Much of Saturday was spent firefighting at work, including chasing down people who had already left for their Christmas vacations but the machine never stops, so most of them had replied by Monday. Saturday morning I made it out to an early breakfast with a couple of friends, both with an interest in heritagey stuff, so it was an interesting conversation, though very early, of course. It was very foggy in the morning, but cleared up by midday, but by that time I was back at work and that didn’t finish till very late at night.
Saturday morning I had the only bad meal I’ve had in days, when we ordered in some halwa puri and omelette paratha. Puri is always terrible when it’s not fresh out of the pan, and the omelette had a ridiculous amount of salt. Anyway. We eventually left for Islamabad, through a dreary browny-grey landscape, as the fog had been even worse and in fact the motorway hadn’t reopened till midday. As we left Bhera and approached the salt range one could barely make out the hills at all in the fog, but the instant we climbed into the hills this changed: the sky became blue, the slanting afternoon light golden on green and brown hills, with the landscape like a Western from the Technicolor era. The salt range is the border of the Potohar Plateau (also my ancestral land), so I the weather patterns are very different here. From then on, it was clear.
We got to Islamabad when it was still blessedly light and I pottered around for a bit, not working as I had planned, listening to podcasts notably the reviews of the final Star Wars film and Cats. The first I will go and see later in the week; the second I will never see as the trailer was enough for me. I can’t say the Star Wars sounds great – by all accounts they have discarded the interesting thematic stuff in the second one but kept the mediocre plot ticking away – but I must watch it soon or I never will.
And today, Monday, has been a high-speed on the run sort of day, I felt like Sonic the Hedgehog. Three back-to-back meetings, and lots of dashing, talking to people on the phone, drafting and redrafting stuff. In the middle of it all came an email about work I’d applied for six months ago which seems to have mysteriously changed its requirements, but I gave them what they’d asked for anyway. Another couple of possibilities also emerged, hopefully something will turn out.