Saturday, April 26

I was on the station platform in plenty of time for the 9:07 train to the airport. This time the man with the buffet trolley came round several times, and this time I didn’t want anything. The train journey passed uneventfully with me looking out of the window.

Now we are stopping briefly at Copenhagen Central, before the train changes direction for the ten minute journey to the airport station.

The flight will be uneventful. I will sit in 12C and drink a tomato juice and a tonic water, but not mixed. The rest of the day wil be a disaster.

As soon as I meet Irma, who has driven to the airport to fetch me, it will be obvious that our moods are completely different and I will become suddenly and overwhelmingly frustrated and angry; and point this out rudely and completely counter-productively.

The situation I have been in for the last few days has forced me out of myself. Only Erik knew anything at all about what has happened to us. Everyone else just took me at face value. I felt buoyed up in some way by this. I will stupidly announce that we need to leap forward and start celebrating life, which will make Irma incandescant with a cold fury. I should have kept my mouth shut until I had calmed down and reacclimatised, but it will not be as simple as that. I will not be able to stop myself saying these things, even though I will know that I am making things worse for myself as well as for Irma.

Naa will try to interpret what I am saying, to act as a diplomat, but in the end will be reduced to asking me why I am acting so meanly. I will have no answer for this. It will not get any better until I go to bed leaving Irma and Naa watching Fay Wray in King Kong.

I will go to sleep secure in the knowledge that I have only myself to blame.