Repeat: Running House

I had a lot of meetings today, of various kinds, so I needed a do-it-all kind of pin that'd lift my spirits. And, just as before, the Running House was a perfect choice. Gotta love that Thomas Mann - his pins almost always hit the spot.

I'm actually posting this from San Jose Airport, while waiting to board my flight home: isn't technology marvelous? But not because it allows me to write my blog while hanging around. The marvelousness comes from being able to escape from a relentlessly friendly fellow traveller (who simply HAD to share his entire itinerary with me) by claiming I had work to do on my Mac.

Naturally he understood: how could he not? We're in Silicon Valley, after all, where work comes first. So I escaped without causing offence, saving myself from imminent and inevitable tales of divorce, death in the family, or other disasters which so quickly follow after the opening trivia of social discourse.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favour of strangers being friendly to each other, so long as appropriate boundaries are set. For him, that meant "this English guy is polite, and won't hurt me, so I'll vomit my travelling tales all over him. That'll make me feel good". For me, the boundaries are: "we don't know each other. We're headed in different directions, so we're not going to know each other. So let's be civil, considerate and not get in each other's way. Oh, and by the way: silence is golden". I've got my earphones ready for the plane...