a large amount of time getting convincingly lost before we got there, once on the drive up and then again when we tried to find the Front. We did find a good bookshop in the process, though...

... or does saying something like that put forty years on my age?

We also had a meal out (any meal I don't have to pay for is good in my book - a restaurant meal is doubly so), though my parents being my parents this took the form of an Obligatory Indian Meal. Very nice, save for one niggling little detail - the wine. Not that it wasn't nice, we just ordered too much of it. Leading to a running commentary on the fact from one of my parental units, who nagged at us all to drink far more than we wanted, then insisted we took the half-finished bottle out with us. Okay. Why this had to lead to a five-minute conversation about who would carry the bottle I don't know. But I think - that is I hope - this was a joke...

Still... I swear, this thing about the wine was brought up at least once every ten minutes from about halfway through the meal. By the time we got back to the car, it was getting a little wearing. I adopted my usual Crisis Mode in such situations - space out and think of other, more pleasant things. Too bad I can't remember any of the de-escalation techniques taught to me in College, they might have proved useful. I suppose one way to solve the problem would have been to grab the bottle and chug it... well, that's an idea ofr next time.

Very nearly finished 'Stasis', much to my gratification. If I can't get that one tucked away by the end of the weekend, I will be very disappointed in myself.